Sunday 17th January - 2nd of Epiphany (white)
Collect:
Eternal Lord,
our beginning and our end:
bring us with the whole creation
to your glory, hidden through past ages
and made known
in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Comment
Jesus’ ‘hour’ (v 4) was the hour ‘for the Son of Man to be glorified’ – his crucifixion (John 12:23-27). In John’s mind the crucifixion of Jesus was the climax of a life of obedience to the Father, doing the Father’s work; and it resulted in the Son of Man returning to the Father and receiving the glory he had before the creation of the world (17:5) – only this time he was receiving that glory as a human being, ‘the Son of Man’. So there is a sense in which Jesus’ glory was seen both in the depth of the cross and in the height of heaven. However, the glory that has been revealed to us is the former, the glory of the cross; we will only see the glory he has now when we see him face to face.
How can the height of God’s glory be seen in the depths of the shame and agony of the cross? How can Paul say, “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of Christ my Lord”? Why is the cross such an amazing revelation of God?
We know the answer in our heads, perhaps; but we need also to know it in our hearts. The crucifixion of Jesus was barbarous torture, a long drawn out agony from which the only escape was death. But it was not just the physical pain that hurt; it was the depths of degradation and shame. For a Jew there was nothing worse than crucifixion, a sign of failure, defeat, rejection by one’s fellow human beings and by God. When Jesus cried out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,’ he was experiencing a depth of rejection we can only imagine. Yet we have to remember that it was not just the son of Mary hanging on that cross, it was the Son of God, the eternal Word through whom the universe was created. The glory of the cross is that heaven and earth, the divine and the human, met there in Christ’s body, not at the place of greatest exaltation, but at the place of greatest humiliation. The Son of God descended to the lowest depths, in order to raise us with him to the greatest heights – not because he had to, but simply because he wanted to.
Jesus’ hour had not come to him in Cana. The fact that the hosts had run out of wine and faced public humiliation prefigured to him his own humiliation and the salvation that would come from it. (All his saving and healing acts prefigured and derived their power from the cross – see Matthew 8:16-17 with Isaiah 53:4-6). Jesus expressed his thoughts to his mother, though I doubt she understood. But she was not put off, and left the whole problem in his hands. (There’s a lesson for us there.)
The result: problem solved, and the best wine was served. This was ‘the first of the signs, through which he revealed his glory’. The ‘signs’ – John’s term for the miracles he has chosen to relate – point to the fact that Jesus is the Son of God, doing the work his Father had sent him to do. They certainly point to his power and authority. But they also point to the transformation that he came to effect. He transforms water, and people.
Questions
1) What have you seen Jesus transform?
2) Where do you see God’s glory?