A SYMPOSIUM: a sermon praught in St Mary with All Souls, Kilburn, on Epiphany II, 17 th January 2010, by the Rev’d Dr Richard Major

The Holy Gospel John ii On the third day there was a wedding in of Galilee, and the mother of was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 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. Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, Fill the jars with water. And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward. So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now. Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

In St Mary’s, Kilburn, they use a big PowerPoint screen for sermons; if you click on the links you get more-or-less the same effect.

E’VE JUST HEARD an extraordinary story about a fairly ordinary wedding. What are we to make of it? http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/1.jpg This story comes from the fourth Gospel, the strangest of the four Gospels, the Gospel written by John. It comes at the beginning of the . In other words, it comes before Jesus has done anything, before He is anyone. No one but His mother and a few of His friends guess that there is anything special about Him. He is just one more intense young man, up in the district called Galilee. So when there is a wedding in a Galilean village called Cana, Jesus attends as just one of the guests, along with His mother, and His friends. Everything’s normal and ordinary. Indeed, as wedding banquets go, we might think it rather below the normal standard. For somebody has badly miscalculated. There’s not nearly enough drink. The party is in full flow, and the rumour goes about the tables that they’re about to run out of wine. There is consternation. The rumour reaches Mary, who is concerned enough to go tell her Son. She understands Who He is; and He understands perfectly well what she is hinting at. Very gently He smiles, and shakes His head. Lady, He murmurs, what is that to you and to Me? It’s not yet my time. The moment for Jesus’ work is not yet; is He to begin His redemption of the world with a kitchen miracle, just to save some family friends from social awkwardness? Well, yes, He is! Our Lady understands her Son; and her Son understands the ocean of compassion that exists within Mary. She is full of grace. No one can resist her, not even God. Without saying a word Christ wryly grants what she asks; indeed, He grants very much more; for the water turns not just into wine, but into the best possible wine, which I suppose means a 1945 Pomerol. The chap who’s in charge of the feast expressed amazement that the groom has kept this amazing stuff until late in the day, when everyone’s a bit squiffy. And that’s how the story ends, a sort of boozy joke. That’s the tale of the Cana wedding. What are we to make of it? Well, even at the surface level, it’s humanly moving. Christ craves our happiness. His mother longs to care for us. Their affection for other people is so tender they will do anything at all, even things that might seem slightly ridiculous. They overflow with love. We are drenched in it.

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But the story doesn’t leave us at that surface level. It draws us in. It demands that we meditate and understands. We look at it again, and rub our eyes, and are astonished. For it is peppered with clues. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/2.jpg The wedding at Cana occurs on the third day. On the third day after what? After nothing; it is just the third day – the day of Christ’s resurrection. This wedding is somehow to be understood as an picture of what resurrection will be like – for us. This is a picture of our eternal life. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/3.jpg Do whatever He tells you, says Our Lady, and you will know plenty. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/4.jpg We are inclined to grasp at our pleasures, to guzzle what joy we can while the going’s good; http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/5.jpg but Christ is not like that. With Him we go deeper and deeper into delight; the great joys are always followed by even greater joys, on and on into infinity. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/6.jpg If we understand what happened at Cana, therefore, we will understand Christ. We will believe in Him, as His friends believed, for the first time, at Cana. And we be able to glimpse what belief in Him gives us. Cana is the final word: in this story we are being initiated into the heart of the matter. We are being shown, as much we can see in this life, what eternity will be like. What is it like, eternity? Beyond our imagings, yes, as life beyond the womb is unimaginable to an unborn child. But we know a few things about it. We know that our love of God will be satisfied; and we know that His love for us will flow over us forever and ever; and we know that all of us will be with Him in perfect unity. Unity, friendship, endless rejoicing: they suggest to us the glorious merriment of a party; particularly, perhaps, the solemn merriment of a wedding part. The best image we can think of for our eternal life is a wedding feast. That certainly it’s an image Bible uses again and again. God and mankind will sit down together for ever, to drink, and laugh, and tell stories; and we will never be sated; and our joy will never cease to increase. Eternity will be a wedding party, where Christ is the groom, and all humanity is the bride, being bound to Christ, more and more, without cease.

