Amahl and the Night Visitors

I was about eight years old and in short trousers when our school music teacher, Miss Waites, who seemed to us then to be about one hundred, decided to try us out on opera. That autumn term, every Friday afternoon when grammar was over, we sat down to listen to it scene by scene on a scratchy LP. We memorised words, we learned tunes, we acted scenes, we drew pictures with wax crayons. It was quite an education. The opera was by Gian Carlo Menotti, Amahl and the Night Visitors. 

It's about a crippled shepherd boy who lives in a remote hovel with his mother.  One night, while he is playing his pipe under the desert sky, he sees a star like no star he's ever seen before. A little later, he hears the sound of travellers chanting as they cross the hillside.  Then there's a knock at the door.  It's the magi on their way to find the Child.  They do not know him, but will recognise him when they find him. They bring gifts for him: gold, frankincense, myrrh.  They need shelter for the night.  Hospitality is a sacred duty in the near east, so they are invited in.  A celebration is called for, so the village throws a great party.  Then, while everyone is asleep, Amahl's mother tries to steal the gold: just a little - surely the unknown Child won't need it all; think what she could do with it for Amahl.  She is caught by the watchful page, and is shamed. But the kings tell her to keep the gold, for the Child's kingdom is built not on riches but on love alone.  It's time for them to leave.  Amahl wants to send a gift of his own. What better than his crutch - the Child might be a cripple like him. He hands it over... and finds he can walk without it.  It's a sign from the Holy Child.  Amahl knows he must visit him too and take his gift in person.  So they set out following the star that will lead them to the infant King.

It's a charming opera.  Here are three insights from this folk-tale to ponder at Epiphany.

First:   the incarnation is about the wonderful possibility of change and renewal.  It is the new creation, whose words ‘let there be light' transform the people who walked in darkness.  The cripple becomes a new person, ready to make his own journey.  His possessive, fearful mother can let him go without regret so that he can thank the Child.  The kings learn that you don't have to be royal to be rich, for they see how God has honoured this poorest of households with a miracle.  Indeed, they have found the Child already, for he has been with them all along.  We have seen his glory, says St. John, full of grace and truth.  Each year, Christmas ought to change us, help us recapture our vision, reawaken hope.  So a good question for Epiphany is, how this latest Christmas in our life touched us, opened up in us a new awareness, some fresh vision of grace and truth, recalled the privilege of being those whom Jesus calls his friends?  

Secoondly:  Christmas is about childlikeness, becoming genuinely open-handed and humble enough to receive what another has to give.  Perhaps the magi saw in Amahl's house

that to welcome the Infant Christ, we must learn to receive before we can give.  For them this meant stooping low enough to seek shelter from the poor, as low as you have to bend down when you visit the shrine of the nativity in Bethlehem.  For the miracle happened not to the great and powerful, but to a crippled boy with nothing to offer but his crutches and a heart full of love.  Jesus said that unless we become like little children, we can never enter the kingdom of God.  If we take Christmas seriously, we see wealth and power in new ways.  To be rich before God is to have nothing in our hands; like the Christ Child to be little, weak and helpless is to know the infinite power of love. And this is all we have to come with: our worship, our longing, our love.  Yet it is enough for us to begin to be bearers of hope in our broken world.

Truth number three:  Christmas is about a journey we must all make for ourselves.  Whoever we are: prince or pauper, powerful or weak, young or old, the star is there for us to follow.  Once we have seen it, we can't not follow it - can't ignore it or tell it to go away.  Well, we can stay where we are, clinging on to old goods and old gods; but what does that profit if it means losing your own soul?  But to make the journey, fling away the crutches that symbolise the past, venture with God towards new horizons where Jesus is going to be - this is what Epiphany means.  It's a risk, for faith leads us we know not where and towards horizons we cannot even glimpse when we set out.  It calls for courage in a society perplexed by what religion is for, puzzled and even alienated by what Jesus Christ could possibly mean in a world such as this.  We are singing the Lord's song in a strange land.  But sing it we must, and gladly.  

Amahl is profound in its simplicity because it captures the profound simplicity of the gospel.  I can still recall watching the opera performed as an eight-year old, and being filled with a sense of expectancy and happiness.  Looking back, I now recognise what I needed to learn: about myself, about human life, about what it means to receive and give, about where true happiness lies.  I am grateful for those early glimpses.  Epiphany is not the end of Christmas but its enlargement that puts the incarnation into its greater context.  For the great light the shepherds and magi saw and the angels sang is for all people of all places and times, for all that lives and breathes, for all that is.  It's for us, this revealing of God's glory where the light shines in the darkness and the darkness is not able to overcome it.  During these forty days of the Christmas festival, we continue to pray that our joy at the birth of Jesus will last for ever, that its lambent glow will melt the snows of spirits long frozen over, warm cold hearts, re-awaken our love for this Infant and our resolve to place him at the heart of all that awaits us as we journey through another year.

