2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle C 21-22
SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Isaiah 62:1-5 | 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 | John 2:1-11
Almighty, everliving God, who governs all things, both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.
Last Sunday we celebrated the baptism of Jesus, and in that image of the Spirit descending upon him at his baptism in a bodily form and a voice being heard from the heavens, and the voice was saying very clearly, “You are my Beloved. My favor, my love, my presence is poured into you, and there’s a deep, deep oneness in us.” And what’s so important about that image is because that’s what it means to be baptized. It means that the relationship that we have with God is so amazingly free of anything that would keep him out from us, anything in us that would keep us from him, it was a celebration of the promise that God has made to all of us, that intimacy with him is the goal. It’s been the goal from the call of Abraham. It’s been the goal from Adam and Eve. God wants an intimate relationship with you. And it’s a struggle to find that intimacy, and I think it’s because of the Old Testament primarily. And that is this: the Old Testament is the beginning of the revelation of who God is. It is not the full revelation of who God is, and the unique thing that one has to have engaged in their imagination, when they read the Old Testament, is that this is a process of God slowly revealing himself. And the slowness of it is based on the capacity of people to understand, and so God does not reveal himself fully to Abraham and to the people that he was calling Abraham to form for him. He was — first of all, you can feel in what he’s saying that it’s a little bit — it’s radically different than the New Testament, but what it’s about, it’s about God is saying, when we take the first reading, that God is calling people into a community of Israelites, his people. He said, “I want, Abraham, I want you to call a people together that I will bless them as a people. And I will guide them, and I will be with them, and I will be their God, and they are my treasured ones.”
It’s amazing how religion has always a shadow of — whatever religion you belong to, they tend to tell you that they’re the only religion, the best religion. When I grew up as a Roman Catholic in the ‘40s and ‘50s, I was told, and I believed with all my heart, that if you weren’t a Roman Catholic, you couldn’t get to heaven. And we believed that, and that is not, in any way, shape or form, the essence of Christianity. It was a hangover, it seems to me, from the Old Testament when there was a certain sense of, I don't know, if God is going to favor me, does that mean he loves me more than others? Well, if he tells me he does, that makes me feel very special. It gives me confidence that he’s my God, my God, not the God of other people. And so there are two things in that first reading that you need to pay attention to. One is that God first reveals himself as having chosen a certain people, and they are his favorites, and he’s going to manifest to him his commitment by guiding them on a journey of evolution of growth and of change. And whenever there are enemies there that are in the way of this growth and change, such as the Egyptians were in the way of their becoming independent and being able to find freedom — and that’s the main theme of the Old Testament, moving from slavery into any system that keeps us from fully being who we are. And so in this process of being freed, what we see in this God of Israel, a promise, “I will be there, and if anybody’s in your way, I will just obliterate them and destroy them.” So we have a God who is kind and gentle to those who are his favorite and vicious and destructive to those who are the enemies of his favorites. That’s the way in which God was working with the imaginations of human beings at that time, because that’s what they believed when they thought of other gods.
Gods were territorial. They belonged to just a certain group of people. They actually belonged to a certain geographical area. And so God had — all the gods were having favorites, so God started out by saying, “Okay, I also am like the other gods. If you let me reveal myself slowly to you, you’ll find that there’s something unique about me.” Then what you see in the Old Testament is this God revealing himself like the other gods, except every once in a while, you’ll see him do something that doesn’t make any sense compared to the other gods, when a human being can talk God out of doing the damage to people that he intended to do out of justice. When Moses can say, “God, you can’t destroy these people. Don’t do it.” That would be unthinkable. So the Old Testament is a beautiful story of a God, like the other gods, who chooses a certain set of people, his favorites, and he protects them against their enemies, and he can destroy those enemies in vicious and horrible ways. The fact that he — I can’t imagine when the Israel, excuse me, the Egyptians were resistant to letting the Israelites leave, those plagues. And the last plague was God went in to every single family and destroyed the firstborn son, which was like taking the posterity away from all those men, because they lived in their children, and their firstborn was the way that they continued to live. It was horrible when you think of God destroying the firstborn of every family in a nation. He did that, and we have to be careful of not saying, “Okay, if a God can do that, he can condemn me anytime he wants, because if I don’t please him, I’m in real, real deep trouble.” But that’s not who God finally reveals himself to be. So he starts off with being filled with a kind of commitment to his people, a unique group of people, and he’s vicious in the way in which he protects them. And if they disappoint him, he turns that same anger towards them. Now, that’s the beginning.
It slowly evolves over 2,000 years until we get to something like we hear in the second reading, a beautiful image of what it is that God ultimately wants to be, not a God that is there for a group of people but a God who is there for every single individual. And the reason you can see that in the second reading is because he’s saying the intention of God is not simply to govern your behavior by threats of punishment, but the real intention of God is to enter into you to enable you to continue his work, to continue being the source of life that he longed to be for the Israelite community. You are now taking over that role, in a sense, and when he lives inside of you and then he cares for his people on an individual basis, it’s a whole new religion. God’s presence is given to each person for a purpose, and that purpose is your unique destiny. And that purpose is your responsibility to fulfill, but it’s the same God in everyone working in an intimate way versus through the Old Testament system, which was more impersonal. So you move from a God who, in a way, only works with groups, and he works through prophets — he doesn’t speak directly to people but through the prophets — to the New Testament where he lives inside of you. And he’s talking to you, and you have a gift, and he just wants you to believe that that gift is your unique reflection of him in the world, and you bring that into the world. And what is the most powerful, powerful manifestation of the Spirit of this God living in individuals that’s different than the Spirit of God that lived, in a sense, in a community of people? And that’s intimacy.
