Hilton Head Island, SC – November 26, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 12:46-50; John 2:1-11
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)
Introductory Note:
There are two words in New Testament Greek for what in English is called “preaching.” The first is kerygma, which means the proclamation of the Gospel. The best-known biblical verse for that concept is John 3:16: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” The second is the word didache, which means teaching. Today’s sermon, and the next four after it during Advent are didache. An example of that is the best-known verse from the Letter of James: “Faith without works is dead.” Incidentally, my didache regarding John 3:16 is this: I believe the word “him” in John 3:16 should refer to God, not Jesus, even though John definitely meant it to refer to Jesus. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him (God, not Jesus) should not perish, but have eternal life.” The focus on these five teaching sermons will attempt to illustrate what God was doing on behalf of God via the life, death, and resurrection of the man Jesus of Nazareth, even though they will mainly be devoted to traditional understandings of who Jesus was and is.
* * * * *
There are two narratives about Jesus’ birth, one in Matthew and one in Luke. Matthew focuses on King Herod and the Wise Men, and Luke’s portrait features the shepherds. In neither Gospel does it say much about the baby himself, because on his birthday, Jesus was like any other baby in behavior and looks.
I was in the Emergency/Surgical Theater/ Obstetrical Delivery Room when our daughter was born in the Washburn, Wisconsin Hospital on Feb. 20, 1965, with its sixteen-beds-all-in-private-rooms for $16-per-room-per-day. Dr. John Telford, our obstetrician/pediatrician/family doctor/ family friend told us that Amy looked just like Winston Churchill. But then, as we all know, every newborn, even the scrawniest ones, look like Winston Churchill. Baby Jesus looked just like that too, except that it would take eighteen centuries before one of the two greatest politicians of the twentieth century was even born.
The first and only Gospel episode about Jesus as a boy is found in the second chapter of Luke. It tells us that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus went to Jerusalem for Passover with a large contingent of other people from Nazareth. When the feast was concluded, everyone headed back north. Jesus was not with Mary and Joseph, so they assumed he was somewhere on the road with the rest of the pilgrims. Three days later, when Joseph and Mary discovered that Jesus was not among the group, they hurried back to Jerusalem, and there they found him in the temple, talking to the teachers and elders.
Mary said to Jesus, “Son, why have you treated us so? Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously” (Luke 2:48). We may infer two things from that. Like any mother in a similar situation, Mary was frantic. Furthermore, despite what Matthew and Luke say about a virgin birth, we learn from her statement that in her mind, Mary considered Joseph to be the father of Jesus (“Your father and I have been looking…”), and Joseph presumably also thought of himself as Jesus’ father. However, even at the age of twelve, at least according to Luke, Jesus did not see things in that light. He responded to Joseph and Mary, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
In the biblical story, the word “Father” is capitalized, suggesting that God was Jesus’ Father. Until the mid-1950s, Bible readings in church were always from the King James Version, but then they were read from the Revised Standard Version. In the KJV, Jesus replies, “How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” For some reason, as a child that verse (Luke 2:49) has always stuck with me. “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”
What a precocious child! What an astonishing response to a mother’s anxious inquiry! On the other hand (and this occurred to me much later in life), what a cheeky response! “You didn’t need to worry, Mom. Didn’t you realize I must be in the temple, doing my heavenly Father’s business?”) Joseph and Mary must have been both thunderstruck at Jesus’ response to them, and possibly also hurt by it. It must have felt like a bolt from the blue, both literally and figuratively.
How do you think it would make you feel, were you the earthly mother or father of the Messiah? Have you ever thought about that? It couldn’t have been easy. It had to be the biggest challenge those two ordinary Galilean peasants ever faced. Maybe it was so complicated for Joseph that he succumbed to the strain, and died sometime between the time Jesus was twelve and when Jesus began his public ministry at age thirty. We never hear anything else about Joseph after the incident of the boy Jesus in the temple at Passover.
In the Fourth Gospel, John says that the first appearance of Jesus in public was when he and his mother went to a wedding in the village of Cana, which is only a few miles from Nazareth. Centuries ago a church was built there where Palestinian Christians believed the house stood where the wedding was held. Two thousand years ago, Jewish weddings were all-day affairs. Everyone came early and stayed late. As you know, if you prepare for a big party, you must be sure to have enough food and drink for all the guests. Back then, because most other beverages would spoil without refrigeration, wine was the only adult beverage anyone ever drank, and at this wedding reception, all the wine was consumed. What a social faux pas!
Apparently, according to John, by that stage in the life of both Mary and Jesus, Mary realized that Jesus had miraculous powers. That notion is portrayed in John’s Gospel more than in any of the other three. So Mary quietly whispered to Jesus, “They have no wine.” In other words, “This is a very awkward moment, son. Do something to ease the embarrassment of the blushing parents of this blushing bride.”
What Jesus said in response is almost shocking, or at least it sounds that way to me as John describes the scene. “O woman,” Jesus answered his mother, “what have you to do with me? My time has not come.” To express it differently, “I am not ready to perform miracles, Mother. There has to be a proper sequence of events to how I make myself known, and it shouldn’t begin with me turning water into wine.” Seemingly ignoring Jesus (after all, Mary is a Jewish mother), Mary says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” And they do, and a couple of the large jugs of water for children were instantly transformed into the best wine anybody ever tasted.
I do not refer to this story to raise the issue of whether this actually happened, although I strongly doubt that it did. I raise it to suggest that the “O woman, what have you to do with me? My time has not come” comment seems like a hurtful and even dismissive put-down of a very concerned human mother by a very human son. Mary is the Co-Redemtrix of humanity for Catholics along with Jesus as the Redeemer, but this episode is off-putting about Jesus if you really stop to think about it.
