Epiphany III, Sunday 19th January, by Fr Jack

Isaiah 62. 1-5
1 Corinthians 12. 1-11
St John 2. 1-11

 

A few people this December were a little nervous about the prophet Isaiah talking of God’s promise to ‘Israel’ (in the readings at Carol Services and those kind of things) because of the contemporary political situation there. Today we hear again of promises to ‘Zion’ to ‘Jerusalem’ in the prophet, speaking eight centuries before Christ. But, in the last 20 centuries, if we had censored or renamed those parts of God’s world every time they had been subject to fresh controversy or trouble, we wouldn’t have said much at all. Quite apart from the fact that the words ‘Israel’ and ‘Zion’ have been labels used for very different realities across the sweep of human history. It really is apples and pears.  

Nonetheless, perhaps it is precisely because the land of Christ’s birth is so tragically and so often subject to human smallness and violence, that it needs to be held up in prayer, that it needs to be respoken (even with heartbreak) in our Scriptures and liturgies. Who knows, perhaps it says something that it is in exactly that place of humanity’s terrible flawedness that God comes as the Christ Child the magi worship? 

And we are still with the magi, still in Christmastide, until Candlemas on the 2nd of February, when the forty day old infant Jesus will be presented in the Temple. So January is a whole season of Epiphany, of revelation and realising just who this Christ Child is. 

And today, is a most wonderful showing. We Christians have always held that Epiphany holds three wonders in one sight: today, the magi adore the infant, today we hear the voice of the Father at the baptism of the Lord by St John Baptist, today water is turned into wine at the wedding feast. Always these three revelations are layered up, in the lectionary readings in these weeks, in altarpieces and great paintings, in the preface to the Eucharist Prayer I will shortly pray on your behalf: they are woven together like three strands making a cord. Three Epiphanies, One Epiphany. Three events, one revelation. 

And today is a glorious one. Up in the hill country, quite apart from the sad subjection of Zion and Jerusalem, we are invited to a wedding…

Let’s open our eyes and see what is being revealed in this Epiphany. 

This is the first of Jesus’ miracles. That is important. This miracle of abundance, and generosity and fun and feasting, is how God chooses to set out His stall. This is an important theological principle, and mustn’t be forgotten. 

And it’s the ‘third day’. St John wants us to hear those echoes of ‘on the third day’ - Easter Day, of course. This wedding feast is a moment of God’s new creation. This is a moment of the Kingdom of Heaven being revealed, just as the Resurrection will be. And everything here in this new creation being revealed, in God’s Kingdom, is about generosity: the jars are to be ‘filled’ not ‘get me some water’ but ‘fill’ the jars. 

To the ‘brim’, we are told. 

We’re supposed to notice this is an image of heaven too: a wedding feast, just as St John will tell us heaven is in his book of Revelation: the wedding banquet of the Lamb. Revelation will tell us about the Apostles on their twelve thrones, and Mary, Queen of Heaven, crowned with stars. And here at this revealing of the Kingdom of Heaven, at this wedding feast at Cana, St John deliberately takes time to tell us that the Apsotles are there, with Mary, the mother of the Lord. St John is curating these resonances quite deliberately for us. He wants us to see! 

So heaven is foreshadowed in this generous, abundant feast, with Jesus and Mary and the Apostles. But there’s abundance here in other ways too:

‘Do whatever he tells you’, says Mary. Not, ‘do x or y’, not ‘do just enough’ but an abundance of attention and obedience is required of us (who are of course the servants in this passage, being instructed, and let into the secret).

And Jesus is concerned with full obedience too. He hesitates because His hour has not yet come. All the way through His ministry, Jesus is very careful to ensure that the prophecies of the Old Testament are respected and brought to bear in the right way, at the right time. This appears to be an acceleration of His ministry by a pushy mother. (My Jewish friends usually say ‘classic Jewish mother’ at this point! But that’s not for me to say!) 

But even here, generosity is the hallmark: Jesus gives His mother a respectful form of address ‘woman’ (it sounds like an insult in modern English, but it is precisely the opposite in this cultural context), and then, best of all, Jesus responds by turning water into perhaps 700/800 bottles of wine. For a country village wedding, after all the prepared wine has already been drunk. That is quite a thing. 

Jesus’ first miracle speaks for itself. It is the perfect day for those who have signed up for the parish lunch today! It is a rallying cry for us all in our faith, in our prayer lives, in our worship, in our finances and politics, in our families, at work and home, with neighbours, and with our internal conversation: with our own selves, to make generosity, feasting, respect and abundance, the way we respond to God’s abundance gift. 

And this is not glib or twee. It is brave and real. All of life, all of it is God’s gift to us, if only we have the wisdom to receive it as such.

To see this point in today’s Gospel, we need to spot another of St John’s resonances. St John says, towards the end of today’s Gospel passage, that Jesus ‘revealed His glory’ through this miracle. Whenever St John’s Gospel speaks of glory, he is speaking about the cross, the moment St John will come to call ‘Jesus’ glory’. We’ll hear that again and again from St John as we come into Lent and Holy Week. Understood this way, even the wine of Cana is an image of blood, of crucifixion, and an image of the Eucharistic sacrifice. For St John, today’s generosity is intimately intertwined with sacrifice, with the cross, and with the Eucharist. His Body broken, His Blood poured out. It’s not simple or shallow, but it is still abundance, and life and joy. It’s just complicated. Just as isaiah’s promises (with which we began today) are real and true, they are just messily lived out in the winding roads and mess of human history. And that is perhaps precisely what makes this theological imperative of generosity, this call to abundance in the Gospel today so vital, and so real. Not because it is simple or easy but because God wills it, and God does it, and so must we. Because if it is God’s way, then any other way will take us nowhere in the end. 

In our faith, in our prayer lives, in our worship, in our finances and politics, in our families, at work and home, with neighbours, and with our own selves, to make generosity, feasting, respect and abundance, the way we respond to God’s gift of life.