Musing on the wisdom contained within the world of the fairy tale, G. K. Chesterton observes that the genre sparks a special way of seeing that is indispensable to living truthfully in the world. Chesterton writes:
"I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by mere facts."
Too many of us live in a world that has been constricted, narrowed, policed by little more than "mere facts." Miracles, wondrous signs are God's invitation to move to a more interesting, surprising, delightful, and we believe, truthful world.
At Cana, during - of all times - a celebration related to a wedding, Jesus performs a sign. Some see glory. In the gospel of John, Jesus performs "signs." In each case, no one asks for a sign or a miraculous work. Therefore, these signs appear to be a generous overflowing of divine power for the world, even as there is an extremely generous portion of wine produced in today's miracle at Cana. The signs are at Jesus' sole initiative and are a way of manifesting his lordship over the world.
If you begin with the assumption that miracles don't, can't, won't happen, they never will. We all know that our senses are fallible. People get hysterical, particularly people in extremis, people in pain, people in fear. We see things we want to see. You see something that doesn't fit your expectations of what you ought to see, you can always dismiss it as mere illusion, wish projection, hysteria, paranoia, or too much food the night before. The modern world has given us a full store of resources for dealing with miracles as less than miraculous - if there are miracles.
Miracles didn't really become a problem for Christianity until the 19th century in northern Europe and the advent of the Enlightenment. Up to that point we didn’t even THINK we had a handle on the world. BIG, MYSTERIOUS, BAFFLING, WONDERFUL. Stories about miracles or anything else that didn't fit into a mechanistic, materialistic universe have had rough going ever since.
If Jesus reappeared in the bodily form of a rabbi, touched a positive thinker crippled from birth and made him walk, I am certain that the guy would regard his state as a result of his good vibes. If Jesus reappeared as an orthopedic surgeon and instantaneously healed the man, the man would attribute his state to a well-functioned HMO.
Experience is a terrible teacher. Preconceptions and prejudices tell experience what to teach.
Critics have long said that primitive, first-century Near Eastern people attributed certain events to miraculous divine intervention because they expected, lusted for divine intervention. Divine intervention was their way of explaining the world. True.
They weren't dumb, however. First-century people may have been wrong in attributing so many events and phenomena to the gods, but they certainly knew the difference between the way the world usually works and a miracle, or what is alleged to be a miracle.
When Joseph the carpenter was told that his wife Mary was pregnant, he didn't immediately say that God was to blame. He assumed that she was "with child" in the predictable but not socially acceptable way.
When people witnessed Jesus healing people, most people were speechless, some said he was an agent of Satan. Only a few said he was God. When Jesus turned the water to wine at Cana, the man in charge of the bar suspected he had switched the labels in the wine cellar. He didn't say, "God must be mixed up in this."
I don't think that biblical people were dumb or naive in these matters. They were like us. They generally saw what they expected to see. They dealt with the world with the intellectual tools that had been given to them. Perhaps that's why Jesus in the gospels doesn't appear to get much mileage out of his miracles, intellectually speaking. Rarely does anyone move from seeing a miracle to believing that Jesus is Messiah, because seeing is not believing and because they were like us.
C.S. Lewis says one of the purposes of miracles, is so that we might witness the wonderful work of God at a more noticeable speed, on a more conceivable scale so that when we witness God at work on a larger scale, we might be filled with wonder at the sign that points toward that one who moves the stars.
When Jesus stilled the storm and made the angry waves to be still, nine out of ten who witnessed it wondered, "Who is this?"
To a few, the wonder became a sign that in Jesus they were witnessing, at a different speed and on a difference scale, the very God who created the wind and the waves.
Jesus turned water into wine at Cana. God does that all the time in California or Australia as the rain waters the fields and the sun matures the grapes. We don't call a gallon of Gallo a miracle (except when we use it at the Lord's table in making Eucharist), but perhaps we should learn to do so. As Lewis said, when Jesus turned that water to wine at Cana, a number saw this as a sign that something mighty was afoot in the world, or as John says, "This was the first of his signs when some saw glory."
Every day, in our hospitals, the blind see, the lame walk. We have spent a fortune teaching you to call it medicine, or technology, or a well-functioning health care delivery system.
Today's gospel bids you to call it miracle. Call the whole world miracle - the continuing effects of a loving, active, caring touch by God allowing you to see your life for what it is. Thank God that occasionally, for some people, on some unexpected day at an unexpected place like a wedding party, our eyes are opened, the lid is lifted off the universe, and we see the hand of God moving among us. In such moments, we see a sign, and a breakout of glory. And we, like the disciples, believe.
Amen,
Pastor Howell
