Epiphany is miracle

We can, perhaps, learn a lot from heresies. Heresies claim partial truths as absolute. That entails a choice. The meaning of the Greek word, hairesis or heresy is choice, choosing a particular perspective or position as absolute to the exclusion of all else. But choice implies the priority of subjective opinion over considered and corporate reflection. How then do we learn from heresies? Because, at the very least, they point to the questions that are most important and thus contribute to the process of thinking things through more completely and more comprehensively. There is usually, if not always, something partly right in positions that are later called heretical because they are too limited or partial; in short, incomplete and inadequate.

Cultural relativism denies the very idea of heresy because it assumes that all perspectives are equally true and, consequently, that there really is no truth. The idea of heresy is heresy! Everything is relative, it is absolutely asserted. We might note the paradox of contradiction and the dogmatism inherent in the claim.

The earliest ‘heresies’ in the emergence of Christianity were Marcionism and Docetism. Marcion was a 2nd century thinker who saw the idea of God in the Old Testament as irreconcilable with the idea of God in the New Testament, opposing justice and goodness absolutely. This led Marcion to get rid of most of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament and, for that matter, huge chunks of the New Testament, keeping only what suited his interests, namely Paul’s Epistles and parts of Luke’s Gospel. What is revealing in Marcion’s perspective is the refusal (or inability) to reconcile the testaments in the manner which was already at work in establishing the Canon of Scripture. In a way, his rejection forced the emerging Church to think more deeply about the unity of the Scriptures in and through their diversity of expression. In our times, the same tendency is inherent in the phenomenon of ‘cancellation culture,’ a kind of intolerance through the negation and proscription of ideas, persons, and texts.

Docetism was an earlier ‘heresy’ countered already in the Epistles of St. John. Docetism rejected the idea of the Incarnation and argued that God did not (and could not have) become flesh in Jesus Christ. It assumes a complete separation between God and the material world, hence a denial of the body of Christ and the sufferings of Christ. The whole story of Christ was simply play-acting, a mere seeming or appearance of being human without being truly human. Docetism comes from a Greek work (dokeo) about what seems to be in contrast to what is. Yet this also compelled the emerging Church to think more deeply about Christ as true God and true man.

 

Both ‘heresies’ anticipate and share in the gnosticism of the late 2nd century which sees the material world as evil and assume a dualist view of competing ‘gods’. Salvation is seen as the freeing of the spirit from the evil of matter. Yet both ‘heresies’ contribute to the establishment of the credal confessions of the Christian Faith about Jesus Christ and to the establishment of the Canon of Scripture, the determination of what books of Scripture comprise the Bible. Yet, as the 16th century Anglican theologian, Richard Hooker, judiciously observed, the heresies of the early church recur over and over again in the history of the Church. Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States of America, for instance, was a deist who held to a kind of rationalist belief in God but rejected the miracles of the Gospel. He took his scissors, much in the manner of Marcion, and cut out from the New Testament all of the miracles of Christ, leaving only a husk of moral teachings. He could not reconcile the idea of miracles with his view of moral and natural philosophy.

 

In Chapel this week the story of Jesus at the wedding feast of Cana of Galilee was read. It is the first miracle in John’s Gospel. The wine failed or ran out and Jesus turned the water into wine, indeed, the best wine. As John, the theologian and evangelist, par excellence, puts it, “This beginning of signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested forth his glory.” It is an epiphany, a making known of Christ as the Lord of Creation, of the God made man who, as this story suggests, seeks the very best for our humanity, even our social joys, an end which is more than what the world can give..

 

This story turns on Jesus’s response to Mary. “Mine hour,” he says, “is not yet come.” This complements wonderfully the point which we heard last week about Jesus in the Temple saying to Mary and to us, “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” Epiphany manifests the divine will and purpose for our humanity which is ultimately found in Christ’s hour - his passion and death out of which flows the grace of salvation and the sacramental means of our participation in his sacrifice and love. Here, then, is the wine of divinity which is not of our making but belongs to the greater good and purpose of God in Christ and in creation itself. The God who creates each thing in its distinctiveness is not simply constrained or limited to what he creates.

 

The miracles point to the greater miracle of creation itself and to its end in God. Such, too, is the redemption and restoration of our humanity. “This beginning of signs” teaches us the meaning of all the miracles, highlighting the miracle of life itself in creation which has God as its end and purpose. The things of this world are used to make known two things: the things of God and the forms of our incorporation into the life of God. The miracles do not negate creation but belong to its place in God’s will and purpose. They are emphatically about essential life. Our life and the created order are gathered to God, the source and end of all life. 

 

A former Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple (1896-1902), recognised that to think the miracles is to take very seriously the idea of God as essential life. Rather than the technological manipulation of nature which uses nature and humans as means to other ends, the miracles point to the greater end of nature and the dignity of our humanity as found in God and in the joy of the communion of saints. This miracle is an epiphany. Here Christ is “manifest in power divine, changing water into wine,” as one of the hymns puts it, and all for the good of our being transformed into who we are in God.