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“When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.” Luke 4:28-30

I can never read this story about the lynch mob trying to kill Jesus without being reminded of my own experience of almost being lynched. Interestingly too, my near- lynching experience happened not that far from where the mob tried to kill Jesus!

It was April 2004, outside Ashkelon prison, south-west of Jerusalem. I was waiting to greet my friend, Mordechai Vanunu – the ‘nuclear whistle-blower’ – as he concluded his 18-year prison sentence (11.5 years of which had been spent in solitary).

Morde had been punished because he told the world about Israel’s secret nuclear weapons facility, hidden under the Negev desert. Like those whistle-blowers who came after him (Ed Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, …), Morde was targeted and, in his case, successfully abducted by Mossad agents, shipped back to Israel and made to pay for exposing the lies being told by his country’s leaders.

Over the 18 years of his confinement I had written to Morde every month, who had been a part of my church and Bible-study group, and I always promised him that I would be there, waiting for him, on the day of his release. Somehow, I always envisaged that it would only be me and a few friends waiting for him. As it turned out, there were thousands there, and the vast majority were baying for Morde’s blood!

I was close to the front gate of the prison which was secured by a cordon of police officers who were holding back the crowd, and we were pressed against each other so tightly that it was very difficult to move at all. When Morde finally appeared and was then thrust into an armored car that went rocketing out of the gates and away from the crowd, the police cordon broke and the crowd rampaged on the streets.

I tried to make my way back to the bus that had brought me to Ashkelon but was stopped by a French woman from a TV station who asked me if she could interview me right there in the street. I said ‘sure’, but no sooner had she started the interview than we were surrounded by a mob of men who started cursing and spitting on me.

I don’t think they specifically knew that I was a friend of Vanunu’s, but I was wearing my clergy collar and was obviously a supporter. Apart from the occasional ‘go home’, they were screaming at me in a language that I didn’t understand. And then I was getting kicked and punched instead of spat upon, and as the numbers grew I could no longer see any daylight between the members of the mob enclosed around me.

As the blows increased, I realised that there was nothing I could do to defend myself. I put my hands together in a position of prayer, hoping that someone (or God) might intervene. And then a hand grabbed me in the middle of my back and pulled me out of that ruck and pushed me in the direction of my bus, and I didn’t look back. I kept walking, and have no idea what happened to the woman who was interviewing me.

Forgive the long introduction to a sermon that’s not about me or Morde, or even primarily about mob violence. In my defense, the draft was originally twice as long. Once I started reliving that day, it all came out. These things leave an impact on you.

What is interesting, by contrast, is how briefly the Gospel deals with Jesus’ incident. We are told “They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way” (Luke 4:29-30).

Are we supposed to see a miracle here? Was the lynch mob suddenly blinded, such that they could no longer see Jesus, who glided through the crowd without anybody realizing He was gone, or was it something closer to my experience where there was such confusion amidst the mass of angry bodies, writhing and pushing each other, that nobody was probably entirely sure exactly who they were trying to beat up?

We don’t know the details. That’s probably because none of the disciples were a part of that mob, and because Jesus probably never spoke about it, as most people don’t talk a lot about these sorts of experiences. It would be interesting to know, if He had talked about it, how He understood it. Did Jesus see it all as a big misunderstanding or, more likely, did He recognise that this was just a foretaste of what was to come?

What we do know is that this is Jesus’ first experience of mob violence. It will not be His last. Eventually the mob will kill Him, with the help of the Roman government, of course, which, in a sense, was just another kind of mob.

Why do we do such terrible things in groups that we would never do as individuals? The process is called ‘deindividuation’ in social psychology. It’s a term that describes the astonishing way normal, educated, and often apparently moral people become murderous fanatics when part of an uncontrolled mob.

What causes it? One theory is that individuals feel anonymous in the larger group and sense that none of their actions will be counted against them as individuals. Kierkegaard believed that the problem with every crowd was simply that the weight of individual responsibility was always divided by the number of persons in the mob.

However we understand it, people do things in groups that they would never do as individuals. The lessons passed down from the early chapters of Genesis, and from the Tower of Babel story in particular, remind us that while sin has always been a part of the human condition, it’s when sinful people get together to ‘make a name for themselves’ (Genesis 11:4), that things really start to unravel.

