Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Third Sunday of Lent 2024

It is Lent and I have just had a lesson in repentance.  Moments ago, I discovered that, preparing this sermon, I had settled on the wrong reading.  I shall be apologising for the rest of the week and eating cold gruel well into the Easter season.  At the door, we can discuss whether this is the right sermon for the wrong day, or the, wrong sermon for the right day.  So unexpectedly, we are now off to Cana in Galilee.

Last Sunday, as I thanked the choir, I told them that standing up here in Westminster Abbey while they are singing Palestrina is like standing in heaven.  Now, the choir are polite, and I am the Dean, so they smiled.  But, we all knew that does not really work – this is good, but this is not heaven.  Heaven is richer, fuller than that.  I might want Palestrina; but she might prefer Purcell, or he might want to spend eternity with Paramore, I am thinking of course of that splendid punk band from Franklin Tennessee.  Heaven it turns out is a bit of a slippery fish.  And that does not work either because I am not keen on fish.  William Blake saw heaven in a wild flower, Sydney Smith thought heaven was eating pate de foie gras to the sound of trumpets and the much-underestimated theologian Belinda Carlisle believes heaven is a place on earth.  It is interesting, it is fun to speculate, but the truth is we fall short – we have never been good at descriptions of heaven.   

When I was working in Cambridge in the 1980s a historian I knew published a book that nailed the problem.  The book was called Celebration and she was Margaret Spufford.  She was a good scholar and a lovely woman, and she suffered from a particularly aggressive form of osteo-porosis.  At times, she was in terrible pain.  Worse, still, she had a daughter – Bridget – with a life limiting illness that was cruel in its progress.  Margaret Spufford knew all about suffering.  She knew it and she could describe it.  It is strange in it, we cannot come it with descriptions of heaven, but my word we can talk about the opposite.  Pain, sorrow, despair, hell even, we can imagine that; we can think about it and we can find the words.  We can name the vile and the vicious.  Margaret Spufford wrote about how well late medieval painters can show us images of hell and then how poorly they paint heaven,

my husband and I were standing in front of a magnificent Flemish Last Judgement that had ended up in Danzig.  The souls to our Lord’s left in their descent to damnation were vivid enough: but the blessed to his right were curiously inert, smug at best.  Our guide said suddenly, “It’s odd, isn’t it, how the blessed always look as if they have been stuffed?”[i]

We don’t know where to begin with heaven.  It was not always like that.  Think of the book Genesis.  There is a description if heaven being made there – it was the creation of the heavens and the earth.  God turned chaos into order, divided this from that, put things in place.  That’s the language of Genesis

Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.      Genesis 1:6

The big idea there is that what we see as the roof of our earth is, to God, the floor of heaven’.  Genesis sets heaven squarely within creation.  It turns out, if you read Genesis, that dear Belinda Carlisle was very nearly right and heaven is a place right next to earth. That’s why the bible speaks so often, so confidently of movement ‘up’ and ‘down’ - heaven is ‘up there’.  That’s why we talk about ascension, or Jacob’s ladder.  It’s lively and we have words for that, but, over time, we got less and less comfortable with up and down and with heaven as a place.  Because we want to be comfortable, because it all felt a bit clumsy, we pushed heaven further and further away until we could not locate it at all. 

First you abandon the idea that God is ‘up there’ and next you abandon the idea that he is anywhere at all and then heaven becomes a rather vague idea, much more imagination than fact.  That is why Blake imagines a wild flower while Sydney Smith eats morally objectionable pate.  We are left in confusion, he imagines cricket, I imagine claret and she imagines good conversation.  It all gets rather thin.

At which point we need to look at our gospel reading and the story of the miracle at Cana, because it is precisely a story about heaven.

