epiphany 2.
the gospel of john 2:1-11.
for St. Paul’s House, a Lutheran Life Community, January 20, 2019.
– – – – –
Grace and peace to you through God who is Creator, Christ who is Resurrected, and the Holy Spirit who is still and always moving in our world.
As many of you know, I am interning here as part of my Clinical Pastoral Education unit – a requirement for many denominations in their ordination process. Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE for short, is a process-based program where the focus is on presence, active listening, and developing your pastoral identity. As part of the unit, which includes both our field placements, like St. Paul’s House, and an educational cohort, everyone discerns a spiritual theme – a guiding story, image, or concept that helps focus our time.
Initially I settled on a theme thinking about productivity, pushing against the notion that every interaction needs a goal, dreaming towards a space where genuine time spent reflects how God asks us to care for each other. I was considering this through the lens of the story of Mary and Martha hosting Jesus, which asks us to sit and share time in addition to being productive. This theme was working for me, but it felt incomplete. Recently, I shifted themes towards hospitality. It felt both more specific and broader than my original intention, and includes considerations of productivity, cultural teachings, and abundance.
Today’s Gospel narrative, the wedding in Cana, is one of the best-known miracle stories of Jesus’ ministry, and is directly tied to God’s hospitality. Weddings, in the Biblical world, are multi-day affairs, with abundant food, drink, entertainment, and company. Being able to provide these things in abundance was a mark of honor for the wedded couple, their family, as well as their guests, who brought gifts of food and drink. Running out of wine on the third day of the wedding celebration implies that the family and friends of the wedded couple are not necessarily well off. This is not a wedding of princes, or religious authorities, or the wealthy. Galilee was known as a city of rebels, thieves, and Gentiles – this is a wedding of two everyday people, who would be hard-stretched to sustain a 5-7 day wedding feast, as was custom.
Jesus’ mother, Mary (though she is unnamed in the Gospel of John), notices that the wine ran out, which would lead to shame and alienation for the family, according to custom, and goes to her son. At this point in the narrative, Jesus has not revealed himself to be the Messiah. As far as we know, he has done no miracles, yet his mother has unconditional trust in him – she is the first disciple. And as an aside, in the Gospel of John, the only two times we see Mary are here, at the wedding in Cana, and again at the foot of the cross – bookending Jesus’ earthly ministry before his Resurrection and Ascension.
But Jesus is not at this wedding to perform miracles. He is there to be in community, to celebrate alongside his friends – not to start his journey towards the cross. And yet, there is a need. Borders need to be broken down, between shame and honor, between scarcity and abundance, between our logic and God’s logic – and that border-breaking hospitality defines Christ’s ministry.
God responds to this need in Christ. Jesus calls for the purification vessels to be filled with water, 120 to 180 gallons of water, and transforms this abundant amount of water to an abundant amount of good wine, enough for the remainder of the celebration and then some, and then some more. It is an abundance beyond what we can imagine, and it is a transformation that defies our human logic and reason – a miracle story.
I want to state very clearly here that the wine is a metaphor. Our relationships with alcohol can be complicated, and this passage does not say that this is the only miracle to experience God’s abundance through, nor does it exclude the possibility for alternate transformations – the message of Christ is the same when water is turned into wine, or when five barley loaves and two fish are transformed and can feed 5,000 people, and then some.
Jesus performs this miracle of God’s abundance quietly. He does not announce himself as the Messiah, doesn’t make a big deal of transforming water into wine, he is simply is alerted to a need of the community by his mother, and fills that need. The characters we would expect to be central in a wedding story, the newlywed couple, don’t know where the wine comes from. The headwaiter, who holds a position of relative authority, doesn’t know where the wine comes from, and is astonished by what he sees as the hospitality of the hosts – saving the good wine, serving it even when people are already a little tipsy, when they might not notice the difference.
Instead, it is the hospitality of God who gifts us with good things in abundance when we least expect it. The witnesses of this grace in this story are the lower-class servants, and Jesus’ mother Mary, and the disciples. The disciples are convicted by this miracle, believing through it that Christ is the Messiah even as Jesus points towards the cross. This transformation of water into wine, a miracle of scarcity to abundance, shame to honor, our logic to God’s logic, sets up Christ’s ministry in the world as one of surprise, and border breaking, and quiet hospitality.
I encounter this passage as a beautiful invitation to notice where God is showing up abundantly in our lives, even when we least expect it. Where is God working subtle but powerful transformations? Where is God filling the needs of our community in unexpected ways? Where is God making Godself known to you and your beloveds?
May we lean into the knowing of God’s abundant hospitality in times of pain and uncertainty, knowing that as God meets our needs in celebration, as at the wedding in Cana, God is with us and meets our needs in lament, as at the cross.
Reed Fowler 