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When the End Is in the Beginning Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 25, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 61:1-7 John 2:1-12
“In my beginning is my end,” writes T.S. Eliot as if he were writing to us of this week of endings and beginnings. “In succession/Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,/Are removed, destroyed, restored.” From a merely human point of view, the beginning we make in a marriage, a job, a community, a friendship, an elected office determines our destination; or as one of the last century’s greatest preachers put it, “The one who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to.” No doubt the actions taken or pledged thus far by President Obama—the intent to close Guantanamo, the order to stop torture, the ban lifted on stem cell research, envoys appointed, a cabinet confirmed, the Freedom of Information Act expanded, an economic stimulus package introduced, aid to agencies involved in abortion counseling, salaries of top government officials frozen—these first acts offer a glimpse in the beginning of the end he has in mind. The end is where we start from, said Eliot. Yet his meaning is double. For lurking in our beginning is our end in the sense of our fall as every previous President can testify…as anyone alive can testify who has ever said “I do” in the face of a future not entirely in human hands. Such was not the case with Jesus, according to the author of John’s gospel. The end in the beginning of our text this morning is of a different order. Moreover John’s beginning is without parallel in the synoptic gospels--in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, where we read that after his temptation in the wilderness by Satan, Jesus begins his public ministry “teaching in synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” John, on the other hand, makes no mention of the temptations or Jesus’ teaching and healing. He begins instead with the story of a wedding at Cana where Jesus performs the first of his signs and reveals his glory. There are a half dozen signs ahead of us in John’s gospel, of which the wedding at Cana is the inaugural. Filling the first eleven chapters, Jesus performs signs in order to give us who have never seen God a glimpse of God in the actions of the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart. He turns water into wine; heals an official’s son; cures the paralytic; feeds five thousand; gives sight to a man who was born blind; raises Lazarus from the dead. These are not wonders done to coerce belief but are more akin to flashes of lightening emanating from the Light of the World; sudden illuminations that let us see our broken and incomplete human existence—thirsty and limping, hungry and blind, helpless and dying---in the light of God’s eternity where the good thing God began will be completed and we will be wholly ourselves. What we glimpse in Jesus’ signs, John says, is God’s glory entering time and space: the same glory that passed by Moses on the mountaintop as he hid in the cleft of the rock; the glory that departed from Israel when the ark of the covenant fell into the hands of the Philistines and returned on a cart pulled by a milch cow; the glory that filled the house of the Lord when Solomon prayed at the dedication the temple; the glory of the Lord foretold by Isaiah when God’s light would shine again on God’s people returned from exile. But from the beginning until Bethlehem, none could look at God’s glory and live. Therefore in the fullness of time God chose to leave the heavenly glory behind in order that we who are hungry and blind, homeless and lost, thirsty and dying may behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and know we are not alone. “[The Son of God] became flesh,” proclaimed an early church father named John Chrysostom who stretches our 21st century credulity to the limit. “He did not become God. He was God. Wherefore he became flesh, so that he whom heaven could not contain…may more easily [be] seen” by the likes of us. This is the glory John tells us we will see, glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. The glory revealed in him through these signs, says John, lets us see for one brief shining moment our final destination: an eternity where God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither will there be any more pain. For now, see God’s glory, says the evangelist, in the first of Jesus’ signs in Cana of Galilee: see in the setting of a wedding the Bridegroom of whom Isaiah speaks; see in the replacement of the waters of purification by the choicest of wines, see the replacement of religion (our seeking God) by revelation (God seeking us); see in the amazement of the steward the mystery no human investigation can dispel; see in every present delight the joy that awaits us all when we shall sit at table together in the Kingdom; see in the action of him who “fills up what is lacking at a human festival of marriage” the One in whose love our feeble attempts at love are forgiven and given a new day. See, says John, the glory of God, glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. Yet even as we strain to see all of this (with a little help from the exegetes) in the first of Jesus’ signs, we are as likely as the wedding guests to miss the end that is in the beginning of John’s