Durham Cathedral, January 2010

CANA IN GALILEE

Cana in Galilee is not a beautiful place today.  Perhaps it never was.  The souvenir shops in this down-at-heel little town are among the tackiest in Galilee.  They sell an expensive, sweet and sickly wine in bottles labelled ‘Cana in Galilee’ for the credulous to buy. In the orthodox church there is a charming icon of the marriage at Cana.  This, and the stone water jars in both churches, are all that can be said for this unattractive village.  What is more, the historical claims made for it are as bogus as the wine.  The archaeologists place biblical Cana a few miles away at a site that can no longer be identified. 

But it is the way of God to choose unprepossessing places to disclose himself from the manger to the cross. Galilee seems to have been just such a lowly, workaday place.  ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ asks Nathaniel a few verses before, on first hearing about Jesus, son of Joseph of Nazareth.  Philip’s answer is simply, ‘come and see!’  What he, they, all of us are invited to see is nothing less than a rabbi who is Son of God and King of Israel in whom, says Jesus, we gaze upon an open heaven.  And hard on the heels of this talk about seeing and believing, about meeting and knowing, about heaven and the angels of God comes Cana in Galilee. For in today’s gospel St John tells us that it was here at Cana that Jesus first revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him. 

St John’s Gospel is built around a number of stories in which Jesus performs some marvellous action. These ‘signs’ show how the glory of God has visited the earth in Jesus, how light and love are at work in the world.  The turning of water into wine is the first.  Then come the healing of the royal official’s dying son and the paralysed man by the pool of Bethesda.  The feeding of the crowd is followed by the healing of the man who had been born blind and by the raising of Lazarus. It’s as if St John has carefully selected these stories as performed images of the incarnation, the Word made flesh and dwelling among us.  He wants us to see, to recognise and to love. ‘These are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.’  The signs are given, says John, in order to evoke trust, and bring about a life-changing encounter with Jesus the Christ. ‘Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.’  At Christmas we heard John say: ‘we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the father, full of grace and truth’.  Glory is his great word: glory that changes lives; glory that makes us free. 

If Cana is the first of the signs, what might the last one be?  Or put it this way: if you were to ask John where more than anywhere else you could see this glory full or grace and truth, what would he reply?  I think he would tell you: at Golgotha where the Son of Man is lifted up, where love is shown to be without end, poured out like the wine at Cana that kept flowing and flowing.  And I want to put it to you that this first sign looks forward to the last and greatest sign, where water and blood flow out of the side of Christ's body on the cross, Christ the true Vine, crushed so that all who abide in him might live again.  Water and blood, water made wine.  In other words, this story already looks forward to the passion. Cana speaks of the cross, and beyond it to this eucharist where we drink of the true and everlasting Vine, the crucified and risen one whose gift is life eternal. 

‘Ah, that miracle!  Ah, that sweet mir­acle!  it was not men's grief but their joy Christ visited.  He worked his first miracle to help men's gladness.’  Dostoyevsky, from Brothers Karamazov.  Or is it our joy and our grief together, indeed the whole of life?  There is the Cana glory of happiness and joy, and there is the Golgotha glory of kingship through suffering.  They are not different.  The sacrificial victim who reigns from the cross is our wounded healer.  Lifted up in death he draws all people to himself.  In this eucharist, we bring our own brokenness and the pain of the world for Christ to work his own sign of renewal, healing and grace.  For if Cana happened once, it goes on happening today in the stories of transformation and change we tell one another to remind ourselves that the gospel is true and that we should go on believing and hoping.  We drink deep and find our thirst slaked, our longings and desires recognised and met.  Out of the stony water jars of Cana, out of the stony hill of Golgotha flow healing, happiness and hope.  Only he can satisfy the restless spirit, the unquiet heart.  Only he can bring rest to the weary and burdened.  Only he can heal us and put us back together again.

The glory of God is humanity fully alive said one of the early fathers of the church.  We come to this sacrament and as we look into the cup of salvation we glimpse how we might be transformed like the wine of Cana.  We gather here as his friends and as his mother said, we do whatever he tells us; and that is to do this in remembrance of him. We are here because in Jesus heaven is opened and we are loved back into life.  We are here to drink deeply of his grace and truth.  And we are here to reawaken hope and anticipate the new heaven and earth where hope will be emptied in delight because the wedding supper of the Lamb has come.

St Chad’s College Durham, 20 January 2013 (John 2.1-11)