That’s why I can never take seriously these horror movies about Freddy Krueger or any of the terrible super-villains, no matter how revolting their crimes. Criminal people can do terrible things, I grant you, but it’s when we get together as a community that things get really awful. Jack the Ripper killed a lot of poor women, but it took a whole country working together to create the Holocaust.

When you walk around Syria or Yemen, and even when you see the conditions being experienced by the men on Manus Island, it’s not wicked individuals that are causing all this. It’s takes a whole pack of us, working together. The question is why? Why do we do it? Well … why did the mob that went after Jesus want to kill Him?

The Gospel-writer makes it clear that it was something Jesus said. Luke begins, “When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.” (Luke 4:28). The potentially confusing thing here though is that Jesus had said a lot of things.

Jesus was in Nazareth. He was at the synagogue. He was given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah to read and he read from chapter 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” (Luke 4:18-19)

Is this what upset people, or was it the very brief (8-word) sermon that Jesus gave on the passage – “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21)

Some commentators have suggested that these are exactly what upset the people. Jesus was proclaiming God’s ‘Jubilee Year’ – a time of true freedom and abundance when the gap between rich and poor would disappear and when debts would be cancelled. Some suggest, understandably, that this announcement would have enraged the rich members of the synagogue who stood to lose out in this great redistribution. That would make sense, except that the Gospel writer says that Jesus was well-received up to this point. It was what He said after that that upset people.

“Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, “Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.”” (Luke 4:23)

Clearly people were looking for a sign (a miracle) from Jesus to show that He was qualified to make His announcement – proclaiming God’s Jubilee Year. Jesus says that they’re not going to get a sign, and he follows this by giving two examples from Biblical history that make the point that miracles aren’t simply produced on-demand.

It’s at this point that everyone gets upset, and no doubt they would have been upset with the way in which Jesus seemed to be so presumptuous. Even so, when you think someone is presumptuous, you tell them to pull their head in. You don’t try to kill them. Is there another piece to the puzzle here? Of course. It’s the occupation!

If you want to know the problem that was plaguing the Jewish population of Palestine in the first century, the answer is always the Roman occupation. I’m not saying that individual people weren’t struggling with their own issues. For sure, people were struggling with illness and with debt, and no doubt plenty of parents were struggling with the good-for-nothing guy that their daughter was infatuated with. Even so, as a group, as a community, and as a mob, the problem was always the occupation.

It’s exactly the same in Palestine today. I’ve heard people suggest that Palestinian education system is to blame for bringing up children to hate their Israeli neighbours, or that the ideology of Hamas is to blame. No. The problem is always the occupation (in this case, the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank).

Whatever form of freedom Jesus was talking about when he ‘proclaimed the acceptable year of the Lord’ that day in Nazareth, what the people of Nazareth would have heard was the promise of an end to the occupation.

The Roman occupation was a political problem – yes – but it was also a spiritual issue. It was about the place of the people of God in the plan of God. It was about history, Scripture, covenant and promise. It was about everybody’s dream for a better world, and what Jesus did in Nazareth, in the scene depicted for us in Luke chapter four, was that he tapped into the dream of the community for an end to the Roman occupation and, from their perspective, he then threw it back in their faces!

On the one hand, Jesus clearly announces Himself as the spirit-filled Messiah spoken of by the prophet Isaiah – the one who would bring in the new world order. On the other hand, he made clear that He was not interested in leading them in any armed revolution, and you can’t do that – not to the people of Nazareth at any rate.

Our dreams are important to us. We have dreams about who we want to be. We have dreams for our families and for our children. We may even have dreams about what we want our house to look like one day. There’s nothing wrong with having dreams, and surely nobody has the right to come and simply smash our dreams. The problem is just that not all of our dreams are in alignment with Jesus’ dream.

