Category: Sermons

“They have no wine”

Mary’s statement describes in a simple phrase our human predicament. We lack the means for our true joy, for our true blessedness. In the background to her remark there is an ancient Jewish saying: “without wine there is no joy”. “They have no wine” means, we may say, they have no joy. But ‘they’ are ‘us’. We have no wine, no joy.

The deeper point is that we have no joy in ourselves. We lack, we might say, the wine of divinity, the source and the occasion of all joy, the wine that truly gladdens and rejoices the heart and soul. To know our lack, however, is saving knowledge. To know our limitations is to be alert to the possibilities of their being overcome – not by us but by the grace of God for us and in us. To know our lack is to be alert to the real presence of divine grace in our midst.

In the Gospel, Mary’s simple statement is made to Christ. Her next, equally simple statement is made to the servants. Yet it extends, really, to all of us: “whatever he tells you, do it.” In between her two simple statements, there is Christ’s rather curious and seemingly dismissive remark: “O woman what is that to thee and to me? mine hour has not yet come.”

What can it mean except that the fulfilling of our needs cannot just be at the dictate of our demands? As if God were some sort of Genie let out of the bottle to do our bidding! As if everything must be done according to our will. To the contrary, it has to be according to the word and will of God, according to the purpose of his coming. In him we find the true measure of our desires. In him we find what is most to be wanted, namely, “thy will be done.” The cost of that is to be found in the meaning of his hour. His hour refers to his death and resurrection, to the miracle of all miracles, of which this miracle at Cana of Galilee is but the “beginning of signs.” The fullness of its meaning is to be found in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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“Speak the word only”

The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday provide the interpretative framework for our understanding of the lessons at Morning and Evening Prayer. Indeed, they are at the heart of the Common Prayer tradition as embodying a creedal or doctrinal reading of Scripture. It is a good devotional practice before each service to pray and study the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for the day, regardless of whether the service is Morning Prayer or Holy Communion. They are at the heart of The Book of Common Prayer, itself the heart of Anglican Spirituality.

I want to make some remarks about the Gospel and to consider briefly this morning’s lessons in its light. The Gospel which orders our thoughts on the Third Sunday after Epiphany is the double healing of the leper and the Centurion’s servant by Jesus Christ. Epiphany season abounds in miracles. They belong to the making visible of the glory of God. A miracle, after all, is a sign of wonder. The healing miracles are a wonder. But what exactly do we see? Only the signs of the glory in the effects of what is said and done. The wonder, really, is the wonder of Christ.

Christ heals a leper and he heals the paralysed servant of the Centurion. He speaks and he acts. There is healing. The healings are within Israel and beyond Israel. “He came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near”, as Paul reminds us. Through the history and meaning of Israel, the glory of God is not only made known to the world but for the whole world, which is Paul’s point later in The Epistle to the Ephesians, namely, that “all might see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God” (Eph. 3.9). The leper is healed within the context of Israel and is held to the requirements of the Law in Israel. With the Centurion’s request, Jesus acknowledges something more: there is the wonder of faith which coming out of Israel transcends Israel. “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel”. For both the leper and the Centurion, Christ is the wonder. There is an epiphany. In a way, too, it complements the extraordinary chapter from Isaiah which actually speaks about Cyrus, the Persian king, who though he did not “know God”, was, nonetheless, the agent and instrument of God’s restoration of Israel from captivity in Babylon to Jerusalem.

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“Speak the word only”

The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday are at the heart of the Common Prayer tradition as embodying a creedal or doctrinal reading of Scripture. It is a good devotional practice before each service to pray and study the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for the day regardless of whether the service is Morning Prayer or Holy Communion. They are at the heart of The Book of Common Prayer, itself the heart of Anglican Spirituality.

The Gospel for today presents us with a double healing, the healing of the leper and the Centurion’s servant by Jesus Christ. Epiphany season abounds in miracles. They belong to the making visible of the glory of God. A miracle, after all, is a sign of wonder. The healing miracles are a wonder. But what exactly do we see? Only the signs of the glory in the effects of what is said and done. The wonder, really, is the wonder of Christ.

Christ heals a leper and he heals the paralysed servant of the Centurion. He speaks and he acts. There is healing. The healings are within Israel and beyond Israel. Through the history and meaning of Israel, the glory of God is not only made known to the world but for the whole world. The leper is healed within the context of Israel and is held to the requirements of the Law in Israel. With the Centurion’s request, Jesus acknowledges something more: there is the wonder of faith which coming out of Israel transcends Israel. “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel”. For both the leper and the Centurion, Christ is the wonder. There is an epiphany.

