Reading the signs

A Sermon preached on Epiphany II, Jan 16, 2022, at St. Augustine’s and St. Christoph

Isaiah 62:1-5, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, John 2:1-11

Jesus’s attendance at the wedding in Cana comes at the end of what in John’s chronology of events has been an action-packed first week of ministry. On day 1 we met John the Baptist who refers to Jesus as the “one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me.” (John 1:26-27) and on day 2 John and Jesus meet and as John reports: “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him.” (1:32) One day 3 Jesus picks up two of John’s disciples – Andrew and the “beloved” disciple: “The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus” (1:37) and later the same day he meets Simon, Andrew’s brother, and renames him Peter. This all takes place in Bethany across the Jordan.

Then on day 4, after a mad dash back to Galilee, Jesus finds and recruits Philip and Nathaniel. And now, a further three days later, he is in Cana with his disciples for a wedding. Mark’s Gospel is often described as one in which Jesus seems to be in a hurry, rushing everywhere with frequent use of the word “immediately” or “at once.” But John’s Jesus is impressively fast too. After a week like that I wonder if Jesus just wanted to relax and enjoy the wedding party and perhaps that’s why he reacts rather dismissively to his mother’s comment: “When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.’” (2:3-4) Of course his hour, the hour of glorification through his death and resurrection has not yet come, we are still at the beginning of the story, even if that final hour is present in the background throughout the Gospel.

John’s carefully crafted Gospel has seven signs, as he calls miracles, and this is as we heard, the first. To call something a sign means that is has a deeper meaning and that it points to something or somewhere else. The other signs seem more dramatic with 3 healings, the feeding of the 5000, Jesus’ mastering nature by walking on water, and then raising Lazarus from the dead … not forgetting his own resurrection as what could be seen as the eighth and greatest sign. So, isn’t turning water into wine, just to allow a party to go on, a little banal in comparison? Why is this the first public sign? I think it is important and comes first for three reasons, for three things that it points to.

Let’s start with the setting, a wedding. This is a big and joyous event in the life not just of the couple, but of the whole community. It would be a big celebration – and that’s why it would also have been very embarrassing if the wine had run out halfway through. A marriage is a public declaration made by two people as they enter into a relationship of mutual trust and joy and support and, we hope, of love. This particular wedding is important in our understanding of marriage, which is why we make reference to it in the marriage ceremony in the prayer book: “Our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.” In the prayers used at an Episcopal wedding, we also emphasise that marriage is a sign with a meaning that goes well beyond just the life of the couple when we pray: “Make their life together a sign of Christ's love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair.”

In the Old Testament, marriage was sometimes used as a metaphor for the divine-human relationship. In the book of the prophet Hosea, whose ministry began before Isaiah’s, Hosea’s own marriage illustrates the breakdown in the relationship between God and God’s people. In the extract from Isaiah, our first reading, marriage is also used as a metaphor. But here, well over a century later, it stands for the restoration of the relationship between God and God’s people, as their exile in Babylon ends. God addresses Zion, Jerusalem in terms of love and endearment: “You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the Lord delights in you.” (Isaiah 62:4) This restoration of relationship is a key part of Christ’s ministry, which is the first reason why his first sign is in the context of the celebration of a wedding, the sacrament of relationship and love.

The second reason is to be found in what actually happens. Water is turned into wine, it is transformed. Wine itself already carries a message of transformation – grapes are transformed by fermentation into wine – but here Jesus takes fresh, living water from stone water jars that were used for the ritual purification and turns it not just into wine, but into the very best wine.  It reminds me of Isaiah’s promise of future deliverance (25:6): “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines.”

One of the three petitions in the special blessing for Epiphany is that “God, by the power that turned water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana, will transform your lives and make glad your hearts.” Jesus came to transform us and our lives and through us the world. At Cana, Jesus offers the first sign that he is the Messiah, the light and saviour of the world, so that all who witnessed it or later heard or read about would believe in him and in his mission and be transformed to new life. Our way of being should be as hospitable, abundant, and generous as was Jesus’ act at the wedding. His sign also already points to the means by which we are to be transformed. Through the water of Baptism, the ultimate cleansing, and the very beginning of our life in Christ, and through the wine of the Eucharist, that together with the bread of life sustains, strengthens and renews us on our journey and allows us to encounter Christ at this Table.

The wedding at Cana embodies the image of reconciliation, of union, and of a loving covenantal relationship as prophesied by Isaiah and the miracle of transforming water into wine as a symbol of the transformation that Christ came to effect. But I said there are three reasons for this being the 1^st sign. I think the third reason is because it is about something ordinary. Two people marrying. A party. Water. Wine. It means that anything and anyone can be transformed. In his sermon last week, Douglas quoted from a poem by John Milton: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” We don’t have to be special, or powerful, and we don’t have to be saints before we are transformed. Our power is not our own, nor is our righteousness. They come from God who sets us apart and makes the ordinary special. What we have to do is believe and to follow the instructions that Mary gave to the servants: “Do whatever he tells you.” (John 2:5)

Amen.

