All Saints’, Dorval/St. Mary’s, Kerrisdale
January 16, 2022
Scene from the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” Klosterneuburger Evangelienwerk, fol. 28r (Stadtsbibliothek Schaffhausen, Gen. 8)
When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘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.’
This portion of the story of the Wedding at Cana reliably gets chuckles at Bible study; the dynamic of the nagging mother and the reluctant son is familiar and comical to many of us. But once you start really looking at it, you realize how much is left out. Why is Jesus’ mother (who is never named in John’s gospel) privy to the lack of wine and the servants’ situation? Why does Jesus respond so curtly to her simple statement about it? And why and how does he decide to help after all? You could build up any number of different and equally convincing stories from this sketchy outline – and many people have.
Some interpreters have hypothesized that Jesus had other plans for his “big reveal” to the world. Maybe a quick wine-multiplication at a random wedding in a hick town in Galilee wasn’t what he had in mind. Perhaps he had a whole different miracle planned for the following weekend, with the disciples briefed and all the symbolism worked out in advance. (Honestly, that doesn’t sound much like Jesus, but who knows? Maybe the events in Cana changed him more than we realize!)
Mary’s request would then have seemed like a tiresome distraction, an annoying and unwanted dilution of the big effect that he was building up to.
But, whatever his reasoning, Jesus did eventually decide to refill the wine jars at the Cana wedding, and this became “the first of his signs,” which “revealed his glory.” And John recounts six more signs before the final, culminating miracle of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Thinking about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry opens up all kinds of questions. In John’s Gospel, Jesus appears out of nowhere. The book begins with the famous “In the beginning was the Word,” passage, which we read something like four times during Advent and Christmas. Then the focus shifts to John the Baptist, conducting his ministry in the wilderness, and prophesying Jesus, the one who is coming after him.
Without ever actually saying that John baptizes Jesus, the writer of John’s Gospel connects them by depicting several of Jesus’ first disciples as having first been followers of John the Baptist. The Baptizer then identifies Jesus as both “Son of God,” and “Lamb of God” as he bequeaths Andrew and at least one other disciple to Jesus’ care. Jesus then collects Simon, Philip, and Nathanael (after the incident under the fig tree) and it is presumably these five, as well as potentially some others, who accompany him to the wedding at Cana and “believe in him”.
But what has Jesus been up to in the mean time? All four gospels are entirely silent on the question. Only one – Luke – has anything whatsoever happen to Jesus between his infancy and his baptism as a full-grown man (the consensus in the tradition from the earliest sources is that Jesus began his public ministry no earlier than his late twenties). What on earth was Jesus doing all that time, and how did it form him into the person who was ready to accept John’s identification as Son of God, call disciples, and reveal his glory by turning water into wine?
There are any number of theories. There are “apocryphal Gospels” written only a hundred or so years after the Crucifixion, which describe Jesus as a toddler engaging in pranks such as making clay birds come to life and striking people blind when they object to his shenanigans. And there are modern scholarly conjectures about whether Jesus was for a time a member of the ascetic sect of the Essenes at Qumran, the desert community where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. And of course everything in between, including some entertaining modern novels. But really, nobody has the faintest idea.
And today, I want to lean into that unknown-ness. There are roughly eighteen years of Jesus’ life – between when Mary and Joseph retrieved him after the preteen caper in the Jerusalem Temple, and when he appears on the banks of the Jordan – that are simply lost to us, and we are unlikely to find out their secrets on this side of eternity.
But we know that something happened. We know that Jesus wasn’t just going about the routine business of a carpenter’s son in Nazareth in the 20s AD, because if he had been, he would have come out of those years with a trade and a wife and probably half a dozen kids, like some of the fishermen that he called away from their nets by the sea of Galilee.
During those years Jesus was, if nothing else, wrestling with God, learning and growing and figuring out who he was, deciding how he was going to respond to the extraordinary knowledge of his Divine identity and commission – preparing to become the person on whom the dove would descend, who would tell Nathanael “you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man,” and who would fill the huge water jars at Cana – whether or not he had planned to do so – with surprisingly excellent wine.
And I find the knowledge of those lost years of Jesus’ to be oddly comforting right now. Because, almost two years into this global pandemic, it feels like we’ve lost a lot of time ourselves. There are so many things that were supposed to happen and didn’t, and so many things that might have happened but couldn’t, and just so much time with our loved ones that we can never get back.
And those losses are real, and we are right to grieve them. Yet God has not stopped acting. I suspect that during his lost years, Jesus too experienced hard moments, deep losses, and painful choices. But God was working, and out of that time came the one who was hailed by John the Baptist as the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.
And yet, whatever Jesus thought he had been preparing for, clearly it wasn’t a request from his mother to top off the wine kegs for a wedding. That was a surprise, and even the Son of God had to take a moment before adjusting to the situation. But adjust he did, and the result was a sign of God’s overflowing abundance, poured out beyond all expectation.
So, my friends, let us take heart. Let us acknowledge and mourn what we have lost, and yet trust in God that God is acting. Even in the hidden years, in the fallow times, in the loss and sorrow. And let us also take this time to consider the question that Paul poses – what is the Spirit inviting us to do? What are the tasks to which we are called, what are the gifts we have to give?
And let us be on the lookout for those moments when suddenly, God invites us into unthinkable abundance; and let us be ready to respond, and join in the marriage feast that God prepares for us all. Because God will not keep silent until our vindication goes forth like the dawn, and our salvation as a burning torch.
Amen.
Leave a Reply