Homily for Epiphany 2
Second Sunday after the Epiphany - January 17, 2010
Well, for starters this week, I want to remind you all that we priests don’t pick the readings for Sundays - they’re assigned by the national church. Which I mention because the Gospel reading for today seems so insensitively out of sync with events this past week.
I sat down on Wednesday to start reading for this sermon at about same time that the news from Haiti started pouring in. No doubt like many of you, I spent a good part of the day reading stories about people still trapped in rubble, their voices and breath fading; watching videos of severely injured people languishing in the street with nowhere to go; listening to reporters wondering aloud where all the ambulances were; and fuming at all the emergency aide boxes lined up just over the border in the Dominican Republic or overseas, with no way to get in.
Meanwhile, over on my other browser window, I was reading about the wedding at Cana - a joyous and extravagant event that seemed entirely disconnected with that I was watching and reading on the news. Obviously Jesus would come into contact with a lot of victims of senseless violence, and would himself be one of them. But this week, of all weeks, he’s at a party. So the question I began to struggle with then and through the week is how you reconcile this story and these events. And what eventually helped me was a closer look at the wedding at Cana.
The wedding at Cana is a fairly brief story from John’s Gospel, and scant in detail. Early in his ministry, Jesus, his mother, and his disciples go to a wedding in the village of Cana, about six miles from Nazareth where he grew up. (I’ve actually been to Cana, where a Franciscan church now purports to sit on the site of the miracle - and where you can also drink free samples of Cana wine! Let me just say Jesus’ must have tasted better.) Partway through the wedding, they run out of wine. So Mary, his mother, asks him to make some more wine, and he instructs some servants to fill six large jars with water, somehow turns it into wine, and the party goes on.
As I said, the story is a bit hazy on the details: for example, we don’t know whose wedding it was, why Jesus was invited, or, worst of all, how he managed to turn all that water into wine. But it does tell us for whatever reason exactly how much wine he made: 180 gallons! (Speaking of which, I read a wonderful new commentary on this, the first line of which began “For his very first miracle, Jesus showed a certain benevolence toward human failings.” That’s next year’s sermon.) So, with all that wine, it was obviously a pretty good party.
That said, in the Gospel of John and in the Christian tradition, the story is about much more than just a good party. It’s also meant to foreshadow darker events ahead in Jesus’ life. The wine is a symbol of the crucifixion and Christ’s blood. The empty vessels are a symbol of his self-emptying in death. There was even a tradition of painting this scene to look like the Last Supper. The Veronese on your programs is a great example of this. On first glance it looks like a huge, riotous celebration is going on - and it is. But when you look more closely, it also resembles the Last Supper, where Jesus said his final farewell to the disciples before his death.
So I guess seeing that this story has two sides, one happy the other tragic, makes it seem a lot less out of sync with the past week. And I can think of maybe two messages to be taken from this story as we now see it. First, it might remind us that, when tragedy strikes, we’re called to press on with life - to claim that much more insistently the joys that life can bring.
Second - and related to that - just as even the happiest events and people always have the slightest bit of sadness within them, so, too, tragedies always has the slightest bit of hope buried within. Like - and we’ve also seen examples like these this past week - moments of compassion that come out of such events. Like the renewed sense of responsibility toward the poor that they inspire. Like the perspective on our own problems that they provide. Like the determination to make things right, finally, in Haiti - and in other places that need it. Maybe the most faithful response in a time like this is to find and create these beautiful details, even in this tragic story.
