Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 96; 1 Corinthians 12:4-11; GOSPEL JOHN 2:1-11
For Zion’s sake I will not be silent,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest,
until her vindication goes forth as brightness
and her salvation like a burning torch.
This is the voice of the true prophet, the voice of Isaiah: For Zion’s sake I will NOT be silent, for Jerusalem’s sake I will NOT rest. You must let yourself hear the steely determination in that voice – I will NOT be silent – the burning anger rooted in righteousness for God’s great goodness: nothing will make me shut up. I will keep on speaking of God’s love for his people, I will shout the truth to power no matter what. No matter what forces are ranged against me trying to close my mouth, no matter what violence they bring against me – I will NOT rest until her vindication goes forth as brightness (like the dawn), her salvation (victory) like a burning torch. Not, that is to say, until, Jerusalem, the City of the Temple of God, is recognised: or rather, not until everyone knows what God is doing in this place, not until God’s work of salvation on the hill of Zion in the City of Jerusalem is fulfilled in victory over the enemies of truth and light.
“The truth will out”, they say: if something is true it will always, eventually, come to be revealed. There is a truth that is like a rock buried under sand: eventually the sand will be blown away by the wind and rain and the hard bedrock of truth will reveal itself: the truth of God’s deep and everlasting commitment to his people. Eventually, the revealing of this wonderful truth will be a bursting out, a “shining from shook foil”, as the poet said: a flaring out like the flame from a struck match-head, or the hard bright little star of the welder’s arc, spitting out sparks, or the incandescent heart of an exploding nuclear device. To believe that our world, our universe is created by God is not to believe in a single amazing event that happened a very long time ago, in the beginning.
Rather it is to know that, with the fire of his love, God creates and re-creates at every moment the very being of things: this building, this altar, these chairs, you, me – everything. For within all things – just ‘behind’ the surface, as it were, just ‘beneath’ the skin of things – God is at work, constantly at work, night and day, keeping all things in being, giving life and growth to all living things. We could say there is, within the smallest thing – a stone sitting unnoticed on the ground untouched for a thousand years – a power much greater than hundreds of nuclear explosions. Except that this power is creative not destructive, a quiet and immensely gentle power that brings and sustains all things in being rather.
Isaiah looked forward to a vindication of Jerusalem which would be like a military victory establishing joyful peace after war or a burning torch spreading light in the darkness. It will be gentle, like a joyful wedding: a marriage between God himself and his beloved Jerusalem, the Bridegroom bestowing joy and fulfilment and fruitfulness on his Bride, once forsaken and desolate but now radiantly happy and beautiful. How to speak of this God and his ways of acting? How to allow God’s own Word or Logos to speak? Perhaps John had this passage from Isaiah in mind, or others like it, when he wrote today’s gospel story.
In John’s gospel, the very first manifestation of Jesus’s glory to the world was this country wedding in Cana. It would be wrong to call what Jesus did a ‘miracle’, for miracles are events out of the ordinary; what happened here at Cana was, we could say, simply God being God, God doing what God does, Jesus being who he is, the Father’s Word and Son. In a sense, nothing could be more ordinary than that: God being God. John calls it not a miracle but a Sign, the first of many Signs of who Jesus is, namely, he is none other than the One Through Whom All Things Were Made, the One who was there In The Beginning, who even now is creating and sustaining in being the very reality of which we too are a part.
Could anyone (except perhaps Mary) have guessed that God might work in this way, that the first Sign – the first revealing of God’s most intimate presence to us – would be like this, would come in the middle of a wedding feast? A badly-prepared wedding feast, in which the host had not taken enough care to procure sufficient wine, without a king or an emperor in sight? But we must learn to see things anew, to know how our God works, as Mary did, in the small things – like wine for a country wedding feast – no less than the great. How typical of our God to allow one of his creatures to prompt this first of the Signs of God’s revealing! O woman, what is that to you or to me? My hour has not yet come. But Mary gently persists: Do whatever he tells you, she says to the servants. What should the social embarrassment of the host of a wedding matter to this God? What is such an inconsequential thing as that to him? But Mary’s persistence brings forth God’s loving response: nothing dramatic, just good wine – lots and lots of it, 120 or 180 gallons of it, a superabundance of the very best wine. Much, much more than the wedding party could possibly drink. And with that, it is launched, it is no longer hidden but out in the open: the Kingdom has begun.
If we take this story seriously, if we take the story of Jesus seriously as the truth that makes sense of our lives, our existence and the existence of the world, we must learn and teach ourselves and others to see ordinary things like wine, and bread, in the sheer fact of their being and being good for us, as signs of God’s everlasting commitment to the world that he is still busy creating. That surely is the meaning of the eucharist we celebrate every day and especially on this, the Lord’s Day. The bread and wine on the altar is a Sign for us, as the wedding feast was for the people at Cana in Galilee. Not just the bread and wine but the altar, the roof, floor, and walls of this chapel, the land on which it is built, the earth itself, and all living and non-living things. The world is charged with the glory of God: it will shine out like shining from shook foil.
By Rev. Fr. Stephen Buckland SJ
Arrupe Jesuit University, Harare, Zimbabwe.
16 January 2022