Author: CCW

“They have no wine”

After the celebrated fullness of Christmas, it must seem suddenly strange to find ourselves utterly empty. “They have no wine,” Mary says to Jesus. Not just the post-Christmas mantra of the Deep Dark Woods’ song “All the money I had is gone”, but we have no wine! Empty wine-skins and empty pockets, it seems. And, of course, we may find ourselves empty, too, with grief and dismay at the terrible destruction of the earthquake in poverty-stricken Haiti; a natural catastrophe magnified by human poverty. There, too, it must seem there is no wine, no joy. And, of course, there are those who point the finger of blame at God because of the realities of human suffering. That, too, is part of our emptiness.

And yet, this gospel story speaks powerfully to the human predicament. We are empty in ourselves of all that has purpose and meaning, of all that has joy and delight. We are just so many broken pots and empty cups. We confront emptiness and loss. Mary’s words are really quite profound. She speaks of an emptiness that is about something more than money, more than even wine physically and materially considered. We lack the wine of divinity.

We meet in the season of the Epiphany. The gospel story of the marriage feast at Cana of Galilee is one of the outstanding stories of the Epiphany season. It is an epiphany. Why? Because it calls our attention to the making known of the essential divinity of Christ as critical to the understanding of him as the Redeemer of our humanity. One of the most poignant stories of the Epiphany, it manifests the power of the one who seeks our good, the one who brings redemption and salvation to a world of empty souls.

“This beginning of signs,” John tells us, is the first miracle and it gives us an insight into the meaning and truth of all the miracles of the gospel and an insight into the redemption of our humanity.

In the background to Mary’s remark is an old Jewish saying that “without wine there is no joy.” We lack the joy of divinity which graces our humanity. Left to ourselves, our joys and our happinesses are incomplete and empty. We need the wine of divinity. This is what God wants to give us precisely in our awareness of what we lack. God seeks the perfection of our humanity which is found in him. Out of the six jars of water comes the wine, the good wine, which restores the joy of the party and signifies the social joys of our humanity. They are found in God. They are found by our paying attention to the creative and redemptive word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ.

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“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds”

With the coming of the Magi to Bethlehem, Christmas goes global. It becomes omni populo, for all people, simply by the journeying to and from Bethlehem by those who are simply called the Magi from Anatolia, the wise ones from the east. We know next to nothing about them; only their gifts, their “sacred gifts of mystic meaning” as an ancient hymn puts it, point to the larger dimension of the reality and the universality of the Incarnation. The one before whom they kneel in adoration is signified in the gifts they bring as nothing less than King and God and Sacrifice.

The gifts teach. Epiphany emphasises the fundamental feature of all revealed religion. God teaches. God makes something of himself known to us and in so doing reveals something of ourselves to us as well, both the good and the bad.

The idea of Revelation honours our humanity; the theological assumption contained in the idea of Revelation is that we are capax dei, capable of God, not by virtue of any presumption on our part, of course, but by the grace of Revelation itself. For Christians Revelation has its fullest expression in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. What greater honour could be bestowed upon our humanity than the divine condescension to enter into the very fabric of our humanity? “Thou didst not abhor the virgin’s womb” as the Te Deum wonderfully puts it. An honour and a dignity have been bestowed upon us. To what end? To teach and to redeem so that our humanity which is capax dei can also participate in the divine life opened to view in Jesus Christ; “he in us and we in him”, as our liturgy puts it.  We are meant to be changed by what we are given to see. In a way, it is as simple as that.

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“They saw…they came…they worshipped”

It may be, as someone recently remarked to me, that had the wise men been women, they would have gotten there on time and presented more practical gifts! Yet the gifts of the Magi have another purpose. They are profoundly symbolic: “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, as one of our hymns puts it. In short, they are gifts that teach. Both the gifts of the Magi and the journey of the Magi wonderfully illustrate something of the nature of the Epiphany.

Epiphany marks at once the beginning and the end of Christmas. With the story of the coming of the wise men from the east who brought gifts to the child Christ, it seems, thereby breaking-in to Bethlehem, Christmas is omni populo, for all people – and so there is the beginning of Christmas for the whole world. But with the break-out from Bethlehem which Epiphany also signifies, there is a new and different focus. There is a journey, both a journeying to Bethlehem and a journeying from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. And yet, the deeper meaning and significance of God with us is the critical lesson in the journeying from Bethlehem. Something of Bethlehem continues with us.

The mystery of God with us is the mystery revealed, the mystery made manifest. Epiphany is more than a day and a season. It signals a doctrine – a teaching. Indeed, the teaching that it signals is the teaching of God – God making himself known to us through the conditions of our humanity; God teaching us something about what he wants and seeks for us. We are opened out to the mystery of God with us. We are taught something about what belongs to the truth of our humanity from within the conditions of our brokenness. We learn, it seems, even from the little ones.

Christ is God’s “great little one” to whom the great of the earth – kings in their power and the wise in their wisdom – “come and worship”. The mystery of Christmas cannot stay hidden in some remote corner of the world; it must needs break out from the confines of little Bethlehem. In the coming of the Magi from afar (they are the prototypical come-from-aways!) the whole world in its desiring to know is understood to have its place and its fulfillment in this story.

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