Hilton Head Island, SC – December 20, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
John 2:1-11; John 19:23-27
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And Jesus said to her, “O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” – John 2:4 (RSV)
In the Bible, women did not have nearly as prominent a place as men. That is true in both the Old and New Testaments. This is the fourth of a four-part series of sermons about two women in the Bible. The first is Ruth, who has a four-chapter book about her in the Hebrew Bible. She was the great-great grandmother of David, the greatest of the Israelite kings.
The second woman is Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary does not have a book about her in the Greek Bible, the New Testament. In fact, we are told surprisingly little about Mary in any and all of the four Gospels. Mary became the most revered woman in the Bible with the least journalistic copy in her reported story.
Both Mary and her husband Joseph, according to the Gospel of Luke, were descendants of David. Thus they were genetic progenitors of Jesus, who was known as “the son of David.” For some reason, ancestry was more important to everyone in biblical times than it is to most people now. It still is important to some people in America, especially Yankee descendants who claim their forebears came over on the Mayflower and many Southerners who had ancestors in the Confederate Army. Otherwise, most of us really don’t care all that much whether any of our ancestors were either upper crust or horse thieves. Whether it is important to try to elevate your own status in society on the basis of who your ancestors were I will leave up to you.
One of the points behind these four sermons is that both Ruth and Mary were unlikely participants in the overarching grace of God, if only because they were not big shots in themselves. Ruth was the Moabite daughter-in-law of Naomi, the Bethlehem woman who was the great-great-great grandmother of David. Ruth was not an Israelite, which normally would preclude her from even getting into the Bible, let alone having her own book. The book almost certainly was written by someone else, because Ruth likely could not read or write.
As for Mary, she may have had a few drops of royal blood in her veins, but she was anything but royal in her own immediate lineage. She was born in Nazareth, which was a very narrow spot on a very narrow road in the Galilee. Galilee itself was a no-place place in first century Judea. When we first hear about her, Mary was a girl in her mid-teens who was engaged to be married to a carpenter named Joseph. He presumably was fifteen to thirty years older than Mary when they were married.
For very few people does life unfold as an unsullied string of solely happy events. There are bumps in nearly everyone’s road, and both Ruth and Mary had more than their share. Nonetheless, God’s grace is operative in the lives of all of us, because God wants to shed His unmerited love on all of us. One definition of grace is that it is divine love which we don’t especially deserve, but which God offers all of us anyway, even if we refuse it.
In the Gospel of John, the first episode that involves Mary is the wedding at Cana. Cana was a village not far from Nazareth. Cana still exists, although it is still a very small place. On the other hand, over the past century or so Nazareth has become the largest city in the region of the Galilee, likely because it has become a major tourist Mecca for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. In any event, because John tells us nothing about Jesus’ birth, the wedding at Cana is the first time he says anything about Mary. It is also the first thing John tells us about in Jesus’ public ministry, for that matter. Because of Mary, Jesus left the starting blocks of his messianic race sooner than he intended, as we shall now see.
You heard the story in our first Gospel reading this morning. Both Mary and Jesus were invited to this wedding ceremony. Weddings were then all-day affairs. Most weddings then, as now, required prodigious amounts of alcohol to be served and drunk, often, perhaps, too much. And in John, the second chapter, we may deduce that Jesus was conscripted by his mother into producing more wine for the celebration when the hosts ran out of it.
For Mary the shortage of wine was an occasion to show off her son’s miraculous powers to the wedding guests. They had begun to run out of wine while it was still relatively early in the day. I guess this was a huge embarrassment for the families of the bride and groom. So Mary asked Jesus to do something to rectify the situation. At the end of this story, John says, “This, the first of his signs Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him” (John 2:11). The “sign” was a miracle, as far as John and the disciples were concerned. The latter part of that statement is what was always uppermost in the mind of the Gospel writer. John always did his best to try to convince his readers that Jesus was God’s Son and the very incarnation of God on earth by the spectacular things Jesus did. John thought that on the basis of those signs, we should accept Jesus as the human manifestation of God Himself.
The reaction of Jesus to his mother’s request is surprising. Indeed, it even sounds shocking. When Mary asks Jesus miraculously to produce more wine, he says to her, “O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” We might express that this way: “Maahhm, don’t rush me! Let me do my own thing in my own time! You mustn’t push me too soon!” Jesus’ response to his mother’s request seems callous, and almost cruel.
But Mary knows her son, and she knows he will do what she asks, because he is a good boy, although he is no longer a boy. So she says to the servants of the bride’s and/or groom’s parents, “Do whatever he tells you.” And then, perhaps reluctantly, Jesus turns the water into wine. Everybody knows this story, even those who are not card-carrying Christians. Stories about wine, women, and song people remember.
Now I want to call your attention to an episode that is recorded in both Matthew (12:46-50) and Luke (8:19-21). In each case Jesus is speaking to a large crowd, and his disciples tell him that his mother and brothers are at the edge of the crowd, waiting to speak to him. In both instances Jesus says essentially the same thing. Pointing to the crowd, he exclaims, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister, and mother.”