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“They have no wine”

Mary’s statement describes in a simple phrase our human predicament. We are without. We lack the means for our true joy, for our true blessedness. In the background to her remark there is an ancient Jewish saying: “without wine there is no joy”. “They have no wine” means, we may say, they have no joy. But ‘they’ are ‘us’. We have no wine, no joy.

The deeper point is that we can have no joy in ourselves. We lack, we might say, the wine of divinity, the source and the occasion of all joy, the wine that truly gladdens and rejoices the heart and soul. To know our lack, however, is saving knowledge. To know our limitations is to be alert to the possibilities of their being overcome – not by us but by the grace of God for us and in us. To know our lack is to be alert to the real presence of divine grace in our midst.

I cannot think of this gospel story without recalling the phrase “the wine of divinity” used by Fr. Robert Crouse in a sermon on this gospel. A great teacher and scholar of international standing and repute, he was a friend and a mentor to a great number of priests and scholars around the world. The Rev’d Dr. Robert Darwin Crouse passed away yesterday. Many of us owe our love and what knowledge we have of such outstanding theological and poetic figures as Augustine and Dante, for instance, to Robert. Through his teaching in hundreds and hundreds of sermons over many years, many people, both clergy and lay, have learned a love of God and an understanding of Christian doctrine, particularly as expressed in the liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer. Acknowledged as “the conscience of the Canadian Church” by another theologian, Canon Eugene Rathbone Fairweather, Robert’s voice was the calm still voice of wisdom and understanding, a voice which has not always been heeded by the Anglican Church, but which lives on through his writings and teachings and, perhaps, in some small way through his many, many students, of which I count myself one.

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“They found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors”

It is an arresting and an intriguing scene. Only Luke tells this story, the only story that belongs to the boyhood of Jesus really. And yet, even that is only partly right. The story really marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. There is, I am afraid to say, no teenage Jesus! We might wonder what we have created in our world of arrested adolescence!

The scene, in a way, is Jesus’ Bar Mitzvah, his coming of age through the study of the Scriptures, meaning the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. The parallel in the Christian tradition would be Confirmation, undertaken once again through the study of the essential principles of the Christian Faith revealed in the witness of the Scriptures, meaning the Old Testament and the New Testament.

This is an epiphany story. Something is being made known to us about Jesus. And in a way, this story, which has been read for centuries upon centuries on The First Sunday after Epiphany, signals and proclaims the Doctrine of the Epiphany. What is that? Epiphany turns our attention to the divine reality of Jesus Christ, emphasising the aspect of the divinity of Christ in the story of his Incarnation. The light of Epiphany is the light of divine teaching made manifest in and through the humanity of Jesus.

In this arresting and intriguing scene, Jesus is both student and teacher: student in terms of his humanity; teacher in terms of his divinity. God is the teacher. About what? About the high things of God which are revealed to us through the humanity of Jesus.

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“But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord
appeared unto him in a dream”

We have had occasion to think about Mary keeping all the things that were said about her son and “pondering them in her heart”. We, too, like the Shepherds have had occasion to come to Bethlehem and “see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord has made known to us”. Now we hear about Joseph, Joseph thinking “on these things”.

Matthew provides us with a window to behold the mystery of Christmas through the eyes of Joseph. What things was he thinking? Curious and difficult things, actually, disturbing and troubling things really. He has just discovered that his betrothed, Mary, is with child. Matthew quickly adds “of the Holy Ghost”, but that is something not yet known by Joseph. He “being a just man”, Matthew tells us, “and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily”. What does this mean? Well, he is thinking about the scandal of Mary’s being with child and not through him. He is aware that according to Jewish law and custom this means she is guilty of adultery and, therefore, subject to the public act of being stoned to death! His thought is to “put her away privily”, which does not mean to kill her but to have her sent away to somewhere private and hidden. There is a quality of sadness about the thoughts of Joseph.

“But while he thought on these things”, these dark and disturbing things, these things which must have troubled him greatly, as greatly, perhaps, as Mary being troubled at the Angel’s words that “the Lord is with thee” and that she should “conceive and bear a son” and all without knowing a man, “behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream”. What follows is explanation that only an angel of the Lord could provide.

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“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord has made known unto us.”