gospel and Jesus’ life. “My hour has not yet come,” says Jesus to his mother who appears nowhere else but in the beginning of John’s gospel at the wedding in Cana and in the end at the foot of his cross. By “hour” Jesus means the hour of his passion, death and resurrection; the hour when mere signs will cease as he enters Jerusalem; the hour when what was glimpsed of God’s glory in his life will, in his death, reveal the height and depth and length and breadth of God’s love. That was the end, wrote John, in the beginning when the Word was and was with God and was God. No human plotting, no turn in the road, no unforeseen circumstance could thwart end that was in the beginning with God. Writing in the light of the hour of Jesus’ death and resurrection, John writes God’s ending into Jesus’ beginning. God’s ending, in a word, is love. “‘Love’ is not so much the name of a personality trait as shorthand for a narrative: death and resurrection…because, seen from faith’s viewpoint, death and resurrection is what love concretely means…,” writes theologian Robert Jenson. “The usual promises we make stop short because we except the condition of death, because we reserve self-preservation; but to promise myself is to try to give up this reservation. Therefore to love is to accept death….All love says: ‘Till death do us part.’…To say that Jesus…died and rose again is to say that there now exists one successful lover.” It is to say that the true Bridegroom on the third day at the wedding in Cana of Galilee is Jesus: the Bridegroom whose giving of himself completely would only be revealed fully in his death. But here at the beginning he takes us, as we who say “I do” mean to take each other: “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death do us part.” He takes us as his own knowing full well we will take him and bind him, will mock him and nail him to a cross that we might in death be done with him. Nevertheless, from this day forward he takes us as his own and gives himself, hands himself over, with nothing left out, so that in him we might behold the love that does not end with death. See in the water turned to fine wine his blood, his life, his love poured out in never ending abundance for us. Some of you more than others of us here this morning, having beheld in him the love that never quits, have glimpsed his love…have traced his love back and back and back until the day when before friends and family you promised your future to a beloved. Likely the days and months and years after that day found you loving in fits and starts. Doors still slammed; tears flowed; silence gave way to hard conversations. Yet because in him you glimpsed the God who entered time and space…because in him God’s light shined in the dark corners of lives lived together such that there was light enough for the next step… because in him the love that is shorthand for death and resurrection held an always fragile human love together, even and especially when the days of earthly love draw to a close, you may live in a great trust that death will not be the end of the affair. “At every wedding,” writes theologian Frederick Niedner and I would add at every celebration of the union of two human beings who pledge themselves to one another, “we wait for the moment when we witness [the couple] vow…‘til death us do part.’ We think when we hear those words, or even more when we speak them ourselves, that death will come to visit much later, at some far distant boundary of a…union begun today with such promise. But,” he continues “death is already there. It comes to sit with us at the beginning else there is no glory, no gravity to the marriages we make by giving ourselves to each other. We do a weighty thing when we commit to sharing most intimately with one partner the brief and precious life each of us gets on this earth. Few of us see the full truth of this, however, until we reach that inevitable moment we named in our vows.” Then Nieder goes on to speak of that moment in the marriage of his parents. “It appeared during the dark night in a dining room converted temporarily into a hospice center. My father lay in a bed there, dying, while I spent nights on a couch nearby and kept watch. Several times in that week I awakened to see my mother standing over Dad in the dim light. She hadn’t risen from sleep to perform some ministration. She simply stood for long minutes looking tenderly down at this sleeping man with whom she had shared more than half a century. I closed my eyes and kept still. Children aren’t supposed to watch their parents’ most intimate moments. But I wondered. “What filled Mom’s mind and heart as she pondered the face, the body, the person with whom she had spent her life? The whole of their life together, I think. The full weight and glory of their marriage now become dear….All that remained was to let it rest in God’s hand.” Because we have seen God’s hand in the hand that healed the official’s son, that cured the paralytic, that fed the five thousand, gave sight to the blind, raised Lazarus from the dead and turned water into wine, because we have seen God’s hand in him who was handed over to death for us, we may live in a great trust that the end in our every beginning will not finally be death but the love that was from the beginning whose glory we have beheld in the face of Jesus Christ. Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. |