Liturgically, this is a funny kind of day in that we are supposed to be, by dint of all the green decoration in the chapel, in what is called ordinary time. But, according to the readings this is actually the last of the great Christmas celebrations because Christmas, which was basically understood in what we call Epiphany, namely, the manifestation of the divine presence on earth, was expressed by the early Christians in terms of this threefold manifestation or Epiphany: the Magi from the Gospel of Matthew, the baptism of Jesus which occurrs in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke and finally, this third manifestation which is supposed to be the first of Jesus' signs in which he changes water into wine at the wedding in Cana. And those were all seen as part of this same manifestation of the divine, but we need to look at this really closely in order to find out what is being manifested, and more to the point, how it is being manifest.

Well, in a sense, the "what" is the easier answer for us who stand 2,000 years after all of these events. What is being manifested is what we believe to be what God is like here, among us human beings. But then, I think there is a massive gap between this "what" question and the other issue which is, "How is this to be manifest?". It would seem, and I think the popular preachers use this routinely - - "Well, Jesus was running around raising people from the dead, curing lepers, restoring sight to blind people, curing deaf people, getting crippled people up and about and healing haemorrhaging ladies" - - that this is obviously God's doing and, therefore, Jesus is God and this is how it all works. But, I am here to say that this notion is dead- wrong. This is absolutely the opposite manner in which the Scripture, and in this case, these writings are all that we have to rely on, presents these events. Mainly, the miracles were never a means to believe that Jesus was somehow the manifestation of God. Never. Rather, and the Gospel of Mark makes this absolutely clear, the miracles are always a response to peoples' belief that somehow in Jesus God is operating on earth, that Jesus is somehow God's agent here.

Continuing with Jesus' ability to perform miracles, Mark makes this issue very clear when he says point-blank at one place in the Gospel that Jesus "could do no miracles in that place because of their lack of faith". You see, you must insist on this because I really believe that this is the absolute opposite...certainly this is the opposite way in which the nuns taught me. For example, they taught me that "Jesus rose from the dead and did all these remarkable things and, therefore, Jesus had to be God and this is all there is to it" and that, furthermore, "Jesus founded the Church, therefore, what the Church says is what you are supposed to do". Thus, this whole situation plays itself out beautifully and logically - - rubbish! This is not the way it worked and to the extent that we work it this way we distort this whole business terribly. We have done this and continue to distort this whole business.

We can take a cue from the Gospel of John, a very weird document that was almost not added to the biblical canon because it was so odd and so different from the rest of the other Gospels that were put into the canon, and the way this text approaches the miracles. For example, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke speak of the miracles as works of power, or the Greek translation: "aerga dunamu" (did I spell this properly?). In the Gospel of John, John, or Johanna (some people believe that it could have been a woman who finished editing this document in its final form), always talks about the miracles as signs. In other words, the Gospel of John does something entirely different with this business of miracles. In fact, the Jesus in the Gospel of John at one point complains about people who follow him precisely because they had seen a miracle - - mainly, they had been fed in the loaves and fish episode. So, Jesus turns around and says, "Listen, you people have this absolutely dead-wrong if you are after me because you got a free lunch". In other words, he is saying: People, you must look more closely at what is going on here in order to understand.

This first miracle, which in certain ways is the weirdest of the seven, and there are only seven in the fourth Gospel, is fairly subtle by our lights. Let me give you a brief explanation that the scholars come up with as to what the editor or the author was doing here. The Jews always had water jars in front of their homes because nobody wore shoes, they wore sandals, and there were no paved streets so people had dirty feet. Therefore, the first thing they did when somebody came into their home was to wash their feet and this is why they needed all these water jars lying around. This was a Jewish rite of purification and most biblical scholars agree that the significance of this first miracle, which contains the transformation of water into wine, is related to this. They believe that the author is saying, "Here is this early stage of Jewish practice and observance (namely, the foot-washing, which is done with water) and now, through Jesus this practice is drastically enriched, deepened and made more wonderful because this Jewish water under the presence of this Jewish man becomes Jewish wine". In other words, God is acting even more fully at this moment in history than he/she had acted at Sinai, or in calling Abraham or the prophets, or anywhere in history for that matter. Of course, it is still the Jewish operation. It is still this weird Jewish God who is doing all of these things but now he/she is doing these things in this man, Jesus. So, this is the sign. In other words, you have to look closely to understand what is going on here.