Of course, there are no shortage of preachers around who will tell you that Jesus is just waiting to give you whatever your heart desires. ‘Name it and claim it’, they say. ‘Jesus will give you a bigger bank balance and a better sex life! Whatever it is that you want, ask and you shall receive’. Well … tell that to the congregation in Nazareth

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” (Luke 4:18-19)

I believe Jesus’ vision of the coming Kingdom fully included an end to the Roman occupation of Palestine, just as I believe that the unfolding of that Kingdom today fully includes the ending of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The Kingdom includes both of these acts of liberation, and it includes a whole lot more! It includes the ending of all wars, of child abuse, violence, the persecution of asylum-seekers, the imprisonment of those who tell the truth to power, and even of death itself!

The dream of the Kingdom is something that we can all tap into. Even so, both in terms of the content of that Kingdom and in terms of how we get there, we need to work on taking on Jesus’ dream, rather than relying solely on our own imaginations.

There’s an old joke about someone who is being shown around Heaven on their first day there. They are being introduced to all sorts of amazing places and all sorts of amazing people from all sorts of backgrounds and faith traditions. Then the new- comer asks what the big walled-off section is in the middle of Heaven that they can’t see into. She’s told that that’s the Sydney Anglican section, as those people dreamed of a Heaven where they would be the only ones there.

We all dream of a better world, but our dreams need guidance too. Let the dream of Jesus be our dream. It is a big dream – a dream of freedom, justice, peace and love. And as Dom Helder Camara said – “when one person dreams it is just a dream, but when we all dream together, it is the beginning of a new reality.

First preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill on Sunday 3rd February, 2019.

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising and have come to pay him homage.” (Matthew 2:1-2)

“Someone in your life is about to burst out of his or her shell – make sure you’re there to cheer them on! … This is your chance to be someone’s personal hero and personal cheerleader. Get out there and lend a helping hand”

As is my habit this time of year, I’ve checked in on my daily horoscope. That was the advice offered me today – Sunday, January 6^th, 2019 – from astrology.com, which I thought sounded like the authoritative place to hear what my stars had to tell me.

I only check my horoscope once per year, largely because I can still hear the voice of my father in the back of my head, saying “don’t you believe any of that rubbish!”

That was the stance I was brought up with – that it was all a load of rubbish – and then, while I was at seminary, someone pointed out to me – ‘well … there must be something to it. The wise men followed their stars and it led them to Jesus!’

Yes, today is Epiphany – the Feast of the Epiphany – and we are blest indeed that this year Epiphany does fall on a Sunday!

Today is the day when we remember the visit of those wise men to the infant Jesus, as recorded in the Gospel according to St Matthew, chapter two – and if ever there was a day to consult your stars, I figure that today is the day!

The Feast of the Epiphany is much more than a day for star-gazing though, and over the last 2,000+ years of the existence of the church a lot of fascinating traditions have become associated with this day.

Epiphany is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, as celebrated in the song that I’m sure none of us have ever been able to forget, even if we can’t remember exactly whether the gift for day twelve was lords a leaping or ladies dancing or drummers drumming.

Either way, the song is a good reminder that the Twelve Days of Christmas have a history in the church, as does the Twelfth Night, remembered in the famous Shakespearean play of the same name.

In some sections of the church, this Twelfth Day of Christmas is considered to be as significant as Christmas itself, and in Spain and in some Latin American countries it is still a public holiday. Traditionally, it was the day when you opened your Christmas presents, and it was the day when you took down your Christmas decorations.

In Siberia today – this Epiphany as every Epiphany – a goodly number of our Russian Orthodox sisters and brothers will take a dip in water as cold as fifteen degrees below zero, jumping in through a whole cut in the ice by the priest who first blesses the freezing water so that they might wash away their sins.

As if we needed more reasons to remain Anglican!

In some areas of England and France, a far more tame Epiphany tradition is to have a communal celebration with an Epiphany cake which has had a pea and a bean baked into it. According to the tradition, whichever man finds the bean in his slice of cake becomes king for the night and whichever woman finds a pea becomes queen! I couldn’t find any explanation as to what is supposed to happen if a man finds the pea or a woman finds the bean.

How any of these traditions grew out of the story of the visit of the wise men to the infant Jesus is anybody’s guess. I can’t see any obvious connection, beyond the general theme of celebration, as Epiphany event does indeed proclaim a truth that is worth celebrating. That truth, I believe, is simply that Jesus belongs to everybody.

“Wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” (Matthew 2:1b-2)

We use this term, ‘wise men’, but the original Greek word is ‘magi’, from which we get our word ‘magic’. These visitors are magicians of sorts, though not of the conjuror variety, such as we see on stage. They are court magicians, such as might act as advisors to the king, as members of the royal court.

If you’re familiar with the book of Daniel, where Daniel and his three friends became part of the Persian royal court, their position in the court would have been as magi. Hence, they played a special role in all matters requiring spiritual wisdom, such as the interpreting of dreams and predicting the future, so that they might help prosper the king and the kingdom, both economically and militarily.

These magi at the heart of the Epiphany story are likewise understood to be court officials, and, if we are to take this story literally as history, religiously speaking, they would almost certainly have been Zoroastrians.

I learned a little about Zoroastrianism, reading the Reverend Dr Niveen Sarras’ commentary on this text. She’s a Lutheran pastor in the USA.

According to Dr Sarras, Zoroaster himself (the main prophet in Zoroastrianism) was also believed to have been miraculously conceived in the womb of a virgin (a 15- year-old Persian girl in his case). Like Jesus, Zoroaster started his ministry at age of 30, after defeating all of Satan’s temptations, and he predicted that “other virgins would conceive additional divinely appointed prophets as history unfolded.”

Zoroastrian priests believed that they could foretell these miraculous births by reading the stars and, like the Jews, the Zoroastrian were, at the time, anticipating the birth of a universal savior.

What this means is that these magi come to Jesus, not on the basis of any prophecy in the Hebrew Scriptures, but on the basis of the Zoroastrian virgin-birth prophecies. Dr Sarras believes that this was certainly the understanding of Matthew, the Gospel writer, who is proclaiming that religions unrelated to Hebrew monotheism, and other sacred texts, outside of the Hebrew Scriptures, did indeed also point to Jesus.

All this reminds me very much of our own Epiphany experience that we had here in Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill, on Christmas Day, when we were visited by our own magi.

If you missed it, I’m referring to the visit paid us by Sheikh Shoaib Naqvi and his colleagues of the Muhammadi Welfare Association in Granville.

Sheikh Shoaib isn’t a Zoroastrian, of course, and he might not appreciate the comparison. He’s a Shia Muslim cleric, of course. Even so, if you were here, you’ll know that he read to us from his own Scriptures some words of prophecy regarding both Mary and Jesus, and he and his colleagues came here to honour Jesus!

If you missed it, it’s on the church’s Facebook page, as Sheikh Shoaib had his brief speech videod, and he posted it to his Facebook page, and I then shared it on ours.

Interestingly, I spent some time with Sheikh Shoaib the weekend after that visit, and he told me that he’d received quite a bit of negative feedback on his Facebook page.

He said that while he’d been 100% supported by how own faith community, the video had been shared and re-shared around the world, and he’d been criticized by some of his old associates back in Pakistan and elsewhere.

It seems that a lot of people in Pakistan think that if you turn up at a church, you have to drink the wine we serve. Shoaib assured them that this was not the case – that the consumption of alcohol here is entirely voluntary.

I note with some pride that we received zero negative feedback from the Christian community (at least as far as I know). Having said that, I suspect that a number of our less-regular visitors that day might have assumed that Sheikh Shoaib was just part of the Nativity scene.

And why wouldn’t’ they? It’s the season! The week before we had half of the Sunday School children dressed up like Bedouin Arabs, roaming around the building. Additionally, we’ve got models of saints dressed in plush, red winter garb alongside woolly sheep and other stable animals. Why would a wise man in a turban look out of place?

In truth, I love this time of year, and I love the pageantry, and the way we dress up, and I love our special visitors, as it’s all a part of the central Epiphany proclamation – that Jesus belongs to everybody.

It’s interesting that the word ‘epiphany’ has another use in our language, entirely independent of this Gospel story. According to the dictionary, it can also mean “a moment of sudden and great revelation or realisation.”

I suppose the two epiphanies are not really unrelated, as they are both tied to the Greek word, “epiphainein”, meaning, ‘manifestation’ or ‘appearance’. The star suddenly appeared as a revelation to the magi and, in similar ways, things suddenly occur to us when we have our own ‘epiphanies’.

I’ve had a few epiphanies in my life.

