Sunday 21^st January 2024 (Epiphany 3)

Readings: Revelation 19:6-10 and John 2:1-11

Love, Joy, Peace and Hope are four of the great and central themes of Christmas, and they are the themes which we used as we lit the four candles on the Sundays of Advent on our Advent wreath.

Love, Joy, Peace and Hope – it’s worth remembering that each of these has an opposite:

·      The opposite of love is hate

·      The opposite of joy is sadness

·      The opposite of peace is war

·      And the opposite of hope is despair

And sadly, we live in a world where all of these opposites are prevalent – a world racked by hate, sadness, war and despair!

So, what has gone wrong with Christmas?

St John’s Gospel, is a Gospel which systematically and thematically reveals Jesus as God’s ultimate Word, coming to a world that was, and still is, so far removed from his plan!

That revelation begins in Chapter 1 with the Word made Flesh of Christmas, and it passes through Jesus’ baptism, his revealing himself in signs and wonders, the ‘I am’ sayings, and eventually reaching a climax in his being lifted up on the cross of the world that he might be raised to new life! 

And the whole purpose of the Gospel is eventually revealed in verses 30 and 31 of the 20^th Chapter, where we hear that, “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book.  But these are written that you may believe^] that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

The whole book is an Epiphany of revelation – a new understanding – a new order in which everything is transformational, and in which only Jesus can give us God’s Life in his name – purpose and transformation!

And right near the beginning, in Chapter 2, as we heard this morning, Jesus turned water into wine – it’s easy to let those words trip off the tongue, but what does it really mean?  He turned water into wine!

In a metaphorical sense, water is represented by the hate, sadness, war and despair, while wine is represented by the Love, Joy, Peace and Hope – and  all of those things are to be found in the story of the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee:

Love – Joy – Peace – Hope!

Just as Jesus turned water into wine, so he demonstrates that God is able to turn hate, sadness, war and despair into Love, Joy, Peace and Hope!

So that brings me back to my question – what went wrong with the Christmas plan?  And the answer sits close to the beginning of this wonderful Gospel, in a short sentence which is part of the Christmas Gospel, where we hear that, “He came to his own people, and his own people knew him not” (in some translations of the Bible that reads as and his own people received him not) – his rejection is the reason why the Christmas plan went wrong!

·      Jesus was rejected by the Jewish people who didn’t recognize him as their Messiah

·      Jesus was rejected by the religious authorities who found him a threat and so they killed him

·      And the real tragedy is that he goes on being rejected, day by day, in a world that has other priorities

That’s what went wrong with the Christmas plan!

But it isn’t all bad news because we do have hope – if God can change one hundred and eighty gallons of water into best quality Chateau Galilee, then he can still transform hate to love, sadness to joy, war to peace, despair to hope, and the Christmas plan can be complete!

The problem is that just as it was us, we silly human beings, who loused up the plan in the first place, it is only we who can put it right, by using every opportunity he gives us to reject the way of the world and promote his way instead, by changing all the water of the world into the new wine of his Kingdom!