Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Ephrem Arcement
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany, January 19, 2025
Click here for an audio of the sermon
What does it tell us about God that Jesus’ first miracle was to turn water into wine…in fact, the best kind of wine?
For
me, it makes sense that the church presents the miracle of Cana to us on this second
Sunday after the Epiphany…this season of excess! The season when light shines out like the
dawn and a burning torch; when the desolate and forsaken receive more than they
could have ever dreamed; when the decades of despair and unfulfilled hopes
finally yield to a reality so overwhelming that the only image appropriate
becomes a wedding feast where God shows up and becomes the source of divine
intoxication! If we Christians are
accused of being boring, it’s certainly our fault, not God’s!
When’s the last time you’ve ever heard that Christianity is
about excess? Probably never! Not the excess of ego-centric desires that
are self-destructive or the excess of things that weigh life down but the
excess of Life itself that gushes forth from a place of inner superabundance
and vitality…where joy just can’t be contained and where peace remains steady
come what may.
For
far too long Christianity has relegated the supernatural and superabundant life
to a time and place after this life here on earth comes to an end…after the struggle here below, we’ll taste the new wine in
the kingdom to come. Heaven is not earth
and earth not heaven. Now here on earth
we experience the cross, only then in heaven will we experience the resurrection. Now is pain and suffering, only then will
every tear be wiped away. This is not
the gospel!
The
Incarnation of Christ, along with the drama of his death and resurrection,
ascension and Pentecost, means that heaven and earth now overlap and heaven
begins before earth ends. It means that
we are now being transformed from glory to glory…that
today is our wedding feast; today we are united to God; today our cups overflow
with new wine!
But,
you may say, mine doesn’t!
Today I don’t feel like my life is overflowing with this joy, with this
peace, with this new wine. Today I feel
dried up, depleted, against an insurmountable wall. Instead of abounding in faith and hope, I’m
struggling just to keep my head above water and stay in the game. Well, the good news is that the truth goes
deeper than our circumstances and our feelings.
Within us all, no matter how we feel at any given moment, churns a
reservoir of new wine waiting to spring up and break through our feelings and
make our lives an epiphany of God’s glory.
But how does this happen? Let us take a closer look at how it happened in today’s Gospel.
On
the third day, John says (alerting us to the day of the Resurrection), at a
wedding (where there is supposed to be great celebration), Mary, the mother of
Jesus, is faced with her own set of circumstances that threaten to bring a
quick end to the celebration. “We’ve run out of wine!”
Wine, for the first century Mediterranean world, is the central sign of
celebration and joy; an instrument which augments life and gives to it what we
can’t conjure up for ourselves. It’s the
central sign of grace. Two people coming
together drawn by the covenantal bond of love should, in God’s eyes, be
celebrated with this augmentation of life that wine provides. It is God’s desire to make our lives into
something we can’t make them into ourselves.
Mary’s move in this dire circumstance is not to try to fix the
problem herself. She knows who to turn
to, and she does: “They have no wine,” she tells Jesus. And we’re a bit shocked by Jesus’ curt
response: “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” Have you ever asked something of God and felt
like you’ve gotten the cold shoulder?
That’s probably a bit how Mary must have felt! Yet, notice, she doesn’t throw a temper
tantrum, and neither does she walk away in shy acquiescence. No, she holds out the hope that Jesus will do
what he thinks best given the circumstances…and says to the servants, “Do
whatever he tells you.”
Let’s not overlook Jesus’ reference to his “hour.” In the Gospel of John, this “hour” refers to
the time of his crucifixion in shame which will directly result in his
resurrection in glory. And the various
signs, or miracles, the miracle of Cana being the first, all precipitate these
cataclysmic events. Jesus knows that the
moment he begins to perform signs that his days are numbered. And he does them anyway…beginning here at a
wedding in Cana.
He
tells the servants to fill the depleted jars with water. Clay jars frequently in scripture represent
our lives. Here they are depleted. Water represents what we can put into them,
one of the fundamental elements of our existence. Water sustains life. Wine transforms life. And when the servants draw out what they
expect to be water, they get instead water transformed…wine, indeed, the best kind of wine. And in this climactic moment of the story,
John the Evangelist, adds his parenthetical exclamation: “Jesus did this in
Cana of Galilee and revealed his glory.”
This
is a story about how God sees us in our circumstances that are less than ideal
and even sometimes dire. And the story
is clear: it is not God’s desire that we remain in these
circumstances: dried up, empty, ready to give up. Instead, the story asks us be follow the way
of Mary into the pattern of transformation.
And here is the pattern:
• First, we must accept the invitation to the wedding. We have to be present where love happens.
• Second, we must be equally present to the impossible
circumstances that arise. It’s wrong for
us to expect that our lives will be free from obstacles…it is through our
obstacles that God is going to reveal God’s glory.
• Third, we need to make our requests known. And notice here, Mary’s request was not for
herself; it was for the sake of all gathered together, especially the hosts and
the other invited guests.
• Fourth, we need to have faith…trust in the word of Jesus
even when you don’t fully understand him.
• And fifth, we need to leave our request in Jesus’ hands. We need to let it go!
This posture of faith, of hope, and of
love, even when our lives are depleted, becomes the recipe for the miracle of
transformation. We’re not asked to deny
the harshness of reality or to try to escape it but to journey through it into
a deeper reality.
So,
what does it tell us about God that Jesus’ first
miracle was to turn water into wine…indeed, the best kind of wine? It means that if we turn to Christ in our
time of need and offer to him our empty, depleted clay vessels, we can expect
to be filled with grace, like Mary was filled with grace, and to taste, in this
life, the excessive joy of God’s new wine.
The
prophet Isaiah, like all good prophets, sees what others fail to see. Isaiah sees God’s
children ravished by their time of desolation and exile, feeling forsaken and
forgotten by God who they think may have given up on them. But Isaiah comes with a message…good news… “you
shall be called by a new name”… “You shall be a crown of beauty…a royal diadem…no
more called Forsaken or Desolate, but My Delight Is in Her, and Married.” Married to whom? Married to God, her bridegroom who rejoices
over her and cherishes and protects her and causes her to shine out like
burning torches of coruscating joy and peace and charity.
The
love of God is our Epiphany. Our old
name is no longer adequate to express our newfound truth. God’s
love poured out in Christ shining and illuminating all who come to receive this
love become an epiphany…the excess of God manifesting itself in our everyday
lives. Heaven shines through earth
through us and by this sign we reveal God’s glory and show the way for others
to follow.
Brothers and sisters, our dark world is depending on us to live our epiphany…or, as I like to say…to coruscate: to shine out, dazzle, shimmer, burn…with the glory of God. To be like the first Christians in the second chapter of Acts…so full of the Spirit that they were thought to be drunk with new wine. Maybe it will be when we start living with more of this kind of excess that those floundering about in a world of darkness will find their way to the wedding feast.
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