Intimacy, and so we have this image, last week, of the baptism of Jesus as being this moment of human nature being gifted with divine presence in this man Jesus who is also God. But careful. Remember, we have to focus on him as one just like us. Even though he was sinless, he’s still just a human being, and I think his sinlessness was the fact that he never, ever doubted his Father. He wasn’t perfect in a sense of never making a mistake or never saying a bad thing or whatever. We have to watch out to misunderstand what sin really is. The most serious sin in the world is doubting the presence of God and rejecting it, knowing what it is, and Jesus never did that. In that way, he was always sinless. Mary never doubted God’s plan for her. She was sinless. But in this wedding feast of Cana, we have something really unique and really powerful, and that is an explanation of the new relationship that God wants with human beings. And it is intimate, and there’s only one way to find intimacy between God and human beings who fail and sin and make mistakes constantly as part of the process of why they’re here, so they can grow through those things, and that is forgiveness. Without forgiveness, there’s no life, and that’s what this whole feast is about. Jesus’ primary message, primary message is intimacy with the Father, and there’s no way that you could teach that mysterious gift of God’s presence in a person if you also have a teaching that implies that, when we sin, we lose God’s favor, when we sin, we are judged by God. And that judgment, all judgment, carries a certain patina of condemnation, and condemnation means separation. Even the word condemn means to separate from something, to push it away, to exclude it. So just imagine, if you don’t move from pure justice in the Old Testament, if you don’t embrace the fullness of forgiveness in the New Testament, there is no way in which this intimacy with God can flourish and grow and become what it is intended to be.
So let’s look at the miracle. It’s not yet time for Jesus to manifest his power. Now, that’s really interesting, and I don’t — one of the ways I thought about this: if you have somebody that’s been preparing for something for a long time and somebody comes up and says, “Hey, do it. Perform. Do what you’re supposed to do,” and you say, “Well, I’m not really ready yet. I’m working on it. I’m getting ready, but I’m not quite ready yet,” that would be the most normal, human experience of having something inside of you that you know is powerful, and you’re not sure how it works yet. And you have to understand the humanity of Jesus to get this full impact of who he is and what he’s teaching us. So he’s got this power, and he hasn’t used it publicly. Maybe he’s never used it before. Who knows? But it’s a weird, weird situation where it’s a wedding, and they ran out of wine. And there’s nobody there to be healed. There’s nothing essential about charity that would say you have to get the wine. It’s like it seems a superfluous reason to have a miracle, except then that there must be some reason for it. And the reason is not that it was such a crucial thing that he had to do, but it’s what it represented. And what it represented was a transformation from the law, judgment, condemnation, which is the shadow of the law. That’s the stone water jars, and water is that image of cleansing. And those jars were there so that — when you were a good follower of God in the Old Testament, you always had to cleanse your body to get close to God, because God sort of didn’t like the dirty body that you had, and there was always this idea of having to cleanse yourself. And in place of that water for cleansing is this intoxicating, amazing teaching that what he was here to do was to bring this new wine into the world. The old wine of justice, which was more — which was less impactful, in terms of its effect on people — you can drink a glass of water, and not much changed. Drink a couple of glasses of wine, and there’s a radical change in your disposition. And so this fire and this wine, water is the image of the power of forgiveness that is there as the greatest gift of God in the person of Jesus revealing that this gift is what we long for absolutely the most. We want this good wine. The good wine has been hidden in the Old Testament for good reason, because the people weren’t ready for it, but now in the New Testament, we are ready for it. And yet still, 2,000 years later, we’re still struggling to understand it and believe it, and when you tell people that the God that created you will never, ever turn against you because of anything that you do, that his promise is that he is there for you always, that’s so foreign to some people’s mind, because they say, “No, no. The church tells me, and everybody tells me that, if I don’t do what I’m supposed to do, I’m excluded, I am kicked out, I am kept away from the gifts of God.” And there’s nothing further from the truth.
God reveals his glory in this man Jesus, this God/man Jesus, and what it is, is that he reveals a God who is seemingly too good to be true maybe or just so beyond our imagining that it’s hard for us to wrap around the fact that the God, who is so perfect, looks at our imperfection and sees it not as something that turns him away but something that turns him closer to us. And he wants us to believe that we’re loved. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t ramifications for what we do. We go through pain. It causes pain. It’s not good, but it doesn’t — nothing can do the condemnation that the law did if you understand the fullness of the great miracle of the new wine, the wine of forgiveness.
God, everyone seeks peace, and peace is that sense that all is well and all will be well and that we are in your favor, in your care. And yet we so often think that, when we fail, that we lose that attention, that focus of your love, and there’s nothing that can be further from the truth. So bless us with an awareness of your consistent, forgiving love and knowing that, when you stay with us in our imperfection, it’s not that you ignore the negativity that we’ve created. No, there’s a sadness in you when we do that, but what we do know is that your love, your attention, your affection is increased when we are not who we are supposed to be. And we need to keep ourselves open to that gift. So we ask for this gift in Christ’s name, amen.