In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

The fact that the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul occurs on a Sunday this year means that we do not hear Saint John’s account of Jesus first public miracle at the wedding at Cana in Galilee, when he transformed water into wine, read as the Gospel.  However, although the Gospel reading appointed for this feast is certainly appropriate, the Gospel for the Sunday is no less so.  Indeed, it could be said that the point of the gospel – that the Lord chooses whatever he wills for his work and perfects it for his service – is illustrated no less in the life of the great Apostle to the Gentiles.  It is for that reason that I wish to focus on that gospel we would otherwise be hearing on this Sunday as a way of reflecting upon the work of God manifested in the life of Paul.  So we begin in Cana.

 We are familiar with the circumstances of the story:  Jesus and his disciples have been called to a wedding and before the festivities are concluded, there is a domestic disaster:  The wine is all drunk, and people are still thirsty.  Should this become generally known, it could reflect badly on judgment of the host and on that of the friend he has appointed to manage the feast.  Jesus’ mother, who is also at the feast, is aware of the problem before it becomes general knowledge. (This fact may well indicate that this was a wedding involving a relative of the family of Mary.)  She brings it to Jesus’ attention in that characteristically feminine way which sounds like a simple report of a situation but which actually is intended as a strong suggestion that the man to whom the report is being made do something about it right away.  (“Dear, the fire has gone out.”  “Honey, the pipe is frozen.”  “Darling, the cat just had a hairball.”)

Jesus says to his mother, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?  Mine hour is not yet come.”  His reply is not what we might expect, but neither does it mean what it sounds like to us.  To our ears, it sounds disrespectful of him to address her, not as “Mother” (meyteyr), but as “woman” (gunai).  (When I was in seminary, the elderly mother of my liturgics professor lived with him.  LaRue was a grande dame of the Texan variety and a great favorite with the student body, not least because her brilliant son awed her not at all.  She heartily disliked the new Prayer Book which he had a major role in shaping and was not shy about letting him, and whoever else was listening, know about it.  At one community dinner, she was holding forth at his expense when in exasperation, Fr Louis said, “O woman, what have I to do with you,” to which she immediately retorted, “Don’t you call me, ‘woman’ – I’m your mama!”)  Two things indicate that Jesus’ reply to his mother is not of this sort and is not disrespectful:  (1) that Jesus’ mother, instead of reacting with hurt or anger, tells the servants to do whatever Jesus tells them to do, and (2) that Jesus immediately, but in his own time and in his own way, deals with the problem that excites her concern in the first place.

The framing of Jesus’ reply – “Woman, what have I to do with thee?  Mine hour is not yet come” – seems designed to clarify that in matters such as this, no earthly claim, including that of closest kinship, can force and determine his action.  His primary relationship to his mother is not as her son, but as her Lord.  As honorable as she is among women – and the Church’s ancient instinct that there is and can be none more honorable than she is surely correct – yet she still has no claim on him that obliges him to act outside his own time.   (This is the same thing that he is driving at in that event recorded by Saint Luke when a woman cries out from the audience while he is teaching, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and blessed are the breasts that fed you,” and he replies, “Yes, but truly blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”)  The primary relationship between Jesus and his mother is characterized by obedient faith, and this is what his reply to her at this moment indicates.  This is far from disrespect; it is best understood as a correction, a steadying hand placed upon the arm of an anxious and well-beloved one.

At the moment when the mother of Jesus makes her implicit plea for him to deal with this immediate crisis, his hour is not yet come.  Receiving his reminder and taking its implications to heart, she commits herself and the crisis entirely to his judgment, leaves it in his care, and turns to the servants, saying to them simply, “Do whatever he tells you to do.”  In effect and in fact, what she has done is to say her prayers, listen to what her Lord says, and get out of his way while he does whatever he will do.  Once that happens, the event demonstrates that his hour is in fact not far distant at all. 

What the mother of Jesus here does is to model the role of the Church and of all her members – to bring our own needs and the needs of others before the Lord, to receive his instruction and correction, and to instruct the servants (us) to do whatever he tells us.  It is not accidental that Jesus chose to do this mighty work at a wedding banquet, for in doing so he fused two strands of Old Testament imagery into one and gave a picture of who he was and what he had come to accomplish.  The image of the kingdom of God as a banquet was well-known to the people of Israel.  So was the image of Israel as the bride of the Lord.  The Greek word used here for “first” (archeyn rather than prohton) does implies primacy of importance as well as the initial position in a series, so in working this first of his signs, Jesus is setting the agenda for his public ministry.  He is demonstrating that he, who already has been recognized by John the Baptist and his disciples as the Lamb of God, the King of Israel, is here to effect the union of Israel with her heavenly husband and to make all things new.

