For Sunday
Epiphany 2C
Collect
Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ is the light of the world: Grant that your people, illumined by your Word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshipped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
For the second Sunday after the Epiphany, we read about the famous wedding at Cana, where Jesus performs his first miracle. This, however, isn’t the first thing Jesus does in the gospel, nor is it the first thing he does after his baptism. What he does then is recruit disciples.
This moment is some time later, after Jesus has recruited Andrew and Simon Peter, James, John, Philip, and Nathanael. It is these six, and perhaps more that attend the wedding with Jesus and his mother — a suggestion I can’t fully comprehend in our invited +1 world. The host is paying per plate for dinner, after all. It would be rude, even for a rabbi to bring his disciples with him. Rude in the post-Emily Post world. Probably not so rude then.
But then again, they do run out of wine, don’t they? That seems like a vote for keeping the guest list tight. Notice how this line of thinking puts us in sympathy with the host primarily? How his status and resources are our concern? The gospel is not concerned with his resources in that way. It doesn’t make the host out to be the victim at all. In fact, he is treated like a cheapskate, trying to short the people on wine. He is neither prepared to properly serve his guests nor inclined to spend on them.
The miracle Jesus invokes is fascinating, then. Because he helps the host save face with his affluent guests while exposing his cheapness to the servants and the disciples. There is a clear class distinction offered by the text here, for the purpose of revealing Jesus’s mission to the people who are most helped by it.
In our witnessing of the miracle, we see this distinction and perhaps a different way of hosting others. That the purpose of hosting is to be generous — always — and to treat each person as worthy of the best stuff we can find.