Each and every one of us can carry out those miracles. Each and every one of us can look into any situation, any difficult path that somebody is on in front of us, understand that that person is in pain or is going to be in pain, that that person is in trouble or going to be in trouble. And through one small act of sympathy, one small act of kindness, one small act of love continue the miracles of Jesus Christ in the here and now.
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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
So let’s have a look at our gospel for today. It’s the wedding of Canna, and it comes up a great deal in our Gospels, and certainly in the daily mass. It comes up very frequently. And I often preach on that line from Mary, ‘do what He tells you’, because it’s just a generally really good instruction for Christians. Do as He tells you.
When Mary, his mother, understands him better than anyone else. But today I want to take it in a slightly different direction. I want to look at some of the history and the reality of what it must have felt like at that wedding and at that feast.
Now, Palestinian weddings are quite different to ours. They would be a feast that would last all day, and then in the evening, the couple would be lifted up and they would be carried through the village on the longest possible route and they’d be in their bridal garments.
They would look like a King and Queen, and in fact, they were treated exactly like a King and a Queen, and their word was law. And then they were taken to their home, where they held court for a week, where everybody came and visited.
There was no honeymoon, but they were really held in great esteem. It’s why we have so much imagery of weddings in the Gospels and in the New Testament, because it is great, this great feast and awaiting the bridegroom, the King. That’s where that imagery comes from.
Some of the later writings that didn’t get into the Bible say that Mary was related to one of the people at the wedding. In fact, they think that she was the sister of the mother of the person whose wedding it was.
And the gospel goes into kind of great detail to tell us that it was Canna in Galilee, not Canna, there are several Cannas, but this one was in Galilee. And in fact, to this Canna, you can see from Nazareth – that’s how close it is to where Jesus and his family grew up. And so this was a family affair. This was a family wedding.
This is why Mary was there. This is why Jesus was there. And drink at these feasts. Drink at these festivals was vital. As the rabbis of the time wrote, ‘there is no joy without wine’.
Very sensible men, these rabbis. But don’t misunderstand that as getting drunk. That was a very bad thing to do. You were not meant to drink to excess. And in fact, the wine at these feasts and wine in general at the time was drunk diluted two parts water to one part wine.
So then wine was vital and wine was a central part of the feasts. And without it, you would have been seen as not a terribly good host. And that would have brought shame on you.
Now, Jesus arrives at this family do, and he arrives not just on his own, but with five additional guests. He’s brought the disciples that he’s just called to him.
He’s brought these five additional guests. I like to think that he’s turned up at the family, He’s turned up at the family do, and how would you feel if your cousin turned up with five people that you hadn’t catered for? You wouldn’t be overly impressed would you.
And so Mary, his mother, feels, I suspect, a little bit responsible for this. My son, has turned up with these extra people. Jesus, you need to do something about this. You need to sort this out. You’ve turned up with these extra people.
Now you sort it out. It is a mother talking to her son. And of course, that’s a thread that we’ve had mothers and their children over the last month or so, all the way through Christmas, mothers and their sons. So a mother is saying to her son, Listen, you need to do something about this. And then Jesus replies with that line, Woman, what is this that you turn to me?
Now, the English actually does a bit of a disservice to this – woman. It’s dismissive, isn’t it? It’s not nice, it’s accusatory, it’s rude. Who on Earth would turn to their mother and go, Woman, what business is this of ours? It’s rude.
And the difficulty is we don’t really have a good translation for the word that Jesus used. In fact, we see it one other time in the Gospel. And it is the moment at which Jesus hands John to Mary and Mary to John when he hung on the cross. That’s the other time we see this word. It appears twice, but we see it a lot in the literature of the time.
We see it a lot in letters. We see it a lot. In fact, it’s in Homer. And the best translation is a term of respect. It’s quite a formal word.
And so maybe a better translation might be, my lady, my lady, what is this to us? And Mary turns around and just says to the guests, Just do whatever he tells you to do, which I just think is brilliant, because it’s that wonderful, again, it’s that human relationship between mother and son. My lady, what is this to do with us? And so Jesus performs the miracle.
He turns the water into wine. And what’s really fascinating about this is the first sign, this is Jesus first miracle. And where does Jesus choose to show his first miracle? It’s not at some big leader’s house. It’s not at somebody who is important.
It’s not at a military leader, it’s not with royalty. But it happened in a place that was humble, that was lowly. And Jesus did this task for a poor village girl and for his mother.
And I think that’s very, very important. The first miracle that Jesus performs in the gospel is firstly one of love, and it is one that he’s directed to carry out by his mother. It sets up the whole of the gospel as Jesus being with the poor and with the humble, not with the mighty and the strong.
He does it out of sympathy. He does it out of kindness, and he does it out of understanding. And the miracle he performs is not the miracles that we see in the rest of the gospel, but it is a miracle of joy.
It is a miracle that lifts people’s hearts. It’s almost a frivolous miracle. He turns water into wine for the party. And so this gospel is teaching us that we shouldn’t be dour in Jesus love. We should be joyful in his love.
And in that joy we should lift people to God. And we do that through acts of kindness. We do that through acts of sympathy. We do that through acts of understanding. Because Jesus understood if the wine gave out at this party, then this family would face shame.
He saw and understood the needs of that family.
Now a lot of us can perhaps act in big heroic ways when we need to. And we’ve seen it throughout the pandemic, haven’t we? We’ve seen how people have acted in enormous and heroic ways. We are moved by big heroic stories of the person who puts their life on the line to rescue others, of the man who dives into the sea to rescue another. We are moved by those big heroic, sweeping stories.
But today’s miracle, the first of Jesus miracles, is not big and heroic. It is small, and it is loving. And in that miracle, Jesus gives us the way to live our lives in his footsteps. It starts as a very human act, and it ends as an entirely divine pattern for the way that we live our lives, to look at our fellow man, to look at our families, to look at those around us, to understand them, to act towards them with small acts of sympathy, small acts of kindness, small acts of love. And it’s in those small acts that Jesus most clearly reveals himself to the world.
Each and every one of us can carry out those miracles. Each and every one of us can look into any situation, any difficult path that somebody is on in front of us, understand that that person is in pain or is going to be in pain, that that person is in trouble or going to be in trouble. And through one small act of sympathy, one small act of kindness, one small act of love continue the miracles of Jesus Christ in the here and now.
And so as we return from the heroic feast that we’ve seen over Christmas and I don’t know about you, but I feel that I have carried out a heroic feast over Christmas. As we return to ordinary time it is not to be deflated it is not to be brought low, but in ordinary time. It is to be lifted up in sympathy, in kindness and in Amen.