Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens
Anyone who has been fortunate enough, blessed enough, to make a pilgrimage to Israel, to the Holy Land, will have visited key places in the life of our Lord, and locations of wider biblical interest.
The normal itinerary will include, of course, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Bethany, Jerusalem, and the Sea of Galilee. As well there will be visits to Jericho, the oldest recorded city in the world, to Masada by the Dead Sea where, perched high up on a rock, Herod the Great built a summer palace, from whose walls thousands of Jews threw themselves to their deaths when the Romans had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. The historian Flavius Josephus narrates the details of this period.
Then there are one or two places that are perhaps less well trodden on the pilgrimage route – the birthplace of John the Baptizer, Ein Karem, and the little town where Jesus performed his first miracle according to St. John’s gospel; Cana in the region of Galilee. Visitors now will be encouraged by the shop owners to enter their premises to buy little clay water pots that can perform all sorts of optical illusions. I have one with me this morning. Due to the number of years I’ve had this item it no longer ‘performs the trick’.
So for this morning the gospel locates us in this small town of Cana, and we are invited to enter into the spirit of a wedding celebration.
I invite you to remain there in your minds – try to imagine it. However I am going to invite you to be in another place at the same time. Yes, I’m inviting you to bi-locate, in your minds at least.
One picture in your mind is therefore perhaps in a public square in a small town in Galilee, or perhaps in a large courtyard of a house. Tables are laden with traditional marriage feast foods and nuptial delicacies, wherever possible placed in the shade of the trees. The local wine has been flowing, and there will be music and dancing, dances that have been done in the community for hundreds of years.
The family of the bride or bridegroom know Jesus, so he is there with his mother and some of his disciples. Jesus is a guest. Yet, as this event unfolds with details that we are all too aware of – water is turned into wine – paradoxically the guest becomes the host, because he is the one who provides, the one who reveals his glory and the Gory of God the Father.
Hold that picture there.
The second picture that we contemplate is rather different. We are not in Cana, but in Bethlehem. We’re not at a wedding banquet, but at a birth. In the unorthodox setting of some sort of stable, maybe no more than a canopy overhanging the entrance of a cave, a new born baby is the centre of attention. The baby is a new guest, invited to join in the life of the world.
But shepherds come to where the babe is lying and in a complete infant-like way this baby holds court. Later, Eastern potentates seek out this new addition to the world, and present gifts as if they were ambassadors bringing gifts to the court of a monarch or an emperor. Hold this picture in your mind also.
The new arrival, the new guest, has become the host, just as we will see thirty years later the guest becomes the host at the wedding feast in Cana.
These two pictures are not two disconnected events, separated by 30 years. In both the guest in the midst of the normal everyday activity is central stage – Jesus becomes the host, and he manifests his glory whether he is lying in straw in a manger, or changing water into wine at a marriage feast.
The ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary; normality is transfigured into a powerful gospel or sacramental moment where God reveals himself decisively in and through his Son, the Word that has become flesh and dwells among us (John 1, 14); he pitches his tent in the middle of our community (which is how the verb in St. John’s gospel literally translates from Greek); and in doing so, whether in the crib or by the wine pots, glory is revealed and people believe in Jesus, and their lives are changed for ever.
So it is that Christ transforms our lives just as the child in the manger reveals to us the glory that is to be found in our flesh, ‘incarnation’ is what we call it, and as plain water metamorphosizes into the fine wine of God’s kingdom. These are about you and me – about our lives changed by Christ.
In the words of Isaiah, ‘You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.’ (Isaiah 62, 3). The key is for us both to know it, and to perceive it, humanity and all creation are shot through with God’s glory as God transforms us constantly, doing his work of holy and sacred alchemy.
As he reflects on the episode of the Wedding Feast at Cana, St. Augustine, in one of his Homilies (9th Homily, quoted from Homilies on the Gospel of John, trans Edmund Hill OP, published by New City Press, p183) speaks of the sacred signs that we read in the gospel narratives; he says “This is the God, after all, who performs daily miracles through the whole of creation. These, though, have grown cheap in people’s eyes, not because they are easy, but because they happen all the time…”.
The signs in the gospels should remind us that God’s miracles happen all the time and all around us. It is to our own impoverishment that God’s glory has grown cheap in our own lives and hearts, and we are moved only by very extraordinary events that take us by surprise. As Augustine once again says, “…one dead man rose again, and people were struck dumb with amazement, while nobody marvels at those…being born every day. In the same way, who is not astonished at water being turned into wine, while God is doing the same thing every year in the vines.” (ibid.)
As we go around in our daily business, handling the everyday things of everyday life, meeting the ordinary people in a fairly ordinary day, doing the tasks of the household, or working away to earn a crust, or mixing among people who have gathered for special celebrations in life, or even in death – here too is to be found the glory of God.
All of this we bring to God in the Divine Liturgy – the everyday work of humans, the leitourgia (Greek for work and the word Liturgy for the eucharist), and we offer it all for transformation – ‘all things come from you O lord, and of your own do we give you’. The priest presides for those who have gathered for this offering and we set a place for Christ to be with us as ‘guest of honour’, but it is none other than Christ himself who is the host, and we are the guests at his marriage feast, the marriage of heaven and earth, the marriage of humanity and divinity, the marriage of the ordinary and the glorious.
“Come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest;
Nay, let us be thy guests; the feast is thine;
Thyself at thine own board make manifest,
In thine own sacrament of bread and wine.”
(NEH 279)
Amen.