All right, now that we know what was being manifested let us get back to that second question: How do we know that God is working in this instance? And I think this is where the big problem lies. The answer to that question is that we know we come to believe that God is working here because we see Jesus, this human being, behaving in this particular way. And the Jews who believed that human beings were made in the image and likeness of God, to go back to Genesis, said, "In this human being and the way this human being operates the image and likeness of God is absolutely transparent and lucid". But notice how this works. They did not say, "Oh, Jesus did all these tricks so there must be something spooky and wonderful about him". No. Jesus simply behaved as a human being in this way. In other words, it is only by examining Jesus the human being that you begin to get some kind of intimation, and this is the way it happened historically - - that you get some kind of intimation that there is more than just a human being here. Anybody who would be that transparent to God must have something more going for himself. But please note that you start from the humanity aspect.

This humanity aspect is enormously important because one of the few things that we know about the historic Jesus is that he ran into problems that were based on his own official Judaism. Jesus was really at odds with a great many bureaucratic religious people of his day. The people who represented this religious bureaucracy were, for example, the Pharisees and the Saducees. And it was precisely his opposition to the laws of purification and the laws of kosher and purity, which stated, for example, that you could not touch menstruating women and lepers or circulate amongst low-life types, that got him into trouble. Why did he act this way? He acted this way because the religion had become bureaucratized, institutionalized if you will. And so you do not look at this man Jesus anymore, you look at, "What is our practice? What do our traditions say? What does the code of canon law say?". And the Roman Church has been around for such a long time that we have had a chance to build this enormous repertoire of things that are supposed to be God-bearing! We have Holy Fathers, Holy Mothers, holy places, holy vestments, holy water and holy candles...we have holy-everything. And under the weight of all of these holy things we frequently lose sight of what it is to be a holy person, which is the only real location of holiness. This is the only way we find out or we come to believe that God is operating in Jesus and this helps us not to look at anything other than the way this human being worked out his own humanity. So again, with regard to the manifestation, what is manifest? And, above all, how is it manifest? To the extent that we ignore this we kind of leap over the humanity of Jesus, which is much more difficult to accept than simply buying into all of the holy things I was talking about a couple of minutes ago. It is much easier to make sure you have holy water, Holy Bibles, Holy Father Pictures and holy this and holy that around. It is much easier to embrace this than to do the kinds of things that Jesus did.

Finally, what is it that Jesus did that seems to have triggered this business? Well, a variety of answers are possible and historically a variety of answers have been given. Let me suggest one which I find the most persuasive of all. I recently was reading my favourite German theologian, John Baptist Madson, and he made a point that I am embarrassed to admit being struck by because I should have known better after all of these years. While talking about Jesus he said, "The thing that was remarkable about Jesus is that he did not go around looking for sin in order to respond to people, he looked at people who were suffering". This is the thing that seemed to trigger Jesus' response to people. And then, all kinds of lights started going on in my head and I thought about my favourite passage in all of the Bible, the judgement scene in the Gospel of Matthew - - "I was naked and you clothed me...I was in jail and you visited me... - - and I thought, "Yes! That is right, that is exactly what is going on in this situation!". According to Matthew, Jesus says, "What is going on here people?" And the people respond and say, "I was in bad shape and you responded to me. I was suffering and you did something for me". This just puts the skids to so much of what I would like to say is my real religiosity: reading the right books, saying the right prayers, wearing the right clothes, knowing the right people and doing the right thing. And here you have this man who said to all of these poor people, just as the God of the Exodus said: "I have seen the oppression of my people and I have come to relieve their suffering". He did not say they were good people or bad people, they were just people who were being oppressed by other people.

So, because there are so many problems and because we human beings constantly want the simple way out we want to be able to measure God and the presence of God so we can say, "This is a holy place, these are holy images and we are going to say holy Mass here and read from the Holy Bible...". It is so much easier to do this than to say, "What was this man really like? What did he do? What made him holy?". And yet, if we do not start from this then all of these other things are just shingling of into space. It might keep us off of the streets but it does not have anything to do with God.

To other sermons

RT 21/12/97

Created: 30 Nov 1996
© Copyright: R. Trojcak, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002
London Ontario Canada
Last Update: September 05, 2005
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