by CCW | 18 January 2026 10:00
“And the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee,” John tells us. The mother of Jesus was there along with Jesus and his disciples. But “the wine failed”. The mother of Jesus tells Jesus, “They have no wine.” So begins this extraordinary Gospel, one which is loaded with significance and meaning.
The story ends with its very opposite: an abundance of wine and not just your usual plonk, but “the good wine”, and the meaning of the whole event. This is, John tells us, “the beginning of signs” which “Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory”, with the additional result that “his disciples believed on him.”
It is an epiphany, to be sure, but of what? Two things at the very least, namely, who Jesus is and what that means for our humanity. This story concentrates several key theological elements that belong to the radical nature of epiphany. What is manifest is nothing less than the essential divinity of Christ, on the one hand, and what that means for the good of our humanity, on the other hand. “This beginning of signs” happened on “the third day” at a little country wedding in Cana of Galilee, the first miracle or sign that Jesus did: an act or sign that is what it signifies. What is that? Simply the real truth and meaning of all the miracle stories of the Gospel. They signify what God ultimately seeks for our humanity: our good found in and through our social joys. That is not simply of our doing but of God’s doing in the very midst of a humble human setting.
God is our highest good. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics argues that the highest good for our humanity is found in what comes closest to the life of the gods, a life lived in contemplation, a life lived in accord with virtue or reason. But he recognises as well that this highest good – which is in itself too high for us because of the great and impassible gulf between God and man – is rightly attended by other goods, such as pleasure and even usefulness though they rank far below his profound sense that happiness, which he even calls in a few passages, blessedness, is our summum bonum, the highest good, which it behooves us to seek. It is about an ethical orientation towards what is higher and beyond simply ourselves.
The Gospel story manifests for us what this means in the Christian understanding. In the background is the ancient Greek wisdom and teaching of Plato and Aristotle in terms of the ethical: a life lived in accord with wisdom and virtue which requires an understanding of what is good as distinct from what is evil and the idea of acting upon that understanding. But in the background, too, is an ancient Jewish saying, that “without wine there is no joy.” We lack, as both the Jewish saying and the philosophers suggest, the means of our happiness, our blessedness, our joy, our ultimate good.
Mary’s words express the human condition, the dilemma that belongs to our humanity in its incompleteness and failings. “They have no wine”. Her words, not unlike her question to Jesus in the Temple which we heard last week, set in motion the whole exchange between Jesus and her, between God and our humanity.
It was “the third day”, John tells us. It follows upon the previous ‘days’, first, of the encounter between Jesus and the disciples of John the Baptist, who identifies Jesus as “the Lamb of God”, a sacred and sacrificial reference that belongs to the going up to Jerusalem at the time of the passover (as we learned last Sunday), and, secondly, “the next day” of his going to Galilee and finding Philip, Andrew, Peter, and Nathaniel. Recalling all of this helps us to understand what Jesus says to his mother about the lack of wine. “O woman, what is that to thee and to me? Mine hour has not yet come.”
It seems so abrupt and strange. She responds: “Whatever he says to you, do it”. An intriguing reply. Is it too much to suggest that having “kept in her heart all the sayings” about Jesus, especially his words about his heavenly “Father’s business”, which we heard last week, she senses that is exactly what is at issue? At the very least, too, it is an echo of her “be it unto me according to thy word”, which anticipates his “not my will but thine be done” at Gethsemane in his Passion, not to mention the Lord’s prayer, “thy will be done.” Is it too much to suggest then the connection between the third day and mine hour and his “Father’s business”? In other words, connecting his Death and Resurrection with this scene? The life that flows out of his Passion is new and radical life. Out of his wounded side flow water and blood that symbolize the sacraments of baptism and communion, as Hooker notes following the Fathers.
What follows is the direction Jesus gives to the servants at the wedding, first, to fill six water-pots with water “containing two or three measures apiece”, equivalent to 20 or 30 gallons, whether imperial or US, doesn’t matter much! Secondly, he bids the servants draw out and give to the governor of the feast.
The miracle is presented in an understated manner. The governor of the feast “tasted the water that was made wine.” There it is. Yet the symbolic significance is clear. God provides for the people of Israel in the wilderness of the Exodus, water from the stricken rock, manna from heaven, not to mention the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac, the promised son. “God will provide himself the lamb for the burnt-offering, my son,” Abraham says to Isaac about the lamb. Unknowing that he was to be that sacrifice, Isaac is spared by a ram caught in a thicket which is offered in his stead. This testing of Abraham’s faith – for that is the scriptural point of the story – is all part of the transformation of images that inform our understanding of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection. Unlike Isaac, Jesus goes knowingly to the Cross; for that is his hour. “Mine hour has not yet come”, he says here.
It refers to the whole meaning of his coming and the making known of its significance. All of the miracle stories in the Gospel have their ultimate meaning in “this beginning of signs”. It is not just about the restoration of our wounded, broken and sinful humanity; it signals God’s ultimate will and purpose for our humanity. Our joy and happiness is found in God and with one another.
As an epiphany it manifests what the 1st of the 39 Articles of Religion[1] states about the doctrine of the Trinity. “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions,” it begins, articulating the radical difference between God and us, we might say, a form of negative or apophatic theology. It proceeds to identify the essential and positive attributes or ways of thinking about God in terms of “infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible,” forms of positive or kataphatic theology. This rather fine summary statement of the classical understanding of God arises out of the convergence of things Greek and Jewish and belongs to theology and philosophy in the intellectual traditions of late antiquity such as neo-Platonism, and in their influences upon Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theology, albeit in different registers.
The article concludes with the Christian doctrine of God as Trinity, known only through the images of revelation and our thinking upon them. “And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” This articulates an understanding of God that comes out of our thinking upon the Scriptures, especially in the transformation of the images of God in the person of Jesus Christ. This is what Epiphany teaches.
The greater miracle is creation, a concept which is unthinkable apart from a relation to a Creator. But “the Maker and Preserver of all things” who creates an orderly and intelligible world is not and cannot be constrained and contained by what he makes. What this story makes clear – and this is the thinking that underlies the nature of the miracles of the Gospel – is that God uses the things of nature for higher ends. The miracle is “a supernaturalizing of the natural” (Farrer), not its negation or destruction. And for no other end than our highest good, the perfection of our humanity signified here in the imagery of a marriage feast, in the idea of joy and happiness found in what God provides for us, the true meaning of our social lives and one which has an unmistakable sacramental aspect. Grace perfects but does not destroy nature.
It means to know first, what Mary says: “they – we – have no wine”. We lack the wine of divinity without which our humanity is empty and incomplete. And to know, secondly, that the Gospel stories of Christ belong entirely to his hour, to the purpose of his being with us and so to our learning what he teaches. Here in this simple but beautiful story we have the whole meaning of all the miracles and of the Gospels as a whole. God is our highest and greatest good. He is quite literally as Anselm says “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 2, 2026
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/01/18/sermon-for-the-second-sunday-after-the-epiphany-16/
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