Outside the Co-op in Zermatt, I spotted a large poster with the words ‘Look around you and you will see the glory of God’. It is an awe-inspiring experience to look up at the Matterhorn shining in the sun or wreathed in clouds, such beauty you say to yourself cannot be an accident.
This kind of glory shouts at you and indeed overwhelms you. You have to stop and fall on your knees, which I did quite a lot while skiing!
But there is another kind of glory, the glory of small unnoticed things, the flower, the butterfly’s wings, or maybe just the lichen on the warm Cotswold drywall. It is a beauty that does not advertise itself but requires a moment of silence and a desire to look and listen.
The Welsh poet RS Thomas reflects on this hidden glory in a few short lines that capture a moment of ‘Eternity’, as he puts it.
‘I have seen the sun break through
To illuminate a small field
For a while, and gone my way
And forgotten it. But that was the
Pearl of great price, the one field that had
Treasure in it. I realise now
That I must give all that I have
To possess it. Life is not hurrying
On to a receding future, nor hankering after
An imagined past. It is the turning
Aside like Moses to the miracle
Of the lit bush, to a brightness
That seemed as transitory as your youth
Once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
RS Thomas
Van Gogh follows a long tradition of Dutch artists who see the eternal in the ordinary and every day. He captures an eternal moment in a workaday scene of harvesters on a still summer evening as the sun goes down, and turns what to many would have been an unremarkable sight into ‘The miracle of the lit bush’. To see this hidden glory’ like Moses we need to turn aside,
That is, to pay attention to the moment, ‘living not for a receding future or an imagined past’ but to the eternal in all things.
The Wedding at Cana
Today's gospel speaks about this glory, hidden to all but those who look and listen. Not a God who is revealed in glory but a God hidden in the ordinary and every day.
The story is a familiar one and has even become a byword for turning 'the ordinary', water, into something special, wine, but there is a disturbing episode in the story that never fails to make me stop and try to imagine what is going on. Whatever may have been the cause of the shortage of wine, Mary the mother of Jesus feels responsible and goes to Jesus with a plea for help. This gives rise to a strange exchange between them. Jesus answers her with a rebuke.
“Woman, why do you involve me?”... “My time has not yet come” John 1:4
However, we try to soften this rejection the mystery remains. Why should Jesus respond in this way? As I understand it, Jesus, who Mary knows can help, wants to remain in the shadows rather than perform a miracle that would draw attention to himself. “ This is not the time,” he says to reveal who he is. That time will come, a day when the world will see what the glory of God looks like but it is not now.
Silence: When God hides and we confront this silence we must first remember that Jesus himself came up against the silence of God, his Father. In the garden of Gethsemane, he prayed:
“If it is Thy will let this cup pass from me”. Luke 22: 42.
At the centre of our Christian lives, we will discover the silence of God, but the silence is not a rebuke but an answer. The response of Jesus in the Garden was:
“Not my will, but yours be done” Luke 22: 42.
Prayer:
This was also the response of Mary. Mary gives us the perfect model for our prayers. In response to the apparent refusal of Jesus, she teaches us what it means to trust in God
‘His mother said to the servants “Do whatever he tells you” John 2: 5.
There will be many times in our lives when we are asked to trust God without understanding what God is doing.
Glory:
So what was God doing on this occasion? The answer comes right at the end of the story.
‘This was the first of his miraculous signs ... He thus revealed his glory.’ John 2: 11.
The moment when all seemed lost, as at the Wedding in Cana is in fact the moment when God reveals His Glory. The first of Jesus' miracles points to the Cross, the ultimate disaster when all did seem lost. The Cross experience lies at the centre of our Christian experience. It is usually in times and places like loss or disaster that we often find God opening our eyes.
It is often in the humble and ordinary that God’s glory is revealed.
The Best:
Mary’s prayer is answered, but not in the way she expected. That is usually true of every experience of God, revealed in the unexpected places and people we meet each day. The silence of God takes us to that place where we like Mary and the disciples learn to wait on Jesus to see what he will do.