The Second Sunday after Epiphany
ISAIAH 62:1-5: The context for these verses go back to at least verse 8 in chapter 61. Here the Lord declares: "I love justice and I hate robbery and wrongdoing. I will make an everlasting covenant with my people, and all the nations will acknowledge that these are the people that the Lord has blessed." This declaration from God demands a response from the people: "I will rejoice in the Lord my God. As bride and bridegroom adorn themselves for their wedding, so the Lord has clothed us with robes of righteousness. As seeds grow to shoots and what is sown in the garden springs up, so the Lord will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before the nations." God gives justice to the people, and God requires righteousness from them.
Chapter 62 has God speaking again. God promises that he will not rest until the vindication of Jerusalem is seen by all the nations. This vindication will shine like the dawn, like a torch burning to light up the night. Jerusalem shall be a crown of beauty, a royal diadem, in the hand of the Lord. It is still in the future, of course, but God has spoken it. God intends to turn the situation of Jerusalem totally around, until once more the Lord will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.
Especially striking are the two new names that God gives to the people. While they were in exile, they were termed "Forsaken" and "Desolate." The two Hebrew words are Azubah ("Forsaken") and Shemamah ("Desolate"). But these names are blotted out, and new ones are given. The people are now called Hephzibah and Beulah. "Hephzibah" means "My Delight Is in Her," and "Beulah" means "Married." Both names signify God's joy over what is about to happen. God is claiming Judah in a new marriage covenant. As a bridegroom rejoices over his new bride, so God rejoices over this new relationship with his people.
Rejoicing, indeed, is the mood of the passage. God cannot keep silent because of his joy over what is about to occur. God speaks of dawn, and burning torches, and glory. God speaks of new names and a marriage ceremony. God will vindicate Jerusalem. God will bring salvation as a burning torch. God rejoices. Let the people rejoice.
PSALM 36:5-10: This is a song of praise to the God who is all in all to the psalmist. Especially important to the psalmist is God's steadfast love, God's righteousness, God's judgments, God's salvation. A recent translation of the Psalm sees God attributes as encompassing all the known world: its hills, its sky, its sea:
Your mercy, Lord, spans the sky
your faithfulness soars among the clouds.
Your integrity towers like a mountain,
your justice runs deeper than the sea.
(The Psalter, Liturgy Training Publications, 1994)
God, says our psalmist, is the loving one keeping covenant with God's people; the righteous one, restoring relationships between the divine and human worlds; the judging one, whose judgements transcend human understanding; the saving one, who, as the spiritual says, has the whole world in his hands.
To this God, people turn. His covenanting love is precious to us. We can take rest in the shadow of his wings, as a chick seeks nurture under its mother's wings, as under the shadow of trees and clouds we find relief from the burning sun. Then comes a series of four beautiful images of God: God is a feast of abundance to which we are invited, with the food and fellowship that brings us. God is a cool running stream whose water refreshes us; no one wants to drink of a tepid well, but a stream beckons us to drink our fill. God is a fountain that restores us. What a pleasurable sight. Not only do you drink of it and wash in it, but its flowing water cools the air all around it, and its soft sound welcomes you to a moment of meditation and rest. God is a light in which we can see light. God lights the dark places, and our universe does not seem so frightening any more. "O continue your love to me," exclaims the psalmist, "and your salvation to the upright in heart!"
FIRST CORINTHIANS 12: 1-11: At this point in his letter to the Corinthians, following his discussison of the Lord's Supper, Paul talks about "spiritual gifts," or even perhaps about "spiritual persons." It is a strangely autobiographical passage.
Part of the autobiography has to do with those who read the letter. They had been heathens. They had worshiped dumb idols, or at least they had worshiped in the presence of dumb idols. These were the many statues that were placed in the many heathen temples in Corinth. Before these idols they had worshiped in cries of ecstacy. But the idols had said not a word to them. The worshipers cried out, the idols were silent.
How different is it in the Christian church. Here God does what the idols never did. God speaks. And the word of God demands a response from the worshiper. Do you say, "Jesus be cursed"? Or do you say, "Jesus is Lord"?