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HAT ’S THE POINT of the wedding of Cana. And therefore there is nothing worth doing more than meditating on it. Christians have always loved to picture it. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/7.jpg Here, for instance, is an engraving by a Frenchman named Doré. It’s very Eastern and exotic: a couryard in a kasbah , with the servants in turbans and the guests under a linen awning. I suppose that’s accurate – I mean, this is what we would literally see if we were beamed back in time to Cana. But the Gospel events are never really exotic for us. Christ is never remote. And Christians have always had the healthy impulse to re-imagine His doings in their own terms. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/8.jpg Here’s the wedding at Cana in an illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages, re- imagining the occasion as a courtly banquet, with fiddlers and troubadours. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/9.jpg And here’s a modern painting of the wedding at Cana, re-imagined as a convivial evening dinner, with the men in black tie and the women in gowns. However, the painting I want us ponder for a few minutes is goes back a few centuries. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/10.jpg It’s by a great painter who named , Paul of Verona. Long ago the French stole it from Italy, and now it hangs in Paris. This is a very . We can feel the hard mobile light of the lagoon moving against those massive columns. It was commissioned from Veronese by the good Benedictine fathers of , the island monastery across the Basin of St Mark’s. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/10a.jpg They hung it in their rectory, and for centuries the monastic community must have felt that every evening they dined with Christ, and all the other-life-sized figures. Then in 1797 that bandit Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the Republic of Venice and looted its churches. He stole this lovely thing, cut in it half, and shipped it off to Paris, where the brutes sewed it back together again. The brutes managed to hang on to it even after the bandit was locked away, and the peace treaties required the return of his plunder. The Wedding at Cana is still hanging in the , much battered: a few years ago the Louvre restored it savgely, then doused it from a leaky vent, then dropped it onto some scaffolding, enlivening the surface with five great gashes. A computerised facsimile, made of sixteen hundred graphic files, hangs in the refectory of San Giorgio, but there is no earthly reason why the original should not be returned to its proper owners. Meanwhile, down with France! http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/11.jpg It’s an absolutely massive painting: 22 feet high, 32 feet wide, weighing one and half tons. The figures in are life size. When you stand in front of it it’s less like looking at a painting than going to a blockbuster movie. Veronese’s Wedding at Cana swallows you up. It fills your imagination; it seems to you as if you were standing there. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/12.jpg At the centre is Christ, lost in the crowd and yet the focal point, your eye. And directly before Him, at the dead front-centre of the painting, mediating between the world within the canvas and the world of the viewer, we find a group of musicians. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/13.jpg Except that Veronese’s contemporaries would have realised that this is a joke. They are artists, but not artists of music. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/14.jpg They are in fact Veronese himself and his fellow painters. Here is the painting industry of Venice. The fellow in red is his Veronese’s friend and rival ; http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/15.jpg his colleagues are posed around a table; and the man with the long dark thoughtful humourous is Veronese himself, plying his instrument, pulling us in to Cana and the company of Jesus. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/16.jpg But Cana is not just inhabited by artists. There are young larrikins, http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/17.jpg who have got bored with conversation and want to climb the pillars instead: there are talkative oldsters http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/18.jpg who have floated off to a terrace to converse about wheat prices. There are the influential fellows, http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/19.jpg whose pleasure is to sit about observing things. There’s the grand young lady, http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/20.jpg rather a celebrity I suspect, with a mischievous face, quietly picking her teeth. And there’s the fashionable set, http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/21.jpg amazingly dressed, more concerned to be seen than to see. Amongst the fashionables is the steward, http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/22.jpg being presented with the miraculous new wine. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/23.jpg People are beginning to notice the miracle: there’s that rather boring figure, the inevitable wine connoisseur , exclaiming over the stuff – as well he may, since its terroir is eternity, http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/24.jpg and its colour is perfect blood. Those big stone jars, thirty gallons strong, http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/25.jpg contain a hint of what is greater than all the world; and the wine, when it is poured, http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/26.jpg drives the whole universe mad with joy. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/27.jpg The servants bring it, the source of it sits unnoticed: http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/28.jpg His elbow has been joggled by His Mother, the remaking of the cosmos has begun. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/29.jpg And you see what Veronese’s done? He has dared to bundle up everyone into that turning point in time, the Cana feast: all his friends, all his colleagues, all the people he knew, and even his whole society. He includes the lots – pushes the whole world into Christ’s dinner party and leaves them there forever. That’s Veronese’s amazing gesture of high spirits and confidence. He was a high-spirited fellow, and sometimes got into trouble with the more strait-laced sort of cleric. But he knew what he was doing, as a Christian as well as a painter. And what Veronese dared do, we dare do. We dare picture ourselves, and our friends and family and neighbours and colleagues, crowded round a table drinking wine forever, with Jesus at the centre of the festivity: for that is the final truth, and the deepest thing Christianity has to tell us.