What are we to make of this? Does it imply that Jesus’ actual mother and brothers and sisters had somehow rejected him in the messianic claims about him? It never says that, but does it imply it? And if so, why would any of the Gospels say such a thing? We are left trying to answer that for ourselves, because there is nothing in any Gospel to indicate a rejection of Jesus by any member of his family.
One of the most interesting things about the Gospel of John is that in the only two events in which she appears, John does not give Mary a name. He identifies her only as “the mother of Jesus.” And, as I am pointing out, he does that only twice. The first is inserted at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry in Cana, which Jesus didn’t want to make public that soon.
The other instance takes place in the very last hours of Jesus’ life. He is hanging on his cross. In his agony he looks down and he sees Mary, but the Gospel writer does not identify her as “Mary.” Instead, again she is “his mother.” I have no idea why John didn’t name her, or why he included only two brief but very important episodes about Mary. You would think John surely knew her name, but he does not give her a name. At both Cana and Golgotha, Mary is simply “his mother.”
In the crucifixion scene Jesus does not refer to Mary by calling her “Mother.” Instead, looking at his mother and then at one of his disciples, Jesus says, “Woman, behold your son!” Then, motioning with his head toward his disciple, he says, “Behold your mother!”
Does it sound peculiar to you, as it does to me, that Jesus did not say “Mother” in these two episodes? “Woman” seems almost cold to me. I have read scholars who tried to put a positive spin on that usage, but none of them ever convinced me. I am simply at a loss to say why Jesus might have referred to his mother in that strange way.
Nonetheless, the story of Jesus on the cross is so typically the Jesus I choose to imagine him to be, whether or not it is an acceptable depiction of Mary. Whatever may have been the nature of their relationship, Jesus wanted to make sure his mother would be cared for, so he directed one of his disciples to watch over her.
John didn’t tell us which of the twelve was the one Jesus designated to be with Mary. Tradition says it was the disciple John, the brother of James, and they were among the first four disciples whom Jesus named as his disciples. Tradition also says that it was the disciple John who wrote the Gospel of John, but that is impossible to believe, because the Gospel wasn’t written until roughly the year 100 CE or later. Tradition insists on lots of things about which the Bible is silent. For example, it says that Mary went to live with the disciple John in Antioch, and that she died and is buried there. Tradition also says she lived on by herself in Jerusalem, and that she is buried there. Another tradition says she is buried in Asia Minor, or modern-day Anatolia in Turkey. She cannot ber buried in three places, but that is what tradition declares. Tradition is very powerful, but also, sometimes, somewhat suspect.
Amazingly, none of the Gospels portrays an especially close and loving relationship between Mary and her son. However, the Church has certainly done that, particularly the Roman Catholic Church. And at Christmastime I’m sure most of us choose to think Mary and Jesus had an unusually strong bond. Whether or how that was so we shall never know.
As I said last Sunday, being Jesus’ mother would have been a uniquely difficult assignment. There is that incident described in Luke, referred to last week, where Mary, Joseph and Jesus went with other residents of Nazareth for the Passover feast in Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve years old. Jesus became separated from his parents. After a frantic search, they found him in the temple, debating theology and scripture with the leading biblical scholars and religious authorities. Mary told Jesus, “Son, why have you treated us so? Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” In response, Jesus said, “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” The word “Father” is capitalized, meaning “in God’s house,” the temple.
Luke doesn’t say that Mary and Joseph answered in exasperation, “What are you talking about?”, but he could have. The King James Version makes Jesus’ response to his parents sound even more curt, and possibly even cheeky: “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”
Was it impossible for Mary fully to comprehend the deepest nature of her son? Did they grow apart, not at all because of a lack of love, but because they lived on two vastly distanced spiritual levels? It’s tough enough to try to be a good parent for any child, but who could completely master being the parent of someone like Jesus?
The Gospels leave us with so many questions because of what they do not say about Mary. I feel sorry for her because of the little they do say. There is no explanation for why they make so little of her story.
The season of Advent is the time of year when we prepare once again for the birth of Jesus, the Christ. This year we have focused on two women who played key roles in hat drama. In them and through them we see the grace of God revealed. Their stories are filled with hardships and burdens, but in the end, eternal blessings abound because of them.
The Church raised Mary to new heights long after the Gospels had been written. She did the best she could to be the mother of a brilliant son, but in Jesus’ mind, perhaps her best could never be enough. Nevertheless, the Early Church would not accept such independent musings. In the second and third centuries, Mary came to be described by the Greek term Theotokos, “the Bearer of God.” “Mother of God” is a frequent description of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church. The “Hail Mary” prayer ends with these words: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and in the hour of our death.”
God’s grace can be rejected, but it cannot be avoided. God constantly showers His loving-kindness upon us, and Mary was a vital example of that to Jesus as she is to us. Whatever may have been the actual relationship between Mary and Jesus historically, we know that contemporaneously and eternally, we are the benefactors of that relationship.
Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.