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Sermon: The Second Sunday after Epiphany (C) - 17th January 2010
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7, 8 & 10 am
Readings: Isaiah 62:1-5, Psalm 36:5-10, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, John 2:1-11
1 Timothy 5:23 is one of my special verses in the Bible, “No longer drink only water, but take a little wine for your stomach and your frequent ailments”.
I hold to St Paul’s advice for the good of my health! Did you know that wine is mentioned in the Bible 235 times and that there is only book of the Bible, Jonah, where it makes no appearance? In Isaiah 55:1 we read that God invites the faithful to abundant life by asking them to make a covenant with God in which, they will be able to buy wine and milk without money and without price.
In today’s gospel reading we see Jesus turning water into wine in great abundance for the enjoyment of all in the marriage feast. Turning water into wine is one of the “signs” that the writer of the Gospel uses to point to the divinity of the Christ and the resulting super abundance of God’s blessing for all who believe.
The water made into wine was contained in six stone water jars, each containing twenty or thirty gallons. Now in metric measure twenty gallons is ninety-one litres, while thirty gallons is one hundred and eighty-one litres. If you had to buy all that at a liquor store in seven hundred and fifty millilitres bottles, the usual size available, then that would mean you would have to buy somewhere between one hundred and twenty-one and one hundred and eighty-one bottles, for each jar. In six stone jars then there would be somewhere between seven hundred and twenty-six and one thousand and eighty-six bottles or between sixty and a half and ninety and a half dozen bottles, and it was of the finest quality! I think that would be quite a marriage feast, especially as more wine had been consumed before the new wine was available. Such an amount of wine would give those who attend the Men’s BBQ and me would give rise to quite a deal of serious thinking and discussion!
More seriously though, this super abundance is an expression of the generosity of the God in whom we believe. God is not measly. Jesus’ sign is a vivid enactment of the gift he has to offer all who believe that he is the one sent from God. Another one of his extravagant signs was the feeding of the five thousand in chapter six of the Gospel.
Living as we do in a rational, scientifically oriented age, we are tempted to talk around the miracle by focusing on other aspects of the text or to explain away the miracle by focusing on the differences between the biblical worldview and the modem worldview. In studying this text, however, we should not get caught up in a detailed explanation or apology, just as we should never succumb to the temptation to explain the resurrection, for it is impossible to do so. The essence of any miracle is that it shatters conventional explanations and expectations and this miracle is no exception. We should never diminish the extraordinariness of this story in any way. We must be allowed to struggle with what this miracle says about Jesus.
The contrast between the responses of the steward and the disciples can help us interpret and appropriate this text. Modern Christians distort and oversimplify when they assume that first century people would have more immediately embraced the miraculous. The steward is perplexed by the sudden appearance of wine of such quality. He summons the bridegroom, the host of the party, because he assumes that the wine can be explained by conventional reasoning. He attributes the wine to the unprecedented hospitality of this man, but this miracle cannot be explained by an irregularity in etiquette. Rational explanations miss the mark.
Jesus' disciples, by contrast, see in the miraculous abundance of good wine a sign of God's presence among them. They recognize the revelation of God in the prodigious amount of wine and they recognize Jesus as the one who brought God to them. The miracle of the wine shatters the boundaries of their conventional world and they are willing to entertain the possibility that this exceptional event marks the presence of God. The steward tried to reshape the miracle to fit his former categories, while the disciples allowed their categories to be reshaped by this extraordinary transformation of water into wine and so they "believed in him" as the one who reveals God to humanity in a previously unheard of manner.
The reading poses hard questions for us, because the miracle challenges conventional assumptions about order and control, about what is possible, about where God is found and how God is known. Indeed, the impact of the miracle is lost if we do not entertain these and similar questions, because the force of the miracle derives precisely from its extraordinariness, from the uncertainty it creates. If we do not experience a sense of uncertainty when faced with this miracle, then the wonder of the miracle cannot be experienced either. To define attitude to this miracle in terms of whether we believe in miracles or in terms of the rules of modern science is wrong. Such thinking is an attempt to domesticate the miracle by making it adhere to conventional rules and definitions, whether those rules are the rules of science or of piety.
In the miracle Jesus works an unprecedented act, the transformation of many gallons of water into good, rich wine. It is a miracle of abundance, of extravagance, of transformation and new possibilities. The grace the miracle offers and the glimpse of Jesus' glory it provides, are outside conventional expectations and place the original witnesses and us at odds with how the prevailing thoughts on how the world is ordered. In applying the meaning in our lives is not to put this miracle in a framework in which it "makes sense", but to enable us to receive the extraordinary gifts this miracle offers. Its centre is Jesus, his gift and his glory.
In the ancient lectionaries of the church, this reading was read on Epiphany, a practice carried over into the Eastern church. In our lectionary we read it today, the Second Sunday After Epiphany, Year C. Its presence today reflects the Christ centeredness of the story. The transformation of water into wine is significant because, in showing forth the unprecedented grace of Jesus, it reveals the glory of Jesus and anticipates his ultimate moment of glorification, his death, resurrection and ascension.
The extravagance of Jesus' act, the superabundance of the wine, suggests the unlimited gifts that Jesus makes available to all who believe. Jesus' ministry begins with an extraordinary act of grace, a first glimpse of the "greater things" to come. This story invites us to share in the wonder of this miracle, to enter into the joyous celebration made possible by Jesus' gift. The story invites us to see what the disciples see, that in the abundance and graciousness of Jesus' gift, we catch a glimpse of the identity and character of God. It is no wonder that the early Christian community confessed in words found in the first chapter,
"from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace".
This sermon prepared using The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol IX, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1995.