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E SPEND A LOT OF TIME struggling – with doubt, with evil in ourselves and in the world, with bewilderment. And that’s as it should be. This life is our pilgrimage. It is a battle. Yet we mustn’t forget the goal. We mustn't let ourselves get coarsened by the stuggle. Or bored. Or jaded. Or subdued. We must sustain, as far as we can, the wild and constant joy proper for Christians. For the fundamental fact of our faith is that God loves us – and I don’t mean love in some cold, abstract sense. He desires you in particular; He is entranced by you; He wants your company. He wants to talk to you forever. He became a Man because He could not bear that you should be lost to Him; His aim is to win you back to Himself, so that He can be with you forever – just as at Cana. Christ began salvation as He meant to go on. It was an unscheduled start, but still typical. He began to re-create the world with an almost dizzy act of generosity and affection. Nothing has changed. He still wants to give you everything; and now, in a few minutes, He will. Christ’s wedding feast is not a distant hope for us, something to sigh for in a great painting. It is happening now, now, already. A few minutes, and He will be with us. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/30.jpg When we are at Mass we are already in the presence of Jesus. We are His wedding guests at His feast, just as much as those happy folk at Cana. And if we are already feasting with Jesus, then we are in a sense already in Paradise. http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/31.jpg I know it does not feel entirely like paradise just now. Mingled with our usual joy at the Eucharist are all the usual sad things we bring to church with us. We are bored, restless, bewildered, weary, troubled. But from the perspective of eternity, which is the perspective that matters, these things are almost nothing. They will burn away in the face of joy, which swells and swells and swallows up all other experience. When we are finally ourselves, fully ourselves, when time is over and we sit forever in the presence of the Bridegroom, http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/32.jpg our delight will stretch backward into time. We will recognise ourselves, here this morning in Kilburn, and be enraptured again to remember that the Cana wedding banquet had already begun for us today. The feast of feasts has started and cannot stop. The wine of joy cannot be exhausted now. The gates of paradise swing open: we can smell the bouquet of it, we step forward, the servants bring the goblets .... http://www.richardmajor.com/sermons/Kilburn/33.jpg

To Christ Our Lord, therefore, be everlasting glory, honour and praise here and in the height of heaven where He reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever One God, world without end: Amen!

The Rev’d Dr Richard Major [email protected] Nansough Manor, near Ladock, Cornwall TR2 4PB 2601 Quantico Street, Arlington, Virginia 22207 , U.S.A. tel. 00 1 703 534 2906

