Christ Church

There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee

This story, like the story of the boy Christ being found in the Temple teaching and learning, is essential to the meaning of the Epiphany, itself the season par excellence of teaching and learning. But teaching and learning what? About God and man but with a new and distinctive emphasis upon the divinity of Christ as revealed through the humanity of Christ.

This story, like the story of the boy Christ at the age of twelve, is an epiphany, a making known of the essential divinity of Christ. “Did ye know not,” he says in the Temple, rather challengingly, and we might think even rather abruptly to his mother, “that I must be about my Father’s business?” meaning, of course, the will of God. In relation to that exchange we are told that “his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.” It is a wonderful phrase that complements and builds upon the Shepherd’s Christmas where Mary is said to have “kept all these things and pondered them in heart.” What things? All the things that were said about the infant, the unspeaking child Jesus. But in the story of the boy Christ, “his mother,” Luke tells us, “kept all these sayings in her heart.” What sayings? All the things Jesus himself is saying. Wonderful. Mary keeps in her heart both what is said about Jesus and what Jesus says to us.

We are called to be Marian in the sense of attending to what is said about Jesus and what is said by Jesus and to let that define and dignify us in spite of our sins and follies. In so doing, we open ourselves to the miracle of God’s grace at work in our lives, not only perfecting and restoring our wounded humanity, but in signalling the joy of redemption, our joy in the things of God without which we are radically incomplete.

This brings us to the Gospel reading for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, to one of the quintessential stories of the Epiphany, to the idea of miracles that teach as distinct from things that amuse and entertain. It is about attending to what Jesus does.

Miracles are an important aspect of the Christian Faith despite the long, long legacy of skepticism about miracles. They aren’t an article of faith so much as an aspect of our thinking about God in relation to us and our world, to what we might call the mystery of life itself; the miracle par excellence, we might say. We live in a world which desperately wants miracles and yet despairingly rejects the very idea of miracles. The great miracle is creation itself, our life as grounded in the Creator’s gift of life. Today’s Gospel helps us to appreciate the miracle of the gift of life, a miracle which challenges the destructive narcissisms of our culture and age.

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They found him in the temple

“They found him in the temple,” Luke tells us. The only question for us and for our world is “will we?” Nothing highlights better the symbolic significance of Epiphany than the story of Christ as a boy of twelve being found in the Temple. Doing what? You might ask. Asking and answering questions, teaching and learning, we might say. Nothing counters more completely the anti-intellectualism of our contemporary age. If anything we are in flight from thought and its demands. Epiphany suggests otherwise.

The Magoi of Anatolia, “wise men from the East”, as Matthew tells us, show us something of the universal desire for truth. They reveal the eros to know as Plato and Aristotle suggest about the desire to know truth in accord with each of our capacities to know. At issue is whether those capacities are alive in us or not.

Luke’s account is the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in the canonical Gospels. There are various stories invented much later that seek to fill in the gaps between the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke and the stories of the ministry of Christ as an adult, stories which, in my view, diminish and distort both the humanity and the divinity of Christ presented in the Gospels. Only Luke gives us this rich and powerful story of Christ as a boy of twelve. It is, we might say, his bar mitzvah. It marks the transition from boyhood to manhood, to the responsibilities of adulthood and conveys to us the idea of maturing in faith.

But even more, it highlights the important Epiphany theme of teaching, of the idea of things being made known to us about the nature of God through the humanity of Jesus. Here Jesus is found in the company of the learned doctors of the Jewish Law, the Law or Torah of our humanity, we might say, at least in terms of its concentrated form in the Ten Commandments, something given and yet given for thought, known and grasped as belonging to universal reason. Christ is placed with the doctors of the Law in the temple of Jerusalem, a place dedicated to the honour, the glory, and the truth of God. There is a rich significance to these allusions. That Christ is found in the temple amidst the doctors of the Law is not accidental.

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