I think the first was when I was eighteen and one night I had a life-changing epiphany when I realised that God was really ‘out there’, or, to be more precise, that God was really close to me, and was deeply interested in what I was doing with my life! That was the most life-changing epiphany I have ever had.

Many years later (and I’m embarrassed to admit that it was many years later) I had another epiphany – that same-sex orientated people were probably no worse sinners than I was (and, in many cases, were far less so). As I say, I’m embarrassed to admit that it took a number of years before I had that particular epiphany but, again, it proved to be life-changing.

A few years after that I had yet another epiphany, when I realised that the Spirit of God was as actively at work in the heart of my friend, Mansour – a Muslim Sheikh – as He was in mine! That epiphany would also prove to be life-changing!

I may have more epiphanies to come, but I note that all my more recent epiphanies have been what I would call ‘Epiphanal epiphanies’. In other words, they have been situation-specific realisations of the greater truth that Epiphany teaches us – that Jesus belongs to everybody, and that ‘everybody’ really does mean ‘everybody’.

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

So says St Paul in his letter to the Galatians, for indeed that is where the New Testament is taking us. It ends there – in the affirmation of our oneness in Christ, where all the divisions between rich and poor and slave and free and gay and straight and orthodox and heretic and us and them are broken down and resolved and all are one in Christ Jesus.

It ends there, but it begins here, in the opening chapters of the first book in the New Testament, with this odd story of these unfamiliar men in turbans who come to stand alongside us and pay their respects to Jesus.

I started my sermon today by sharing with you some of my horoscope reading for today. In case you’ve forgotten, it mentioned that someone was going to “burst out of his or her shell” and that my role was to be there to “cheer them on!

“Get out there and lend a helping hand”, was the closing exhortation of that prophecy and I really don’t know if this sermon has been that helping hand for anyone today. If that’s you, and this sermon has helped you burst out of your shell, do let me know.

That, at any rate, was the extract from my daily horoscope on astrology.com. What I found even more interesting though, from the same site, was my weekly horoscope, which gave specific recommendations for each day of the week, concluding with, “express yourself eccentrically on Sunday.”

I thought about that for quite a while, and wondered whether concluding this sermon with an ‘ice-bucket challenge’ might help bring the Epiphany message home. I decided though that most of our church thought I was already eccentric enough.

It did occur to me though that if ‘eccentric’ means being ‘out of step’ and ‘non-conformist’, then there is probably nothing more eccentric that we can do than simply proclaim the message of Epiphany – that despite all our differences (of gender and class and race and education and religion, and all the other factors that distinguish and divide us), we are one, and that the Lord Jesus belongs as much to the Sudanese Muslim woman on the other side of the globe as He does to us.

Happy Epiphany!

First preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill on Sunday 6th January, 2019.

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.” (John 2:3-5)

Here we are at one of the driest times of the year, and yet today is the day our lectionary chooses to present us with the story of ‘Jesus the winemaker’!

Some people refer to this whole month as ‘Dry January’, as it’s our period of recovery after the ‘silly season’. Some of us get more silly than others over the Christmas period, of course, and some of us let the frivolity extend right on into the first few weeks of January as we take the kids away and sun ourselves on various beaches and continue to consume far more alcohol than either our livers or our credit card can handle. We dink like Princes, which means we’re paying up to $50 per bottle but partying like it’s 1999!

Either way, by this time of the month, we are all starting to sober up, surely. The school holidays are coming to an end and even the most slothly amongst us is being drawn back into the workplace. Yet now is the time when Jesus brings out the best wine – right at the end of the party!

It really is odd timing, especially when you consider that our Gospel readings for this whole season are being taken from the Gospel of Luke. I guess the church inserted this reading from the Gospel of John into the series because it is Epiphany – the season of ‘revelation’ – and this passage concludes by noting that Jesus ‘revealed his glory’ through this miracle (John 2:11), but what an odd way for Jesus to choose to reveal Himself, and exactly what glorious aspect of Himself was Jesus revealing through this miracle anyway – that He is the source of unending streams of alcohol?

I don’t mean this as a flippant question either, for in the other Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – Jesus’ miracles are referred to as ‘signs of the Kingdom’ (‘semeion’ in Greek), as they are concrete illustrations of the message that Jesus is preaching.