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND THE WEDDING AT CANA

Franklin is often creditted (especially on bumper-stickers) with the flippancy that Beer is proof God loves us and wants is to be happy . Of course he did not say that; beer is not so serious a drink as that; being civilised, Franklin knew what it is that proves God loves us, and in a charming letter explains so: Preuve constante que Dieu nous aime, et qu’il aime à nous voir heureux. I’m attaching the whole letter (in translation, with sketch by his young grandson, Temple) because it’s nice to see that he makes this point in the context of Cana. We are not naïve about what Franklin meant. He was no Christian, but a lapsed Quaker who thought the Faith utterly exploded. He was writing (while ambassador to France for the rebellious American colonies) to the economist André Morellet, who was a stereotype of the sort of worldly, unbelieving Paris abbé . Franklin’s whole letter quivers with the smug, over-polished wit of the Enlightenment. Yet infidels sometimes speak truth when they joke. A certain joy runs beneath Franklin’s smooth cool shallow sneering Deism, and threatens to break forth, as wine broke out of the cold water-pots at Cana itself.

You have often enlivened me, my dear friend, by your excellent drinking-songs; in return, I beg to edify you by some Christian, moral, and philosophical reflections upon the same subject. In vino veritas , says the wise man, -- Truth is in wine. Before the days of Noah, then, men, having nothing but water to drink, could not discover the truth. Thus they went astray, became abominably wicked, and were justly exterminated by water , which they loved to drink. The good man Noah, seeing that through this pernicious beverage all his contemporaries had perished, took it in aversion; and to quench his thirst God created the vine, and revealed to him the means of converting its fruit into wine. By means of this liquor he discovered numberless important truths; so that ever since his time the word to divine has been in common use, signifying originally, to discover by means of WINE ( VIN ). Thus the patriarch Joseph took upon himself to divine by means of a cup or glass of wine, a liquor which obtained this name to show that it was not of human but divine invention (another proof of the antiquity of the French language, in opposition to M. Geebelin); nay, since that time, all things of peculiar excellence, even the Deities themselves, have been called Divine or Di vin ities. We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy. The miracle in question was only performed to hasten the operation, under circumstances of present necessity, which required it. It is true that God has also instructed man to reduce wine into water. But into what sort of water? -- Water of Life . ( Eau de Vie. ) And this, that man may be able upon occasion to perform the miracle of Cana, and convert common water into that excellent species of wine which we call punch . My Christian brother, be kind and benevolent like God, and do not spoil his good drink. He made wine to gladden the heart of man; do not, therefore when at table you see your neighbor pour wine into his glass, be eager to mingle water with it. Why would you drown truth ? It is probable that your neighbor knows better than you what suits him. Perhaps he does not like water; perhaps he would only put in a few drops for fashion's sake; perhaps he does not wish any one to observe how little he puts in his glass. Do not, then, offer water, except to children; 't is a mistaken piece of politeness, and often very inconvenient. I give you this hint as a man of the world; and I will finish as I began, like a good Christian, in making a religious observation of high importance, taken from the Holy Scriptures. I mean that the apostle Paul counselled Timothy very seriously to put wine into his water for the sake of his health; but that not one of the apostles or holy fathers ever recommended putting water to wine.

P.S. To confirm still more your piety and gratitude to Divine Providence, reflect upon the situation which it has given to the elbow. You see (Figures 1 and 2) in animals, who are intended to drink the waters that flow upon the earth, that if they have long legs, they have also a long neck, so that they can get at their drink without kneeling down. But man, who was destined to drink wine, must be able to raise the glass to his mouth. If the elbow had been placed nearer the hand (as in Figure 3), the part in advance would have been too short to bring the glass up to the mouth; and if it had been placed nearer the shoulder, (as in Figure 4) that part would have been so long that it would have carried the wine far beyond the mouth. But by the actual situation, (represented in Figure 5), we are enabled to drink at our ease, the glass going exactly to the mouth. Let us, then, with glass in hand, adore this benevolent wisdom; -- let us adore and drink!

http://books.google.com/books?id=YCdCAAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA291&ots=GGKNaVoWaG&dq=%22But%20man%2C%20who%20was%20 destined%20to%20drink%20wine%2C%22&pg=PA290#v=onepage&q=%22But%20man,%20who%20was%20destined%20to%20drink%2 0wine,%22&f=false