Years ago, I was taken to Cana in Galilee.  I was on a pilgrimage, one of those jaunts for spiritual tourists, three holy sites, a shop and a good supper.  I wore a panama hat and tried to look serious.  But at Cana I got cross.  Nobody thought to mention the fact that the place we visited was almost certainly not Cana at all.  Other villages further north, had a better claim.  So, in the wrong place and in a church full of smug and dusty cherubs we gazed at a battered pot.  ‘This’, said the guide, ‘was 'it', one of the jars that had held first water and then wine.  Well, it wasn't.  The pot before me would have held about six pints.  The authentic items were bigger, so much bigger that they contained 20 gallons.  When Jesus had finished at Cana-in-Galilee there was enough wine to have them feasting till Friday.  And that is really important, this miracle was magnificent, super- abundance, extravagance.  It was astonishing.  The details of the story make that clear.  The details matter.

Christ came to Cana, John tells us, 'on the third day'.  That ‘third day’ is code God Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Day – three days.  The third day is the day of resurrection.  So, the story at Cana starts with Christ arriving as the Saviour who rises from the dead.  He goes to a wedding feast - to Jews the wedding feast was the symbol of the moment when relationships get sorted.  This is the moment God does what he promised to do.  Isaiah says, 'Your maker is your husband’.  The Revelation of St John tells us, 'Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb'.  When Jesus comes to Cana that actually happens, God comes to his people and it is the Day of the Lord.

Then there is the wine.  This was a preposterous miracle that generated 120 gallons of wine.  This is not a party, that is absurd.  This is the beginning of the banquet of the kingdom of God.  It is the time when the harvest is abundant, when vines will hang heavy with fruit and the mountains drip sweet wine, just as Amos promised.  One writer promised that each grape on a vine would produce exactly one hundred and twenty gallons of wine.  When Christ comes to Cana, the Kingdom comes see a foretaste, a glimpse, of heaven.

We gave up on the idea that heaven is ‘up there’, and on everything else the bible says about heaven.  The really interesting thing the bible wants to tell us is not about where heaven is, but that heaven and earth are part of one creation and that God rules in both.  We are supposed to see connections.  We think heaven is imaginary.  Not a bit of it, in Cana in Galilee God’s kingdom crashes in and that the signs of his Kingdom are generosity, rejoicing and good company.  That’s the key message, that heaven, God’s Kingdom comes close when we live as if we are at a wedding feast and rejoice.

And there is still something more - there is the strange conversation between Jesus and his mother.  Jesus turns water to wine because his mother asks.  Yet, he barely acknowledges her.  Notice, she is not mother, he calls her "gunai", 'woman'.  She tells him there is no wine and he replies (in Aramaic) "What to me and to thee, woman, the hour is not yet come".  He does not call her ‘mother’ and does not behave as a son.  Only later as does this make sense.  On Calvary, as Mary stands watching him die, Jesus, calls her "gunai", 'woman,' once more.  Now his hour has come and things are different.  He says 'woman (gunai) behold thy son'. Having demolished Mary's family at Cana, he recreates it on Calvary. 

Mary will not really see the Kingdom until she has gone the way of the cross.  She cannot understand the Kingdom until she has grasped that there are no privileged, and no special relationships there.  Hard as it is, there is no mother and son, no pair of lovers; heaven is a new community where relationships are not particular and exclusive in that way.  It is a different kind of community, it’s a new sort of loving in which all are equals and all can find a place.  And that is what we should be hoping for, seeking, trying to build.  Heaven is not a state of mind.  It arrived that day in Cana.  It is not a bit of spirituality, pie in the sky when you die.  It is robust enough to gather up the agony of the cross, real and urgent in its insistence that we need to make new communities of grace and generosity.

Jesus comes to us in blood and broken bone; reveals himself in bread and wine; summons us to a wedding feast.  We keep making our religion into ideas, concepts, spiritual feelings.  It is so much more than that.  More than the abundance at Cana, it is life in death, the peace of God, the right ending we crave.  We must not sell that short.  We must go by way of Cana and Calvary and we must hope for heaven.

[i] Margaret Spufford, 1989 Celebration, London Mowbray pp.21-22.  Margaret Spufford was the mother of the writer, Francis Spufford, and you will come across references to the story she tells in some of his books.