Or there is a very short story told only in the Gospel of Matthew (10:34-39). It begins by Jesus saying, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have come not to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother.” There is no indication that Mary was there to hear Jesus say that, but if she were, those words might cut into her like a scalpel. Furthermore, on the surface, these words do not make Jesus sound very much like a committed family man.
Yet again, there is the story in Matthew 12 (vs. 46-50) which was our first reading this morning. Jesus had just finished telling a group of listeners the parable of the farmer and the seeds, found in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. It says that while Jesus was still speaking, Mary came with Jesus’ brothers (which intimates that Mary was not a virgin for her entire life, as has been taught in the primary branch of the Christian Church for perhaps sixteen or seventeen centuries. There is an explanation for why that is believed, but I won’t take time to explain it.) After Jesus was finished with the parable, the narrative says that a man told Jesus that his mother and brothers wanted to speak with him. Jesus said, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Then it says, “And stretching out his hand, (Jesus) said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister, and mother.’”
Listen carefully, Christian followers of Jesus Christ, and this is didache; it is not kerygma. You are not required to affirm this, but I want you to know that I don’t think that the two stories of the virgin birth or the one story of Jesus in the temple as boy of twelve or the story of the wedding at Cana or Matthew’s account of what happened when Jesus was telling the parable of the farmer and the seeds are historical; they didn’t happen. They may be theologically true, or more precisely, Christologically true, but they didn’t happen. Instead, these stories were written by Gospel writers who wrote their Gospels from forty to seventy years after Jesus died. By then they knew that the early Christians were starting to be shunned and persecuted by most of the larger society around them. They wanted those early disciples to realize that there was a risk in becoming a Christian, that they were a tiny minority in a huge majority of pagans, and that if they didn’t understand that distinction and make their kerygma distinctive, Christianity might die before it ever really lived.
Christianity did not evolve into a major world religion in a vacuum. It grew from a few hundred followers of Jesus at the time of his death into the official religion of the Roman Empire by the decree of the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. Without the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, Christianity would never have come into being at all. Nevertheless, not everything in the New Testament is historical, and there is a considerable gulf between what is written and what ought to be believed. Anyone who believes everything in the Bible is not doing enough thinking, and many who believes nothing in the Bible may also fit into the same category.
My opinion on the content of these five sermons is very untraditional, and you need to understand that. But the longer I have lived the more I have become convinced that Jesus of Nazareth is the most influential human being who ever lived, and that the enormous variety of claims made about him in the New Testament are the reasons why Christianity eventually became the world religion with the most followers. But I also think that the the New Testament intentionally turned the Messenger into the Message. To me, Jesus was the most convincing exponent of the God of Israel in the Bible. But Jesus was not God, or the Second Person of the Trinity, or God Incarnate, although he was the most salient incarnation of God within a human being out of all the other human beings in human history. He was THE most extraordinary son of God, but we are all sons and daughters of God.
It appears to me that Jesus was also a difficult son for his parents, Mary and Joseph. The last instance of that we shall consider is told about in John’s account of the crucifixion, John 19:25-27. After saying that the Roman soldiers cast lots to see who would win the robe Jesus was wearing when he was crucified, John writes, “(S)tanding by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.” As clarification, that means there were three Marys: Jesus’ mother Mary, Mary the wife of Clopas (whoever that Mary and that Clopas were), and Mary Magdalene, plus Jesus’ un-named aunt (or, in certain parts of the American East or South or in the UK, “ont.”) Incidentally, that’s the only time we are ever told that Jesus even had an aunt/ont.
Next, in John’s telling of the crucifixion story, it says, “When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom Jesus loved standing near the cross [the meaning of that phrase is open to interpretation, but I’m not going to do so here], (Jesus) said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold your son!’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.”
The word “woman” at the wedding in Cana and at the crucifixion is problematic to me. I have read commentaries that say it was a common term of endearment, but from the context it doesn’t sound very endearing to me. It sounds almost like the exasperated slur that a son sometimes felt toward his mother. Because Jesus was so brilliant, charismatic, driven, and God-energized, he was a huge handful for his parents to try to raise, especially for his mother. Did they ever really understand who he was? Did they realize the divine calling of their son? Or was he like a Churchill or MacArthur or Einstein or Gates or Obama - - - or Musk - - - or Trump - - - to his parents? To be effective parents to an extraordinary child requires extraordinary parental skills, and did Joseph, and particularly Mary, possess enough of those skills?
Between the lines, the scripture passages that have been cited in this sermon imply that there may have been friction between Jesus and his mother, but by no means was that the intent of the Gospel writers. What they wanted to convey is that of all the male babies ever born, Jesus was beyond adequate description by anyone, and these stories hint at that. To us, or at least to me, these episodes seem surprisingly awkward. There was no intention of portraying Jesus as a difficult son, although he may have been one. Instead, the Jesus of these stories is portrayed as larger than life, broader than a mere member of The Holy Family. He was the man described in one of those hymns whose texts I remember for some reason, but no one else seems to: “O Master Workman of the race, Thou man of Galilee, who with the eyes of early youth eternal things didst see.”
I am old, and I have pondered these matters for many decades. I also have had the privilege of being the pastor of this congregation for twenty years, and I have convinced myself that I can preach what I honestly believe here without being thrown out on my ear. Were that to happen, I admit I wouldn’t like it, but then, I can’t continue forever anyway, and it all has to end sometime.
In the meantime, I hope you will stay with me for four more Sundays as we contemplate Jesus, the most fully human and the most God-inspired person whom Christians will ever encounter.