Image credit: Swanson, John August. Wedding Feast, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN
Original source: Estate of John August Swanson, https://www.johnaugustswanson.com/.
Second Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C
19 January 2025
Isaiah 62:1-5
Psalm 36:5-10
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
John 2:1-11
You may or may not know that I continue to cheer for my home town soccer team. When I was there in 2016, arriving in the evening of a game, an old friend of mine and I bought tickets from a scalper. That’s the last time I was in the stadium. I like soccer as a sport and I also find sports generally a good diversion from the problems of the world. After all, we can’t always worry about the next government, about the unravelling of the etiquettes of trade, about wars and fires, and so forth. I like cheering for my team. It’s even better when they win.
They used to be a force to be reckoned with. Smart coaching, good scouting, and good internal politics had much to do with it. But they are a smaller market team and their pockets are not as deep as those of other teams, and so pundits and fans will make comments about the class of individual players which suggests that if only they had more money, they would be at the top of the table. And that, in turn – in the way that professional sports works, undermines the ability to identify with a team, because, you know, their striker missed another chance, their defense was not up to the challenge, or the midfield had no creativity. My team isn’t doing too badly, but talk like this is common in professional sports. So much then for finding an escape in cheering for my team.
This highlights the way we often approach the world. We just do not have enough. Not enough money, resources, people, support, brains, or time. Perhaps you are thinking that I want to encourage everyone to look on the bright side, to see the cup not as half-empty but as half-full, and generally to be more optimistic. But it turns out, I am not an optimist. The literary critic Terry Eagleton writes, “There may be many good reasons for believing a situation will turn out well, but to expect that it will do so because you are an optimist is not one of them.” A little later he writes, “An optimist is (…) someone who is bullish about life simply because he is an optimist. (…) As such, he fails to take the point that one must have reasons to be happy.”1
It seems then that optimism and pessimism are the wrong dispositions to begin with. For neither has bearing on an outcome. Further, I wonder if those of us who are optimists and those who are pessimists are simply looking at the wrong picture, use the wrong data to confirm their view of the world.
As you already know, I am not an optimist, but I do not think I am a pessimist either. So for us to have hope about the future we must not deny the challenges of the present. You know what the challenges are. Growing political instability, climate change, increasing economic disparity, unsolved social problems (among them homelessness and the opioid crisis), artificial intelligence. We don’t necessarily have to agree on the list. That could be another conversation.
The way we look at problems is generally a deficit perspective. There is not enough.
In today’s Gospel reading there also is not enough, not enough wine to be specific. That there is not enough is an embarrassment. The parties we go to all offer too much food with the hosts urging us to eat more.
Jesus and his disciples are at the wedding of an unnamed couple. This is at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and the evangelist tells us that the miracle Jesus performs is the first of his signs.
John’s telling of the story is full of allusions.
The episode occurs “on the third day.” This alludes backwards to the descent of the Lord on Mount Sinai to give the Law to Moses and to manifest his glory (Ex 19:10-11, 16-20; 24:16-17), and forward to the raising of Christ’s body, the true temple (John 2:19-21).
When Jesus’ mother alerts Jesus to the problem, Jesus replies that ‘his hour’ has not yet come. In John’s gospel “the hour” is the hour of his passion and his glorification (12:23; 13:1). Jesus’ reply then directs our attention ahead, to his his cross and resurrection.
The six jars for purification suggest the inadequacy of the Law (seven is the perfect number), while the ‘good wine’, into which Jesus changes the water they contain, anticipates abundance of wine promised at the banquet in the Kingdom of God (Is 25:6; Amos 9:13-14; 1 Enoch 10.19; 2 Bar 29.5). This is realized in the meal Jesus has with his disciples when, finally, ‘his hour had come’ (13:1). The theologian John Behr points out that already by the second century church father “Irenaeus, who identifies the wine that [Jesus mother], symbolizing the Church, desired to partake of before the time, ‘as the cup of recapitulation’ (haer. 3.16.7), the cup that is filled with the blood that flowed, together with water, from Christ’s side (19:34), and which alone, ‘cleanses us from all sin’ (1 John 1:7).”2
And finally, we never learn the names of bride and groom yet we know that in the scriptures the image of a wedding is an image for the healing of God’s relationship with God’s people as we heard in our first reading,
“4You shall no more be termed Forsaken,
and your land shall no more be termed Desolate;
but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her,
and your land Married;
for the Lord delights in you,
and your land shall be married.
5For as a young man marries a young woman,
so shall your builder marry you,
and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you.”
The builder and bridegroom is God.
In the story Mary sees deficiency. Therefore she says to Jesus, “they have no wine.” And while Mary is the first person in John’s Gospel to show trust in the words of Jesus, as demonstrated by her instruction to the servants to do whatever Jesus tells them, still, she sees deficiency.
Yet the story shows us promise and abundance. To be sure, abundance of wine, of very good wine, representing the promise of God’s marriage with the people, and the promise of redemption in the foreshadowing of the hour. And so the story is not simply about the embarrassment of the wedding couple but is a foreshadowing of how the story will end, namely with God redeeming God’s people and Jesus glorified. Despite of what things may look like in the present.
And so here at the beginning of John’s Gospel we learn how the story will end. The story begins in God and ends in God. Our mistake then is not to look to God, not to look to Jesus, but only look at our scarcity and lack, when all things will be well, all manner of things will be well, as Julien of Norwich reminds us.
Of course, they won’t be well simply because we wish them so or because God’s miracles undo all our sins. They will be well because God is enough, because in Christ we have an abundance of God.
But we remember that Christ suffered and died and calls us to take our cross upon ourselves and to lose ourselves for his sake. So the abundance of God we find in Christ is not a set of rose coloured glasses. It is God in Christ.
Because God is enough and because there is an abundance of God in Christ, we no longer live in scarcity but are given the resources to live a life that witnesses to God’s abundance, in the sharing of our gifts, material and otherwise, in making room for the other in our communities, in practising a politics the world does not know.
If theology is the answer to the question ‘Who is God?’ and ethics is the response to the question ‘Who am I?’ Then the response of the Church must be ‘Who are we in the light of who God is?’
Because we know how the story ends, because we know God’s abundance, we need not fear but can live a life that is driven by the answer to the question of who we are in light of who God is. That is, as Jesus enacted seven signs in John’s Gospel, we can be God’s sign to the world that a different life is possible, that we can live with less, that we can love neighbour and enemy, that we do not shy away from sacrifice, that we welcome the stranger, and feed the hungry.
I still like soccer, but there too, we need a different narrative.
Amen.
1 Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism, Charlottesville, VA: 2015 University of Virginia Press, page 1 and 2
2 John Behr, John the Theologian & his Paschal Gospel – A Prologue to Theology, Oxford: 2019 Oxford University Press, p.142
