EPIPHANY 2C 2022

     Maybe Jesus doesn’t think he’s ready. Perhaps on some level he doesn’t want to have his first miracle (or “sign” as John refers to them) be some type of party game. But Mary is wise…somehow she intuits, she just knows that the time’s right for Jesus to shine his light….so over his harsh rebukes Mary calmly tells the servants to do whatever Jesus says. She’s’s not deterred by her son’s protests, rather Mary’s encouraged by what she knows, what she senses, God’s urging her to do. She ignores the human side of Jesus and encourages his divine side to get to work. It’s time.
    Mary, in the quiet way she moves through the stories of Jesus’s life, gives Jesus—and us—-an important lesson: what God needs us to do is not always what we want to do. As a matter of fact it is often exactly what we don’t want to do.
Jesus was at the wedding as a guest—he had no intention of being anything other than a regular wedding guest. He was sure: it wasn’t his time.
But Mary, she wasn’t concerned with anything except what she sensed, what she heard deep within her.and what she heard, what she felt was…it was time.
Throughout the stories of Mary, we hear that she pondered.  
Whether it was the announcement from the angel Gabriel, the wisdom offered by the Magi, or at the presentation of  Jesus at the temple; each time Mary experienced another step in the amazing journey of being Jesus’s mother we’re told that she took what happened, and pondered it in her heart. She quieted herself enough, was comfortable enough with the discomfort of not knowing what it all meant that she let things linger in her heart, soul and mind, listening for when more would be revealed.
Mary listened, waited, and listened some more. This devotion to waiting, wondering, looking and listening led Mary to be a wise counsel to Jesus (and to us) through this  journey of increasing awareness, the season of Epiphany.
    One of the overlooked parts of Epiphany is understanding that the Messiah coming in the form of a human being, born of a human woman was not the way it was supposed to happen. The Messiah coming and taking so many of the beloved traditional beliefs of Judaism and turning them upside down and inside out was not what anyone thought would happen. They thought that all the traditions of the faith—-those handed down for generations —-would continue to serve the faith forever. The messiah was to fit the model worshipped and longed for for centuries. The Messiah wasn’t supposed to be unexpected, unusual and challenging.
It’s why, in my opinion, the Wedding at Cana was the first miracle, the first sign pointing to the arrival of this long-awaited Messiah:
The wine is running out and the wedding host is in danger of being shamed. Although unhappy about it, Jesus obeys his mother and saves the day.
But, the miracle at Cana isn’t done simply to save the day….it’s done to show us that this Son of God is here to save us every day and in a completely new way.
You see, the water used in the miracle is poured into the jars used—for centuries—in the Jewish rite of purification, a cornerstone of the old covenant… but Jesus uses them for a new thing—creating wine. The old way is adapted and a new way emerges.
From the restrictions of the old emerges the hope and joy of the new.
Much how new wine bursts old wineskins, God, through Jesus, bursts out of the old in a big, abundant and extravagant way.
This first miracle of Jesus is not just a little something. It’s a whole lot of something big.
The new came to the Jews of ancient Israel in Jesus’s time and it comes now, too.
May we all quiet the voices in our head that begrudge the new long enough to, like Mary,  ponder and then notice how Jesus is leading us into something new, something  unexpected, the next step of what it means to be his followers.
Right here and right now.
Amen.