The first may have been spoken in some of the Jewish synagogues in Corinth. "Jesus is not the spirit-filled coming of the messiah," they were proclaiming loudly. "He is an imposter. Jesus be cursed. Jesus is anathema," that is, he is a demon-inspired preacher to whom we should pay no attention at all. "Jesus is anathema." If they had come to the Christian faith by means of Judaism, they had heard the words spoken: "Jesus is cursed."
These words might also have been spoken in a Christian congregation. We take it from Paul's letter that some of the people were carried away in their worship. They would say anything that came to mind. They would shout, they would cry out, they were acting in the congregation as they had acted in front of the idol. One, two, three who had carried away in their worship might indeed cry out, "Jesus is cursed," and the whole congregation would be shocked by their words.
There is a third possibility. By this time in some parts of the Roman world Christians were already being dragged before the altar of the god Roma. They were asked to do two things. They were to curse Jesus and praise Roma. "Jesus is cursed," they were to say. "Caesar is Lord." "In the presence of the holy spirit of God you cannot say that," wrote Paul. Anyone who says before that altar, "Jesus is cursed," is not speaking through the spirit of God. That spirit leads us to say, Jesus is Lord, and this is the great triumph of the spirit.
There is a fourth possible interpretation of these words. What Paul is saying here has an autobiographical ring to it. Paul is the one who had gone before Jewish congregations and had said, "Jesus is cursed, Jesus is anathema, he is a demon-inspired preacher from the demon world." Then Christ intervened in Paul's life, drove him to his knees, brought him into the Christian community, and now Paul was saying, "Jesus is Lord," lord of my life, lord of the faith we had all received, lord of the world itself. By these words Paul was confessing to the people of Corinth that he had thought that the spirit of God had led him to say "Jesus is cursed." He now knows that the only spirit-filled words are the latter ones. "We say 'Jesus is Lord,' and we say it through the Holy Spirit of God in Christ."
This same spirit, said Paul, results in "a variety of gifts; a variety of service; a variety of working." But, Paul added, "it is the same Spirit that inspires them all."
It is not perfectly apparent what each of these gifts of the spirit were. "Gifts of healing" are clear, as are "workers of miracles." The difference between "utterance of wisdom" and "utterance of knowledge" is clouded, as are the differences between "prophecy" and "tongues." The first set has to do with teaching, and the second with ecstatic utterances, either quiet murmuring or loud outbursts. "Distinguishing between spirits" and "interpretation of tongues" also belong to those early worship practices in Corinth and have not passed down to us in the kind of unbroken line that we can differentiate between them. Note also that "faith" is described as a gift, not as a human achievement: "having faith" is one of the gifts God through the spirit of Christ bestows upon us.
Two things are certain from Paul's description of these spiritual gifts. One is that each person in the church has his or her own spiritual gift to bring. No one is excluded from having a gift. The second is that the church is made up of all kinds of gifts. Not everyone has every gift, but when the gifts are accumulated, when each brings one's own gifts to add to the others, the church is far the richer for it. "Just as the body is one and has many members, and all are members of the body, so it is with Christ."
Special attention has to be given to verse 13: "By one spirit we were all baptized into one body - Jews and Greeks, slaves or free - and all were made to drink of one Spirit." The church is not an exclusive club, one congregation made up of Jews only, another of Greeks, one of free people, another of slaves. The body of Christ is made up of all peoples, whatever the barriers that divide them in the world. All are baptized into Christ and are therefore drawn together into Christ's body. All are nurtured by the supper of the Lord - "drink of one spirit" - and are therefore brothers and sisters in the Lord.
JOHN 2:1-11: How are we to approach a story as familiar and as meaningful as this one? Is it simply a story? Is it an historical event? Is it an incident shot through and through with the kinds of symbolism that the Gospel of John delights in? Is it all these things at once, and more? These are the questions we have to bring as we examine what happened when Jesus went to the wedding at Cana.