Jesus is proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God – an age where there will be no more violence, disease or death – and He illustrates His message through His signs that show us what the new world is going to look like.

The blind see because there is no more blindness in the Kingdom of God. Lepers are cleansed because there is no leprosy in the Kingdom of God. The dead are raised because death itself will be no more in Jesus’ Kingdom, but if this miracle too is a sign of what is to come, what’s it saying about the new world coming – that the alcohol never stops flowing? If so, I wonder how some of our Baptist brethren are going to cope?

Personally, I have no problem with that as an image of the Kingdom of God. Even so, I think we run the risk of trivialising this passage and missing what the Gospel writer is trying to say to us here if we reduce the whole message to one about the Kingdom of God being a non-stop party. It is a party – no doubt – but there’s a lot more going on at this party than just drinking!

We are in the Gospel of John, and John is a book with a lot of levels to it, and where there are often a lot of double-meanings and hidden messages.

I’m not suggesting that there are scandalous truths hidden in code anywhere (as the authors of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ might have us believe) but rather that John, as the last of the Gospels written, was crafted very artistically, and you often need to read over John’s words multiple times to get their full meaning.

This is the Gospel where Jesus speaks of how the ‘wind blows where it will’ (John 3) but he’s really talking about the movement of the Spirit of God and it’s easy to get confused! Likewise, He speaks about ‘flowing water’, or was that ‘living water’, and was He talking about the Spirit again?

Those who have looked for hidden meanings in this particular passage have often done so by looking at parallels between this miracle story and some of the ancient myths about the Greek god, Dionysius, who is probably better known to us by his Roman name, Bacchus. He was the god of wine, and turning water into wine was something he was very good at. Interestingly too, Dionysius was supposed to have been the result of a virgin birth, and his birthday was celebrated on December 25! This has, of course, led some to suggest that the early church simply stole this story about Jesus from the myths of Dionysius, but this is hardly likely.

Lots of Greek and Roman gods and demi-gods were the result of virgin births, or at least of strange sexual encounters between the gods above and the mortal women who fell victim to their lusts, and when it comes to December 25th, the reason the Greeks and Romans celebrated Dionysius’ birthday on that day was probably the same reason that Emperor Constantine decided to celebrate Jesus’ birthday then (in 388 AD) – not because anybody really thought that that was when Jesus (or Dionysius) was born, but because it was the beginning of the Winter Solstice and a good time to celebrate.

In terms of the miracle of water into wine though, is the Gospel writer subtly trying to let his Greek and Roman readers know that anything their gods can do, Jesus can do better? This is possible, but it’s hard to be clear about anything like this in John’s Gospel. The wind blows where it will, and so can your imagination when you’re reading the Gospel of John.

I might add at this point that I do genuinely believe that any similarities we might find between the stories in the Gospels and the myths of ancient Greece and Rome are entirely superficial, and I believe this not only because of differences in the stories themselves, but more so because of the entirely different role that these traditional Greek and Roman myths played in their respective societies when compared to the Gospel stories.

For the worshippers of Zeus and Jupiter and their respective pantheons, nobody really cared whether any of the stories about these characters were historically true. I suspect that many worshippers probably thought that their stories had some basis in history but it really didn’t matter because the way you practiced your religion was by participating in the cult and doing the sacrifices. Nobody ever asked you what you believed as it didn’t matter.

The whole concept of ‘orthodoxy’ (right belief) really only starts with Christianity, where all of a sudden it became very important what you believed because the historical facts about Jesus were seen as being very important.

For this reason, I think we’re frankly on much firmer ground in our speculations about John’s Gospel when we look for connections within the Gospel itself. For instance, when John begins this passage by saying “On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee” (John 2:1), is there some double meaning to the words, ‘third day’? John didn’t seem to be counting days up to this point. Is this a subtle allusion to the resurrection?

It’s impossible to know for sure, of course, but that would connect this story from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry to what happens at the end of the story – namely, the crucifixion and resurrection – a connection that is made more explicit in the odd dialogue between Jesus and his mother.