Literally, “this thing which is come to pass” means “this saying that has happened”. Thus, does Luke proclaim, in his own way, the essential Christmas message about the Word made flesh. Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh, the saying (το ρημα) that has happened (το γεγονος). It is something made known to us through the witness of men and angels, through what has been heard and seen, declared and written down. In a way, the liturgical celebrations of the Christmas season offer a profound and sophisticated commentary upon the idea and concept of Revelation.

There is a rich fullness to the Christmas story concentrated in the rather crowded scene at Bethlehem. This fullness relates directly to the very dynamic of the Christian faith. Christian contemplation is the exact opposite of Buddhist meditations, for example, precisely because it is about the fullness of images (and at the fullness of time, too!) and not about the emptying of images from our minds as if they were essentially illusions. It counters, too, the despair and emptiness of the contemporary culture of nihilism. For in “the fullness of the time”, to use Paul’s phrase in Galatians, all time finds meaning.

The consequences of this fullness of images are huge. To put it simply, it provides the logic for redemption. The images convey meaning and truth. There is something that has happened in time and in space. While the material and the physical, the sensual and the tangible are not everything, neither are they nothing; they have their substance and meaning precisely in the embrace of the spiritual and the intellectual; in short, in God. There can be no greater intersection between the eternal and the temporal than what the Christian story proclaims and no place where that is more concentrated for us, it seems, than in that crowded scene at Bethlehem. And here is the redemption of our humanity, the redemption of desire, of love; in short, the redemption of all that belongs to the truth and being of the created universe.

It is found in the mystery of Christ’s holy birth. It is found in the simple humility of this holy scene at Bethlehem.

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“Then Herod … sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem”

There is no greater challenge to the cultural celebration of Christmas than the Feast of the Holy Innocents. We like to think that Christmas is for children and for the child in all of us. We might want to think again. God “madest infants to glorify [him] by their deaths.” Now, there is a show-stopper! A real shocker. Try marketing that!

And yet, this is inescapably part of the Christmas story, albeit a part of the story we easily overlook. It recalls us to the inescapable political occasion for the nativity of Christ in Bethlehem – a census for taxation purposes – and then ups the ante in terms of the real-politique of power and domination. Herod embarks upon a policy of infanticide, killing all the little children in Bethlehem. Why? Out of fear for a rival king, the child King of Bethlehem, as he has heard from the Magi. He embarks upon a human scorched earth policy to destroy a potential rival to his power.

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“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you”

There can be no greater affirmation of the central mystery of the Christian Faith than this Epistle reading from The First Letter of St. John. It echoes, of course, the great Christmas Gospel proclaimed at the Mass of Christmas Night. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God … And the Word was made flesh.”

And that is precisely the point which John is driving home in his Epistle. He is arguing for the absolute and tangible reality of the Incarnation. This man Jesus Christ is “Very God of Very God.”

“That which was from the beginning – heard, seen, looked upon, and handled by our hands is the Word of life.” He bears witness to the divinum mysterium of Christmas. The Word and Son of the Father who is Light and Life is Incarnate; the God made Man is Jesus Christ.

And he is telling us that this is no passing knowledge – a matter for a moment, a mere factoid of idle information – but rather a truth that reveals “eternal life,” the truth upon which our lives ultimately depend for their truth and meaning.

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“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and
stonest them which are sent unto thee.”

Jerusalem!? I thought Christmas was in Bethlehem! It is, but to understand the mystery of Christmas, we cannot lose sight of Jerusalem.

Bethlehem and Jerusalem are the two centers around which Christian contemplation revolves like an ellipse. We cannot appreciate and celebrate the meaning of Christ’s holy birth in little Bethlehem without regard for the events of betrayal and death in Jerusalem. “Jesus Christ was born for this,” as the carol, In dulci Jubilo, reminds us. “This,” of course, is death and sacrifice, and only so can we celebrate the birth of a Saviour who comes that he may go “through the valley of the shadow of death” for us; only so “hath he ope’d the heavenly door and man is blessed for evermore;” only so we “need not fear the grave.”

Christmas is not a happy-clappy story, all fuzzy and warm with sentiment and good cheer. No. The joys of Christmas are deeper and greater than the sentimental trappings of this overly commercialised and rather caramelized season. Christ’s holy birth addresses the deep disorders of the human heart and the human community. Bethlehem is oriented towards Jerusalem from the get-go.

Remember Advent Sunday? We began the holy season of Advent with the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem and his cleansing of the Temple. In other words, we make our journey to Bethlehem with the realization of the deeper meaning of God’s coming to us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. “He borrowed a body that he might borrow a death,” as St. Athanasius puts it. Death and sacrifice are inescapably part of the Christmas picture.

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