C. H. Dodd (The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 297-300) relates this act to the incidents in John's Gospel up to the end of chapter 4. In 2:1-10 water is replaced by wine. In 2:14-19, a new temple is foretold. Chapter 3 is a discourse about new birth. Chapter 4 contains the contrast between the well of Jacob and the living water of Jesus Christ, and between the ancient cults of the Jew and Samaritan and the new worship in spirit and in truth that is introduced by Jesus Christ. Dr. Dodd terms this story "the new beginning."
This is my own translation of the story, showing as much of the original grammar as seems necessary. I will use this translation as I comment on the story.
2:1 And in the third day a wedding was held in Cana of Galilee, and was the mother of Jesus there; 2 and was called also Jesus and his disciples to the wedding.
C. H. Barrett says that "on the third day" means "on the day after the morrow." Dodd suggests that the phrase points to the day on which Jesus manifested his glory by his resurrection from the dead; and John's Gospel means us to understand that the whole of Jesus' ministry has the character "of the third day," the day that revealed Christ's glory .
A "marriage feast" was such a joyous occasion that it came to symbolize for Christians the joy they will have when they feast with Christ in his kingdom. A marriage feast lasted for 7 days; during this time the wine flowed freely.
"Cana of Galilee" was a village not far from Nazareth. Jesus and his disciples had been in Judea, but they returned to Galilee for the wedding. The movement from Judea to Galilee and back again is unique to John's Gospel. The other gospels picture Jesus more in Galilee than in Judea, but John's Gospel reverses that. According to John, Jesus is in Judea for his baptism and the calling of the disciples; then he moves to and from Judea and Galilee a number of times; finally he goes to Judea and Jerusalem, where he is executed.
This verse contains the first mention of "the mother of Jesus" in the Gospel of John. In this Gospel she is never called "Mary." She is always known instead by her title, "The Mother of Jesus." It was a title that carried great honor in the early church.
We do not know why she was there, or why Jesus and his disciples made the long trip to come to this wedding. It is presumed that a relative of the family was being married, but there is no indication of that in the account. We do know that everyone loved a wedding ceremony in those days and would make a great effort to attend. It was one of the few social occasions in which women played a significant part.
3 And when the wine gave out, said the mother of Jesus to him: "Wine they do not have."
J. D. M. Derrett gives an interesting interpretation of the request Jesus' mother made of him. He says that according to Jewish custom everyone invited to a wedding feast, with the exception of beggars, was obliged to give a wedding gift to the couple. Jesus was obviously invited to this feast as a personal friend or relative, and his disciples came with him. Because they were poor and lived on doles themselves; probably they did not bring a wedding gift and were henceforth a burden to the wedding reception. Jesus' mother was therefore calling Jesus' attention to this double fact: first, that the host was embarrassed because he had run out of wine, and second, that Jesus had not yet given a gift to the couple.
4 And said to her Jesus, "What to you and to me, lady mother? Not yet has come my hour."
The first part of Jesus' reply is difficult to interpret. In Mark 1:24 and Matthew 8:28 the same phrase is used. There it is used by people possessed with demons, and the evil spirit is speaking. It was also used by Jephthah in Judges 11:12. There it means "leave me alone"; or maybe "it is all right - it is not time for me yet." Interpreters have taken two main routes in dealing with the phrase.
Some see nothing jarring in it. Barrett reads it as "You have no business with us - yet." Howard says the words mean, "What have you and I to do with this?" In other words, "Don't worry, my hour has not yet come." Temple points out that the tone of the words in the original contains no harshness. In its simplest form it merely says, "What is this to you and to me, lady-mother?"
Others see it as a turning point in Jesus' ministry. Cullmann says the words accuse Jesus' mother of still sharing the Jewish conception of a miracle-working messiah, and that she has not understood that Jesus' miracle consists only in his death and resurrection which we share through the sacrament of water and wine. Fiorenza pointed out that there is no precedent in Jewish or Greco-Roman sources for a man to address his mother as "woman. The address distances Jesus from his biological mother and rejects any claims she might have upon him because of her family relationship to him. (Fiorenza Memory 326) Perhaps the point of the passage is this: Jesus had to make clear his refusal of Mary's intervention. She cannot have any more role in his ministry. From now on he is not to obey his mother or any other human of family agency. From now on he must obey only the will of his Father in heaven, and his ministry must reflect the Father's sovereignty
The second part is easier: "My hour has not yet come." While "hour" may refer to a portion of the day, in John's Gospel it usually refers to the moment of Christ's crucifixion; when Jesus is crucified, his "hour" had come. This "hour" is set by the father. Not even the request of his mother can change that.
