Epiphany 2 Year C |
St James’, Peace River |
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I'm never quite sure what to make of Jesus the winemaker. It's a great story, especially the by-play between Jesus and Mary as they try ever so politely to not tell each other what to do. And it's certainly a way to make a name for yourself. If I have the math right, six jars averaging 25 gallons each works out to about 900 bottles' worth of wine, which even for a big wedding is going to make for a very HAPPY wedding, and let's not forget that they had already drunk their way through what the bridegroom's family had provided! The gospel of John describes this as the first sign – the first miracle – that Jesus performed, and tells us that it revealed Jesus' glory and gave his disciples a reason to believe in him. That's part of what seems odd about the story. I guess I would have expected Jesus' first miracle to be more clearly tied in to what we see him doing later on – something which change's a person's life in a deeper way than just having a good time at a wedding party – something like curing a chronic illness or disability. That's not to say that his intervention at the wedding isn't practical and helpful. It would have been highly embarrassing to the hosts to run out of wine, and in a society based on honour and shame, embarrassment might have had a lasting impact. And like a lot of the later miracles, Jesus does what he does in private, so that as few people as possible will know. If word had got out, you can bet he would never have had a weekend free of wedding invitations again! Still, I can't help feeling there must be more to this story than meets the eye. John is famous for offering his readers a puzzle – often the real impact of the stories he tells comes when you don't meet them head on, but when you look at them through your peripheral vision. What is he really trying to tell us about Jesus here? Is there an indirect message? One possibility that comes to mind is that there's a parallel with the book of Genesis. In chapter one of Genesis we have the creation; chapter one of John also starts “in the beginning”, and tells us of the Word through whom all things were created – the Word that was revealed as God's Son, Jesus. Chapter two of Genesis is the story of Adam and Eve. So maybe it's no accident that the next thing that happens in John is a wedding... and Jesus is there just as the Word was there at the beginning of creation, rejoicing in the latest example of man and woman becoming one flesh, and doing his part to start their life together off on the right footing. This story isn't like a healing miracle, fixing what's gone wrong – this story is about celebrating what's going right. The thought that John is showing us a different, real-life perspective on Jesus as God's creative Word was picked up by early theologians who looked at the water-into-wine business as well. Why should anyone be surprised, St Augustine wrote, that our God would turn water into wine at a wedding – after all, he does the same thing every year in the vineyards on the hillsides! Wine in Scripture often shows up as an example of the goodness of creation, so this story shows Jesus at work creating goodness. For me, though, the lasting after-impression of the wedding story is the sheer excess of it. Not only is there way more wine than anyone would want or need – they are NEVER going to run out again! - but it's good stuff. More than good – it's eye-opening good. The maitre d' of the feast thinks it's even better than what the hosts served first, which is strange given what happens to people's taste buds as the party wears on. As I see it, that's more than just a neat trick. It's really an illustration of what God's love is all about. The love of God is such that God always gives us more. More than is necessary, more than we need. More than we can ask or imagine – or as the older service put it, more than we either desire or deserve! God's love is never content to rest with doing just what we pray for, or only what we might expect. We know God's love because it always catches us by surprise. That's what reveals God's glory; that's why we believe. Our Bible revolves around two extended stories of God showing his love like that. One forms the core of the Old Testament. God creates for himself a people and he strikes a bargain with them: you be my people, and I will be your God. Being my people brings some obligations along with it, and here's what you're signing on for: you will be holy as I am holy, you will follow this law that sets you apart. And everyone says, Hey that sounds great! - and then they go away and promptly forget any thought of being holy and set apart. Eventually it all comes crashing down around their ears and they realize that they have not kept up their end of the bargain, so it's over. No god would want them now; their story is at an end. Only, of course, it's not. It turns out God loves them more deeply than they could conceive. God goes with them into exile; God suffers with them the indignity of having their land overrun, God shares the loss of pride and former glory. And God makes them the promise we heard in the first reading today: “You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God. 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.” That's God speaking to his people at their lowest point, and telling them what he sees in them. That's love. The story of the New Testament takes that sense of love doing more than anyone thinks possible and raises it to a new level. In Jesus the Word made flesh, God makes it possible for us to believe in God's love in a way that would have been nonsense before; and in Jesus' death and resurrection, God proves what really didn't need to be proven – but he does it anyway – that there is absolutely nothing we can do and nothing that can happen to us that will separate us from the love of God. God could have done all that without getting his hands dirty, tucked safely away in heaven, telling us what we needed to hear in dreams and visions and whatnot. But love does more, love surprises. Love doesn't just exceed expectations, it shatters them and leaves them in the dust of Calvary. Those are grand themes and big ideas, but for John the story of God's unimaginable love begins on a very human stage and in a very practical way, with Jesus attending a wedding – itself an expression of how we human beings aspire to a love that is bigger than we know. The hosts have done what they can, and it's not enough. That's a pretty common human experience too. In our family ties, in our careers, in what we try to offer our friends, in our goals and ambitions – very often we come up short and we don't know what to do. We get to the point where we're out of gas, though we might as well be out of wine. The promise of God is that these are exactly the times when he will show up. God is capable of taking the most ordinary and apparently useless stuff in our lives, those great honking stone jars full of nothing but water, and turning it into something amazing. We come here week by week to see exactly that happen, offering not just the best we've done in the last seven days but all of it: our achievements, our disappointments, and everything in between, all the apparently pointless details of who we are and what we do. Because that is the place where Jesus meets us; that is the stuff out of which God makes better wine than we have ever tasted before. We can't predict how, or when, or where. But with the taste of God's new covenant of love in our mouths and feeling its life in our veins, we can leave here today sure that God is going to surprise us once again in the coming week, just as he once surprised a bride and groom at Cana in Galilee. * |
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