Sunday's Sermon

By The Revd Harold Stringer
Epiphany 3
22 January 2012

Readings:
Genesis 14.17-20
Revelation 19.6-10
John 2.1-11

Cana Wedding Feast

Do you believe in miracles? That’s putting it a bit crudely; how can we generalise about such a vague concept? To be more specific: do you find some New Testament miracles harder to believe than others? If so, you are in good company, with very many Christian people today. And if you have no problem with any of them, you’re also in very good company.

For a lot of us, though, there are distinctions. On the one hand, many of the healings are perfectly credible, like the man crippled by guilt but released by the forgiveness Jesus brought him. I think many psychotherapists would recognise this (but surprised at it happening instantaneously). Or leprosy, a term that covered a lot of skin complaints, some probably of the kind related to mental and emotional states, like anxiety. Such cures by the caring, Spirit-filled presence of Jesus are truly works of God, without having to violate the natural laws built into God’s creation.

Walking on water, though, is a bit harder to take as accurate and literal fact. But think of that wonderful story of Peter, wanting to walk on the lake to Jesus, and finding that he could; then noticing the wind and waves getting up, suddenly being afraid and doubting… and at once he starts to sink. But even then, Jesus stretches out his hand and holds him. It’s such a perfect picture of what it’s like, trying to ‘walk by faith’, without proof. Surely all of us – sceptics and credulous alike – can happily own this story without having to know for certain how much it was a literal, physical event and how much a brilliantly vivid parable to both challenge and encourage us. That account is in Matthew’s Gospel. In John, the borderline between factual history and parable or spiritual teaching is continually and deliberately made fluid. Take today’s miracle of the water made wine at the wedding feast.

For a start, we might pause in wonder that, for the first of Jesus’s miracles revealing his glory, he should choose to provide extra booze (of the highest quality) when the guests were already fairly drunk! What is he thinking of? Next, note how John says it’s ‘the first of his signs’ revealing Jesus’s glory. You see, we could argue till Kingdom come about whether a miracle story is accurately historical or not, and never prove it either way; but if we miss the meaning of it – what it’s a sign of – we’ve missed the point. Jesus reproved those who demanded to see wonders and miracles as proof; and he told off his disciples when they failed to get the meaning behind the sign of his feeding the five thousand.

So what is this a sign of? There are little clues in the text, which build up to a big and crucial point. It starts ‘On the third day…’ John’s gospel is full of allusions, and we all know that ‘on the third day’ came the ultimate sign of the glory of Jesus, his resurrection; here, it is the God of small things who reveals a little of his glory.. (Remember, the third day was the day after tomorrow, as they’d count days to include today) Clue 2: The verses leading up to this passage have several explicit notes of time (‘on the next day’), which fix this wedding as six days after Jesus started his ministry, when John the Baptist’s proclaimed ‘this is the lamb of God, on whom the Spirit rests.’ The very next thing after this story is that Jesus goes up to Jerusalem for Passover. Now much later, near the end, there’s another carefully noted sequence of six days, culminating in the final revelation of his glory at another Passover. So here we are given a glimpsed preview, a foreshadowing of that great event.
Clue 3: a wedding feast is a frequent image in gospel parables – an earthy picture of the Kingdom of God. It also came in today’s reading from Revelation: ‘The marriage of the lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready…’ The bride being the Church, clothed in the fine linen of righteous deeds. Yes, this village wedding is an image of something really big. (By the way, Jesus addressing his mother as ‘woman’ should not be taken as demeaning her or as a reproof. It can as well be affectionate, as when from the cross he commends her to the care of the beloved disciple – ‘Woman, behold your son…’) And though his hour has not yet come – it’s not time for the final test – he agrees to her implied request, ‘they have no wine’. He takes the hint. At one level, it’s a simple act of compassion: it would’ve been a serious embarrassment for the bridegroom, even a humiliation on his wedding day. And clearly he was not a wealthy man: we gather that the wine he’d supplied was lacking in quality as well as quantity. But of course there’s more to it than providing more booze.

Clue 4: those water-jars, essential to the story: there are six of them. Six again: one less than the number seven that implies fullness, completion. Six asks for something more, as the six days did. Now it’s Jesus who will supply it. And Clue 5 is the key: the jars were for ‘the Jewish rites of purification’, and they’re stone – a ritually ‘clean’ material. They were for the external ritual of washing away impurity, ‘uncleanness’. But such external rites cannot of themselves transform inner motives or external lives. Purification is a negative thing – like all those Thou Shalt Not’s in the 10 Commandments – good guidelines, but stern prohibitions do not warm the heart, do not tap the wellsprings of compassion and love. The miracle of Jesus is that his presence transforms the legalistic negatives of self-righteous Pharisees, into something positively life-changing from within.

Wine or strong drink in many cultures and religions is more than a symbol – it’s a means to a heightened state of awareness that can be seen as ‘spiritual’. We actually call strong drink ‘spirits’! The Jewish-and-Christian tradition certainly doesn’t see it that way; neither does our own secular binge-drinking society pretend it brings contact with any divinity! Yet wine as a symbol of a life-enhancing spirit that we can take into ourselves, to transform our emotions and our attitudes… that symbolism is deep within the biblical tradition, from the Prophet’s ‘come, buy wine and milk, without money, without price,’ to the Passover cup running over, via the Jewish writer Philo: the Logos itself as wine – ‘the delight, the sweetening, the exhilaration, the merriment, the ambrosian drug whose medicine gives joy and gladness’; to the Cana wedding and to the Last Supper itself; and to Pentecost, when people thought the Spirit-inspired disciples were drunk with new wine!

We must not imagine that Jesus supplants the Old Covenant and that we’re alright because we’re in the right religion. It’s more that we need to realise, to make real, that when Jesus invites us to share his Supper, we are invited to share both in his sacrifice of self, and also in his parting gift of peace, in his joy that makes our joy complete, in his delight and sweetening, exhilaration and merriment, his medicine of joy and gladness – to share in his risen new life, in the holy wine of his wedding banquet. Here, and for in all times and all places, we are invited to ‘taste and see that the Lord is good.’

©Harold Stringer
22 January 2012

Top

Copies of the weekly sermon are now available by email.
Please contact the Administrator if you wish to receive these on a regular basis.

This page is updated weekly unless there is a visiting preacher who does not leave a copy of the sermon.

Links