When I get home this evening I shall be stripping the Christmas tree and taking down the decorations, as perhaps you will be too, but our readings remind us that to-day is not so much the tail end of Christmas as the beginning of Epiphany, the season in which we celebrate the progressive revelation of the truth about Jesus. Wise men from the East may have seen his star and come to worship him in Bethlehem, but that was a distant memory, even for Mary, and as the wedding party got under way, she was the only guest who could have known just how special Jesus was. Some of the others probably knew that he had been down to the Jordan where John had been preaching and baptising, and that John’s mission had made quite an impression on him and the group of friends with whom he had returned, but as he sat there enjoying the party with his friends and neighbours, few if indeed any would have seen in him anything more than the nice young carpenter from Nazareth.
You know the story so I don’t need to remind you how his mother urged him to do something to save the hosts from acute embarrassment when the wine showed signs of running out. It wasn’t his problem. He wasn’t ready. Perhaps within himself he had yet to come to terms with what his mother had told him about the circumstances surrounding his birth, now reinforced by what had happened at his baptism. He needed more time before he started doing things that would inevitably attract attention and thrust him into the spotlight. But the need was urgent, and his mother was relying on him. So he acted, quietly it’s true, but recognising that news, or at the very least rumours about his miraculous power were bound to spread as soon as the servants told their friends. As he acted to resolve, discreetly, this little domestic crisis, he took the first step along the road of his public ministry of healing and teaching, a course of ever more dramatic revelation that would soon bring him into conflict with the religious authorities, and within three short years, to the crisis which resulted in his cruel, early death. As he changed the water into wine, he may not have known precisely what the future held for him, but he does seem to have sensed that he was embarking on a new and more public phase in his life, from which there would be no turning back. The years of relatively comfortable obscurity were drawing to a close. Reluctant as he might be, the process of revelation had begun, and the world was set to experience the most profound re-shaping of its fundamental understanding of what God is like, and how we should relate to him.
The process of revelation is as remarkable and its impact is powerful. We know something about how it works from our own little epiphanies. We wrestle with a great host of seemingly random facts and figures, personalities, events, partial explanations, until a thesis emerges which enables us, at first tentatively, then with growing confidence, to make coherent sense of it all. We do something rather similar as we find pattern and purpose in our own personal narratives, or on a grander scale as we shape and reshape our national history and identity. As the revelation unfolds we may think, at least to start with, that we are simply discovering something interesting about a particular person, or a chain of events, but the hallmark of a truly significant revelation is the way in which it not only makes sense of the immediate focus of inquiry, but in doing so throws fresh light on the past and helps us to see more clearly the way ahead.
In John’s gospel we follow just such a process of revelation, as each successive sign, beginning with the changing of water into wine at Cana and climaxing in the crucifixion and resurrection, gradually reveals to Jesus’ companions more and more of the truth about him. But of course it won’t have been anything like so apparent at the time, as we know very well from the doubts and questions which continually assailed even those who were closest to him. It is as he looks back on those three precious years in Jesus’ company that John sees ever more clearly the truth about Jesus, and is able to chart the course of how he and the other disciples came to believe, at first tentatively but at last with full confidence, that Jesus was and is the promised Messiah, the Son of God. This process of revelation has shaped his understanding of the words and deeds of Jesus, which he now relates in a fashion calculated to open that same revelation to us. He concludes his account of this first sign with the statement that his disciples believed in him. When he comes to the end of his story he challenges us all to see the successive signs of his glory, in seeing them to believe that Jesus is indeed the Son of God, and in believing to have life in his name.
Our own little epiphanies – our little shafts of revelation – can be quite exciting, even if they are not in the same league, but they can never be more than partial and provisional. They are almost invariably open to challenge from someone with a different perspective, or even subject to revision in the light of our own growing knowledge and changing insights. The Bible itself bears witness to a similar process of progressive revelation, as the insights of the prophets into what God is doing in their own time shape a changing perception of past history and future destiny. What makes the Feast of the Epiphany so special is the fact that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is the one and only definitive expression of the truth about God. We may still have a long way to go in discovering its full meaning for ourselves and for our world, but there is nothing to add to it – indeed some theologians have argued that there was never anything intrinsically new about it, since the truth about God was manifest in his creation from the beginning.
That may be so, but what is new about the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is the demonstration that God could be utterly God within the limitations of the human form. Sure, he had access to miraculous powers which you and I don’t possess – at least not in such direct form. We cannot normally turn water into wine, but the exercise of such powers was never the essence of his divine power, and arguably we are no less able by God’s grace to make joyful, abundant provision for people’s needs if we commit ourselves to doing so for his sake. What Jesus revealed to us by his life and death was the startling truth that he would rather die at the hands of his enemies than force their submission and allegiance by some act of overwhelming power. And he had the confidence to do that because he knew that the love by which he was bound to his Father and his Father to him was stronger that all the weapons of his enemies, stronger than death itself.
And that is the revelation which changes everything for us all. Not only does it change for believers our understanding of past history, so that the Christian church can regard itself as the inheritor of the promises made by God to the people of Israel. It also changes our understanding of the present, since it assures us that if we put our trust in God our Father, as he did, then we too can do what love demands of us, for his sake, without fear of the consequences. For a current example of what this might mean, we need look no further than Archbishop Desmond Tutu. There are plenty of people who have been too polite to say so, but who think he can only fail and damage his reputation by getting involved in Kenya. As a political realist his own judgment might be no different, but he is ready to take such risks if that is what he thinks he is being called to do in the name of Jesus who took even greater risks and paid the highest price for our peace and reconciliation. Finally God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ modifies our view of the future, since it assures us that his love is stronger than either the belligerence of nations or the greed of mankind, or any other evil which might threaten life on earth.
To many of our contemporaries all that would sound like a load of pious nonsense. They may have filled our galleries and followed with us the narrative of the loving purposes of God, which we proclaim every year at Christmas time, but when we take down the Christmas decorations, putting them back into the cupboard for another year, it is easy to slip back into working off the old agenda which relies on wealth and power and influence. The message of Epiphany, which we read back into the paradoxical power and helplessness of the babe in the manger, and forward into the conduct of our lives today, is that there is another way, rooted in the very nature of the God who was content to strip himself of all power, and live a life of service and ultimately sacrifice, relying on the love of his Father in Heaven. It doesn’t appear to make sense, and we cannot force ourselves to believe it, but if we come to him saying Lord I believe; help Thou mine unbelief; help me where faith falls short, he will surely grant us such faith as we need, at least for the next step. Then, as we discover step by step what it means to live by faith, we shall learn to trust his love more and more, to see as John saw, and to believe as John believed.
Jesus had waited some thirty years before beginning to reveal his glory, but now the time had come. To-day he waits patiently to reveal his glory to us as we put our trust in him. If that is our prayer this Epiphany-tide, we shall be embarking on a voyage of discovery that we shall never forget, a voyage that will make sense of our lives – past, present and future.