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” (John 2:3-4)

Jesus seems to be being disrespectful, referring to his mother simply as ‘woman’, but this is not the case, as is made clear by the only other mention that is made of Jesus’ mother in John’s Gospel, which happens at the foot of the cross, where Jesus speaks to her again:

“Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” (John 19:25-26)

Some translate both references as ‘dear woman’, as it’s obvious, in this second case especially, that Jesus is speaking to His mother with tenderness. Even so, the exchange in Cana it is a mysterious one, and the mysterious statement of Jesus – “my hour has not yet come” – connects this early scene to the later one. For some reason, Jesus sees His mother’s invitation to do something about the wine as the beginning of the end!

Why is that? Is there something going on here between Jesus and His mother that is not obvious? Is there something about wine that has a special significance for Jesus? Is there something in the water (so to speak)?

I believe the water is the key, in fact, because we’re told quite explicitly that

“there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding about one hundred litres” (John 2:6), and the water in these jars was not for drinking – not as water, let alone as wine! This water was holy water (or sorts) used to make people ready for worship.

The Torah strictly regulated how you had to purify yourself with water before coming to pray, and so you would rinse your hands with this water, symbolically washing away your sins so that you could be close to God. It is this holy water that Jesus takes charge of – water that is meant to purify people and bring them closer to God – and He turns it into something radically different, and then He makes it available for everybody to drink!

Now … I don’t want to start making connections here between water and wine and blood and the cross and the Eucharist, but Jesus evidently saw some of these connections, and the Gospel-writer, John, obviously saw connections. How exactly all these things connect, I don’t hazard to guess, but this is John’s Gospel, and maybe we’re not expected to figure it all out.

Now … you’ll have to forgive me if I’ve overworked the brain this morning, venturing into Greek mythology and exploring convoluted connections between the beginning and the end of John’s Gospel. As a preacher, the danger in preaching like this is that everybody checks out at around the 10- minute mark as that’s about as long as most people’s concentration can last. Mine (with all the hits I’ve taken to the head) normally only lasts about half that distance.

Even so, I haven’t finished yet, as there is one more thing I want to draw attention to in this passage, but it’s something really obvious that doesn’t require any subtle guesswork or intricate knowledge of the text. It’s the fact that this is a really big miracle that results in lots of wine!

We are told that there were six massive jars, each holding around 100 litres, and Jesus quite explicitly tells the staff at the wedding to “fill the jars with water”, and we’re told that they “filled them to the brim” (John 2:7), meaning that they ended up with at least 600 litres of liquid!

If you think of this in terms of wine for the party, that’s the equivalent of around a thousand 750 ml bottles (which is the standard size) and would go around a long way between one hundred or even two hundred guests!

The figures look even more extreme when you think of this liquid in terms of it being holy water that washes away sin. According to the Torah, you only needed one cup of this sort of water to purify a hundred worshippers. Now … I haven’t attempted to do the maths as the figures get quite astronomical, but I think that might have been a part of John’s point – that what Jesus has done here is to create enough holy liquid to cleanse the sins of the whole world!

Of course, Jesus acting on a crazy large scale like this is nothing new. When Jesus goes fishing, there are so many fish caught that the nets can’t hold them all! When Jesus organises lunch for a crowd, there is so much food left over that it fills a dozen baskets! Jesus provides, and He provides abundantly, especially perhaps for those who follow the instructions given by His mother, “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5).

That is a useful thing to be reminded of at this time of year especially – in this ‘Dry January’, when Yuletide merriment has all but frittered away and been replaced with sober contemplation of the credit-card bills. Jesus provides!

When the friends and family have all gone home and we’re coming to terms with being alone again, Jesus provides!

And most importantly, as we continue to struggle with our own weaknesses and watch things collapsing around us and feel the weight of our own sin and failures pressing in upon us, Jesus provides!

There is plenty of wine to go around. Nobody need be left out, and if you’re feeling like you’ve run your race and it’s all too much and you can’t go on any further, then grab yourself a glass and break open another bottle! It’s all good! We’ve saved the best till last!

I appreciate that some might find this imagery offensive, as indeed many of us might find John’s Gospel impenetrable. Even so, this is how Jesus first chose to “reveal his glory”, “and his disciples believed in him.” (John 2:11)

First preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill on Sunday 20th January, 2019.