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Turning Water to Wine: The Second Sunday after Epiphany

Sunday, January 16, 2022:
John 2:1-11

There’s a Dominican friar, and popular Christian writer and speaker, Timothy Radcliffe (whom I know some folks in our parish have read), who, in the last few weeks, wrote about his recent treatment for cancer in his jaw. There were weeks where he couldn’t drink, and could only wet his lips with a damp cloth. It helped him feel something of the “tormented desire” of the crowds wandering in the wilderness those 40 years of uncertainty and precariousness.*

And it hit home how thirst was a repeating feature of Jesus’s life. Coming out of the season of Christmas, we’ve been thinking of Jesus as a vulnerable child, thirsting for milk. Or later, Jesus thirsting 40 days in the desert. Meeting a Samaritan woman at a well, and asking her for water. And at the end, the writers don’t just leave us with, as we might expect, a narrative of Jesus’s mocking and torture, but they include the detail of his thirst. There is something fundamental about our need for drink.

The gospel story today sneakily echoes the Cross and Resurrection, by locating it on “the third day,” and even in his seeming reticence around working the miracle: “My hour has not yet come.” And Mary is here, at the party, and she’ll be there, at the Cross; and it’s this same Gospel in which Jesus is pierced and bleeds water and blood. The Cross, for John and John’s Jesus, is what it’s all about. It’s his victory over the world, and his arms-open embrace of humankind.

So why be bothered by the drink menu at this village party? Surely there were countless other weddings in Jesus’s lifetime (maybe even that day and in that place), where they ran out of wine. Surely there were thousands of sick people, for every one person that Jesus came across, reached out, and touched. “One man in West Asia doesn’t even move the leprosy statistics,” one writer has noted. “The cruelty of the cruel world reproduces itself far faster than his slow hands can move. He brings sight to blind eyes, and all the causes of blindness rage on.”**

But the Church has held on to this story, and prizes it as the first of the miracles. Or “signs” as John describes them. Because it shows us something of the love that we’ll see on the Cross. And it shows us something of the love of God that shined through so perfectly in Jesus. This is the third of the traditional Epiphany stories, because traditionally, the feast incorporated the visit of the magi, the baptism in the Jordan, and the wedding at Cana. All three episodes are about the glory of God poking through for a moment. “…and his disciples believed in him.” We all need these moments, fleeting as they might be; helping us to make sense of the love that we’ll see on the Cross, and helping to get us through the cruelty of this world that puts him on it.

Cosmo Gordon Lang, a 20th century Archbishop of Canterbury said that it’s important that we realize that Jesus came into the cruel world, as it is, and came in flesh, as a real person. And we, then, “are to take the water of life as we find it, and convert it into wine. Our lives and circumstances may seem incapable of fulfilling a divine purpose; yet it is through these that the divine purpose it to be fulfilled…. It is not too much to say that the main business of the Christian life is to go through the world turning its water into wine.”***

Using a miracle to prolong the enjoyment of a group of revellers might seem trite. Healing one person while others continue to suffer might seem a disheartening. Feeding even 5000, when millions more hunger and thirst for righteousness that would eliminate human need might seem illogical. But these are all manifestations of God’s glory, seen in the person of Jesus. Epiphany is about having those moments of revelation or realization. But ours is an impractical calling. It’s not about efficiency. Right from the get-go John tells us that the Word came to people, and they welcomed him not. But it’s in God’s nature to show up. To shine. And to turn water into wine.

“Let your light so shine before others, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

© 2022 The Rev’d Matthew Kieswetter

*The Tablet, 1 Jan 2022, p. 5.
**Francis Spufford, Unapologetic (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 134.
*** Jeffrey John, The Meaning in the Miracles (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2001), 58.