Sermons
Epiphany - 2
So how are those New Year resolutions going? Are you all eating less and exercising more (or the other way round), are you always being nice to the members of your family, working harder, worrying less, taking up that new hobby. If one of your resolutions was to drink a bit less you might find today’s gospel a source of positive discouragement. Jesus obviously didn’t have prohibition on his mind when he attended the wedding at Cana; his response to the disaster of the wine giving out is to provide such a superabundance of new wine and good wine at that, that the guests are able to take up where they left off. It is estimated that the six jars mentioned in today’s gospel would each have contained 2 or 3 firkins each, between twenty and thirty gallons, which makes for 150 gallons of new wine or around 800 bottles, which is even more than we got through at the Christmas parties at the Vicarage. So what might be the significance of this abundance, this profligate and miraculous wedding gift? As so often in gospel records of the miraculous it may not be the miracle itself that is the key thing going on here, and as we are in John’s gospel we know this story is likely to be full of allusions of many kinds, John’s stories are multi-layered and rich productions.
I’d like to look at two related aspects to the story of the wedding at Cana, first the allusions John makes to Jesus using the riches of the Hebrew religion to point to his own ministry as its fulfillment and secondly, the distinctive role of Mary in this story.
The image of the wedding feast and of the day of the coming of the Lord as one of abundance runs through many prophetic books in the Hebrew scriptures. In Amos and in Hosea and in Jeremiah and as we have heard, in Isaiah the coming of God’s vindication or his glory are likened to a wedding feast and to the sensual delight which joins two people together Isaiah says ‘as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you’. And John’s multi-layered narrative is of course placed at an actual wedding, with the underlying theme of irony that the bridegroom of the Hebrew people, and the bridegroom of God’s future people, the church, is in attendance personally. And this is a Jewish wedding, so water is provided for the ritual cleansing of the guests before they feast, and when the wine gives out Jesus shows himself willing to use the riches of the Jewish heritage but to transform and fulfil their meaning. His actions show that the old order is passing away and that a new beginning is made in him, the wedding feast can continue with renewed vigour, because the ritual lustrations of the guests have been replaced with a sign of the inaugurated kingdom. We pass from law and ritual to gospel and rejoicing, and through Jesus actions, John tells us, he reveals his glory.
And what of Mary, introduced before Jesus in the narrative but apparently rebuked by him and reduced to instructing the servants to do whatever Jesus says? Mary is rebuked by Jesus, he reminds her both that she is actually outside the key relationship in his life, his unity with the Father, and that her role is now to be one of service to her son. She is reminded that an hour is coming when from the cross Jesus will entrust to her and to the beloved disciple the continuing work of the gospel, but above all she is the first person in John’s gospel to show that the proper response to the word made flesh is one of obedience and faith - ‘do whatever he tells you’. Though no doubt stung by Jesus’ strong address to her, her actions are a model of unconditional trust and faith in her son. Mary is seen here as elsewhere as the model of the church which exists to do whatever Jesus tells her to do, which exists to provide patterns of obedience and faith in Jesus.
And Mary is also a link between these two aspects of the story. She is present as the symbolical womb in which the church was nurtured, as the Hebrew religion issues in the new life of the church, the church comes forth from its Hebrew mother, the Hebrew religion is as it were pregnant with the church and Mary, as mother of the church, mother of our Lord, model of faith and obedience, stands as the link between the old order and the new, she is the gateway and the portal, the channel through which the old order is fulfilled in the coming of the word made flesh.
So John’s multi-layered story is certainly to do with a miraculous event, a sign of disruption in the ordinary course of events, a disruption that reveals something of the glory of God, but it is also about Jesus bringing new life into the old pattern of things. And the life he brings is abundant life, much more life than we could possibly imagine. This is the underlying theme to the story John tells, that in this Jesus first sign, we get a glimpse of the unimaginable abundance of the glory of God. So one New Year resolution that might be worth making and keeping is to try to respond to that abundance which is offered to us again and again in Jesus, to try to see the signs in our own lives that God is constantly offering to transform our lives, constantly offering new life, new wine, and in abundance.