Child of God

A Sermon preached on Christmas II, Jan 2, 2022, at St. Augustine’s and St. Christoph

Jeremiah 31:7-14, Ephesians 1:3-6, Luke 2:41-52

There are quite a few so-called non-canonical or apocryphal gospels, that is ones that are not included in our Bible canon. We know of about 20 complete ones, with about the same number only existing as fragments, and of some “lost ones” – known only by being referenced elsewhere. They were all written much later than the four canonical gospels. You may have heard of the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Judas, or the Gospel of Mary – mostly just collections of sayings. And we also have a few infancy gospels that try and provide details about the life of the child Jesus from the age of three to age twelve, a period in Jesus’ life that is hardly covered by the canonical gospels.

After Jesus’ birth, Matthew just has the flight to Egypt, a story which much elaborated in the infancy Gospels, with them returning home sometime between 4 BC and 6 AD. Luke has two childhood stories: Jesus’ presentation at the Temple about 40 days after his birth and today’s story about a 12-year-old Jesus teaching and learning from the elders of the Jerusalem temple, but that’s it. One of the infancy gospels (the Infancy Gospel of Thomas), actually ends with its own version of this event. There it is the culmination of a process of maturity as the child Jesus comes to terms with and learns to control his divine powers and nature, and to use them for good. On the way however he can be quite nasty and arrogant at times. The author “takes what appears to be a quite radical step of assuming that [Jesus] was not born from the womb as a wise and mature person, but that he started out as a little boy and had to learn to handle his neighbours and himself carefully.”[1]  These stories were very popular in the middle ages, make an appearance in medieval Christian art and one episode, involving Jesus making clay birds, which he then proceeds to bring to life, even made its way into the Quran.

The authors – and the readers – were partially motivated by curiosity: What would Jesus’ childhood have been like? What happened in those intervening 12 years? But they are also about making Jesus approachable, of showing the fully human side of his nature and how he struggles with it. The adult, canonical Jesus is – thankfully – also not a distant, divine, emotionless entity but a real human being who cries, gets angry, occasionally struggles with his calling, and is even willing to be corrected at times. He has to be, or there would be no point to the Incarnation: “He became what we are so that we might become what He is,” is how the 2^nd century bishop of Lyon, Irenaeus of Lyon. The authors of the infancy gospels just went a little too far with that idea and let their imaginations run away with them!

But returning to Luke, what are we supposed to learn then from the only incident from Jesus' adolescence recorded in the canonical Gospels? What does it tell us about Jesus and about us?

This is the first time that we hear Jesus speaking. In verse 49, when he replies to his mother and her very understandable concern with the words “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" Up until now, other beings or people have told us who Jesus is: Gabriel – “He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:32), Zechariah and Elisabeth who call him “Lord,” Mary in the Magnificat (Luke 1:47-55), the angels who tell the shepherds “to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord,” (Luke 2:11) or Simeon who calls him your (God’s) salvation and “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” (Luke 2:32). Now Jesus uses the word “Father” to refer to God, alluding to the sense of family relationship and intimacy he feels and has with his heavenly Father.

In his understanding of his relationship with God and in the way he interacts with the teachers at the temple “sitting among [them], listening to them and asking them questions” (2:46) we are shown a Jesus who, on the threshold to adulthood in the Jewish tradition, already has a strong sense of mission and self-awareness, and a clear sense of his calling. The phrase “in my Father’s house, can also be translated as to “be about my Father’s business.” In his first public utterance he is reflecting on his relationship with God and on the will of God. It is not a coincidence that he has begun to reveal himself in Jerusalem, a place he will later return to, in obedience to his Father, to fulfil his mission on the Cross and truly reveal himself as the Son of God and Saviour. His submission to his parents “Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them,” is already a foretaste of that final obedience and a necessary step in his human development. He still needs to increase “in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour,” before setting off on his final journey to Jerusalem, gathering followers, teaching, and healing on his way.

And what about us? “His mother treasured all these things in her heart.” (2:51) she pondered, that is thought about, their meaning and her son’s destiny just as she had “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” after the shepherds told her what had happened in the fields when the angelic host appeared. I am sure she also pondered what Simeon had meant 12 years’ previously, also in the temple, when he had blessed them and said to Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” (2:34-35)

Mary does what Luke wants us, his readers to do as well: To pause and contemplate who Jesus is and what he came to do. What does it mean that Jesus both shares our human nature and God’s divine nature?  What is his Father’s business? Well, according to the author of the Letter to the Ephesians, these two themes are intimately connected: “He (God) destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.” (Eph. 1:5-6) God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus is the Beloved. Through our shared nature and union with the Incarnate Christ, through God’s will and choice, and through our own positive response to that choice we are God’s beloved children. That gift comes with enormous responsibility. If we share in his nature, we share in his mission. But right now, on the 2^nd and last Sunday after Christmas, in this season of great joy for all the people (Luke 2:10) it is enough to give thanks and rejoice and to pray, in the words of today’s collect, that we may grow into the life promised at Christmas:

O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

 

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[1] Stevan Davies, The Infancy Gospels of Jesus: Apocryphal Tales from the Childhoods of Mary and Jesus--annotated & Explained. SkyLight Paths Publishing; 2009. xxii