What Jesus does at Cana is typical of what he does wherever he chooses to act: He uses whatever imperfect material is available to him on the spot.  What is available is an imperfect number of stone jars (six), each of which have a capacity in excess of twenty or thirty gallons of water, but surely by now mostly empty because all the guests had already used the water for the ritual purifications preceding the wedding feast.  (To the Jews, six was not only an imperfect number, but the most imperfect of numbers because it is the closest to the perfection of seven.)  The available material is an imperfect number of ordinary stone water jars that are used for rites of purification that can do nothing to effect the purification needed to enter the presence of a holy God, and these jars are mostly empty anyway. 

Jesus simply directs the servants to fill up the pots with that most common – yet most essential – substance, water.  Once they have done that he simply tells them to draw some out and take it to the steward of the feast.  They do this, and the steward tastes it and finds that it is so good that he takes his friend the bridegroom aside and wants to know why it is he has held the good wine back until that moment.  Of course, the bridegroom whose wedding it is cannot give an answer, and none is recorded. However, the answer to the steward’s question has everything to do with the unrecognized presence of the other Bridegroom at the feast.  The good wine cannot be had without the presence and blessing and action of him through whom the water and the stone and the wine and everything and everyone at the feast were made, whose coming is to make all things new.

One thing that we are reminded of by this event is that the best that human wealth and ingenuity can provide is not enough for the wedding-banquet of the kingdom to which we are called.  Not even the “proper vessels” – wineskins or jars – are able to meet the need:  The wine they contain will run out, and its quality will decline as time goes on.  (Eventually it will become vinegar.)  Only as we follow the example of the mother of Jesus and place the need in his hands, then do whatever he tells us, will he do wonders with the most unlikely of resources – even ours, even us.  The same one who from the most basic of beverages provided more than enough for a feast, who from a few loaves and a couple of fish provided for the needs of thousands, will provide for us what we need if we are obedient to his word, if whatever he says to us we do.

What Jesus does with the water in the jars for the rites of purification at Cana, he does to Paul on the road to Damascus.  We need to realize that there is no reason to doubt that Paul was telling the absolute truth about himself prior to his conversion when he wrote that, “touching the righteousness which is of the law” he was “blameless.”  He kept all the rules, he did all the duties, and more, for he also said that he zealously persecuted the Church.  (cf. Philippians 3:5-7) He was like those six stone jars, filled to the brim, but lacking something essential, which was the transforming word of the Lord.  What he learned beginning on that day outside Damascus was that, however blameless he was according to the Law, the Law could not save him – that fellowship with the living God is not a reward for good work, but a free gift enabling good work to be done.  What he learned was the lesson that the real objective of the godly life is not to first please God, but to trust him – to trust him in the same way that led the Virgin to tell the servants at the feast, “whatsoever he saith unto you, that do ye.”  Trusting God is he essence of faith,  and because of that it is at the center of “the holy doctrine which [Paul] taught,” and which we have this day prayed for grace to follow.

We also have prayed today that God would look upon our infirmities, and in so doing we have admitted that we are not what we ought to be – that the jars of our lives are, at best, only partially filled, that (to use Paul’s imagery) we have God’s treasure in earthen vessels so that it may be clear that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.  We have asked him to help and defend us in the needs and the dangers that are rooted in these limitations.  Paul himself struggled with some sort of infirmity – whether physical, emotional, or moral is not clear – that he referred to as a “thorn in the flesh” (cf. 2 Corinthians 12:7-9) from which he three times begged the Lord to deliver him, only to receive the seemingly paradoxical reply, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.”  In this way, he learned that the message is greater than the messenger, that the treasure is greater than the vessel which bears it, and the next time you find yourself disappointed in and perhaps angered by the weakness of someone who is in a position of oversight and apostleship, it would be well to remember this.

In the letter to the Romans, Paul points out the main danger in denying our infirmities, which he calls “being wise in your own conceits.”  This means deceiving ourselves about our true condition, and the result of it can be seen in the behaviors and attitudes to which he refers: evasion of the truth, fractiousness, vindictiveness.  The solution he offers is to “overcome evil with good,” lest we be overcome by evil in using evil means to overcome others. 

This is a difficult thing, to be sure.  It runs contrary to what we take to be our nature.  Indeed it is impossible unless our nature is transformed.  But we worship a God whose specialty is the transformation of most unlikely material into instruments for the sharing of his life, which is the true wine which makes glad the heart of man:  From water he makes wine of extraordinary quality.  From peasants he makes apostles.   From a zealous persecutor of the Church, he makes a zealous ambassador for the Gospel.  From sinners of all kinds and descriptions he makes saints, living stones in the temple of the New Jerusalem.  From simple food and drink, he makes a feast which, when trustfully received in penitence and thanksgiving, nourishes us with his life and transforms us into his likeness.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Christ Church

Highlands, North Carolina

January 25, 2009