5 Said his mother to the servants, "That which he says to you, you do."
The word for "servants" is "deacons." Barrett points out that this is not the most natural word to use for household servants. He suggests that this word is used here because it recalls the activity of "deacons" who brought wine to the guests at the celebration of the Lord's Supper. Jesus' mother had implicit faith in her son. She did not know what he would do to remedy the situation, but she was confident that he would do something to set things right.
6 And were there stone jars six for the purpose of purification of the Jews setting, having room for upwards of measures two or three.
A "measure" was about 9 gallons. Each waterpot contained 19 to 24 gallons - 120 gallons in all. Is it only a coincidence that in 2 Baruch 29:5 we are told that in the messianic age a single grape would provide 120 gallons of wine?
These water jars are made of stone. Stone jars can withstand levitical impurity, as jars made out of clay cannot. The jars were probably placed in the room so that guests can wash their hands ritually before eating. There were "six" of them. This indicates that a great many guests were present for this wedding, and it underscores the need for more wine.
7 Said to them Jesus" "Fill the water jars with water." And they filled them all the way up. 8 And said to them" "Draw out now and take to the superintendent of the feast." And they took. 9 And as tasted the superintendent of the feast the water wine having become, and not knowing whence it was, but the servants knew the ones drawing out the water. Called the bridegroom the superintendent of the feast, 10 and said to him: "Every man first the good wine serves, and when they are drunk the poorer; you have kept the good wine until now." "
"Superintendent of the feast" - Barrett points out that in Judaism there was no official at a wedding feast who had this title. He feels that the title may have been of Hellenistic origin. My dictionary suggests that this may be the slave responsible for managing the banquet or it may be the toastmaster, who tasted the wine before it was served. Whoever he was, he was familiar with the bridegroom but unfamiliar with the movements of the servants.
This part of the story is open to many interpretations. Dodd, among others, points out that the "water pots" may stand for the entire system of Jewish ceremonial observance which is to be replaced by a religion of truth. Franklin Young adds that the fact that Jesus was present meant the difference between a sad wedding party and one that was quite successful. Oscar Cullmann says that Jesus performed the miracle of changing water into wine only as a pointer to the greater miracles of his death and resurrection, for which the time has not yet come. Higgins adds that this sign points to the Eucharist: "The wine represents the eucharistic wine, the blood of Christ which cleanses from sin, and (hence) replaces the purificatory water and washings of Judaism." Whatever else John does, the Gospel makes important use of this incident, combining, as it does, the water with wine and spirit.
Wine flowing in abundance was one of the signs of the coming of the messianic age. When Jesus makes this wine flow, this signals the coming of the new age.
Someone with a flair for poetic phrasing described the water turning into wine by saying, "The modest water saw its God and blushed!"
11 Thus did first of the signs Jesus in Cana of Galilee and showed his glory" and believed in him his disciples.
This verse raises the question of the difference between a "parable" and a "sign". C. H. Dodd defines a parable as "a picture or story of real life, presenting a situation which the reader will recognize. His judgement is invited on the situation. This judgement can be applied to a different situation, which is present in the mind of the hearer and teller. The characters of the parable have to behave as people might in real life. It generally has a single point. No elaborate interpretation of details is necessary to serve its purpose with its original hearers." A "sign" is different. It is something that is factually true and at the same time is a symbol of a deeper truth. The sign points beyond itself to something else, yet it does this so intimately that there is a unity between the symbol and the thing symbolized. The outward act is a sign of an inward invisible grace. The word in Greek originally meant "a distinguishing mark, a token, a signal." John's Gospel uses the word (which has both Old Testament and Stoic roots) for those acts which demonstrate the character and power of God. It is interesting to note what John's Gospel says a sign does: it manifests Christ's glory, and it awakens or confirms his disciples' faith in him.