Second Sunday of Epiphany
Untimely and Abundant Love
The Rev’d Devin McLachlan
19 January 2025
John 2.1-11 (The Wedding at Cana)
On the third day there was a wedding…
Wine, it should be said, was no mere intoxicant. It’s not just that throughout the ancient world, wine was watered before being drunk — as we still do at the altar, although in a token amount rather than the 3:1 perhaps usual in Jesus day, having started with a very high ABV. It’s that the scientific miracle of fermentation was not just for inebriation, but also as a reliable preservative: Here was an abundant harvest of calories which, correctly stored, could keep for years — the warm sugars of summer, stored up for hungry winter days.
An aside: Some fundamentalists, so quick otherwise to insist they are biblical literalists, have invented wonderfully convoluted arguments designed to prove that Jesus never drank alcohol. There are many good and faithful reasons to be abstemious, and for some of us, indeed, to remain sober and refuse alcohol altogether. None of those reasons require contrived exegesis— invention, really. Even more galling is how those same contrived arguments are unironically paired with vicious and narrow interpretations of scripture used to silence women, condemn gay Christians, and insist that disability is a mark of God’s displeasure. But I digress, staring at the log in my neighbour’s eye…
Back to my first point: Here in northern Europe, wine is a cultural luxury — but in the Levant wine was, albeit in different qualities, the drink of labourers and emperors alike. Which is not to say the wine at the wedding was not celebratory —the steward strongly intimating that the guests, if not completely pole-axed, were at least too legless to necessarily notice the quality of the next round of drinks. But it is to say that wine was no mere frivolity, but also a staple of the village diet. Bread and roses in one.
Yes there is symbolism aplenty: the third day, the water and the wine, the six jars and the six days of creation, the bridegroom and the wedding feast… But commentators who over-spiritualise this first miracle do so at the risk of failing to feast at the wedding at Cana as we are filled at feeding of the five thousand. No imaginary satiation, but real food and real wine, in abundance (well over half a metric tonne of wine, by weight), sustaining life as well as giving joy.
Jesus’ first, overflowing, miracle is threefold It sustained life — filling as well as fulfilling, poverty turned to abundance. It sustained joy — to the astonishment of the steward, the delight of the wedding party, and the wonder of the disciples. And it was untimely, in the very best way.
It was itself a miracle of time, a wrinkle in time if you will. Augustine of Hippo reminds us that “the one who made wine on that day at the wedding in those six jars, which he had ordered to be filled with water, does the same thing every year in the vines. Even as the water which the servants poured into the jar was turned by the Lord into wine, so what the clouds pour forth is changed into wine by the same Lord.”[1]
In the water made wine the new creation was revealed at the wedding feast, we’ll hear at the altar in a moment. And in water made wine at Cana, creation was revealed anew. For the miracle at Cana is a miracle of creation, one which we might see in slow motion every day in the fields we go past, God’s creation wonderfully transforming sun and water and air into what is sufficient for all creation to thrive. Jesus just sped things up a little, that we might be fed and filled with joy.
And this miracle was untimely in another way, in that argument with his mother, and Mary’s brilliant power-play: ‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’[2] As Mary saunters out of the room I almost can hear Jesus grinding his teeth and saying “Motheer….”
And then he gets on with it, even though his hour had not yet come. Perhaps he was testing his mother — was her request for vanity or pride, or was it truly a desire to help her neighbours? And perhaps — scandalous to literalists who do not like to remember the Syro-Phoenician woman[3] — Jesus listen to, learned from, and responded to these women.
As he hears and responds to us today.
It’s January. It’s dark and cold. Tomorrow, Trump takes office again as president, having pledged mass deportations, the rolling back of environmental protections, to ban trans students from some school activities, pardon insurrectionists, and start trade wars. We have sisters and brothers in real fear this day, and I suppose we could say “what concern is that to you and to me?” But that’s not where Jesus stopped, and it is not where the bridegroom leads. For even now, Candlemas bells — snow drops — are working their way into the sun. Magpies have begun their nests, cavorting and chatting away. The same miracle that turned water into wine has begun to do so again in the meadows and the fields.
Our griefs, our fears, our losses — they all feel so untimely. But, wonder and glory, Jesus’ love is untimely as well. It will not wait for some perfect hour. It will not even wait for some more propitious season. He loves us, abundantly and joyfully, overflowing, right now, right here, even as we are, right up to the brim.
At this altar, and in our hearts, we will drink the joyful wine of the new creation, and so transformed and fed be sent out in the power of God’s Spirit to live and work to God’s praise and glory. Amen.
[1] Tractate 8 on John, (first sentence, Trans. E. Hill OP, the second my paraphrase of J Gibb), cited in Andrew McGowan, The Wine at Cana, also the source for the passage on wine as a staple and a food:
https://abmcg.substack.com/p/the-wine-at-cana
[2] John 2.4-5
[3] Matthew 15:21-28; Mark 7:24-29