The Sixth Day

Last Easter, I sat in the Good Friday service with our foster daughter. A few months later, she was placed with out of state relatives: we had her for a year. I believe and pray every day it's for her gain; and I give thanks every day for our year. But my chest still hurts every time I wake in the night.

This Easter, I was sitting in the Good Friday service alone – until a little girl who's been coming to my weekday class wriggled out of her pew and scurried up next to me. A few years ago, her mother left.

I find it hard to focus on a sermon when children are present. Something about making sure a smallerish human doesn't crawl completely under the pew and pop up behind. Personally, I'd like to pop up back there too, and I'd very much like to have my stuffed animals lined up in church next to me. But one is called on to be a grown up when there's no one larger in the pew (sometimes even when there is); and while she was tracing my hand on the sheet for sermon notes, some of what I've been reading in the gospels became more tangible to me. It occurred to me that she and I, like those women long ago, were gathered around the cross. And that it was Day Six, gospel-of-John-time.

God made the world in six days. His Spirit moved on the face of the water, and He said “let there be Light.” It intrigues me that in John's “beginning”, after the first Word, and six reverberating “days”,^[1] Jesus creates wine from water at a wedding feast. And he tells his mother about his coming “hour” (2:4). The last instance of the word “hour” in John's gospel is at the cross, when Jesus forms his mother and his beloved disciple into a new family (19:27). So that time, in John's treatment, is oriented between re-echoed creation and the cross. It is also, intriguingly to me, oriented in two scenes involving Jesus' mother (addressed by Jesus as “woman”), and the claims of kinship, jars, water, and wine.

In the original creation account, day six was the day of man's making, and of the woman taken from his side, and of the first human poetry: “Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). On day six, Adam and Eve were one. The wedding celebration at Cana sits on John's substructure of creation right over Adam and Eve's joy. So when John introduces another six day count toward the end of Jesus' ministry, it feels like I am being initiated into another wedding: “Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany” (John 12:1). I wonder if the disciples were anticipating more wine.

Whatever the disciples anticipated, six days before the Passover – it wasn't what happened. Instead, they were scattered. Judas sells Jesus for the price of a slave. Peter denies that he knows Jesus – and where is the person Peter thought he knew, who could walk on water? Jesus seems to be at the mercy of the storm. Nothing is miraculous, on this sixth day. The one who provided wine for everyone else at Cana has to have his thirst slaked.

Yet, here is Jesus' mother again, the woman at the wedding. She hasn't been encountered since in John's narrative – but here she is, again, standing in front of Jesus. And here again is water and wine: the sour wine lifted to Jesus' lips; the water with blood spilling from Jesus' side. And here again, family ties: “Woman, behold your son,” (19:26). It sounds like an echo – but so distorted, it almost feels like a mockery.

John is not the only Biblical writer who set me up to anticipate Cana at Passover. Long before, on some high peak from which he could see “the land that stretches afar” (Isaiah 33:17), Isaiah saw Jesus' hour. He wrote about a feast – and a slaughter.

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples

a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine,

of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.

And he will swallow up on this mountain

the covering that is cast over all peoples,

the veil that is spread over all nations.

He will swallow up death forever . . .

It will be said on that day,

“Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us.”

-from Isaiah 25:6-9

        He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,

        yet he opened not his mouth;

        like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,

        and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,

        so he opened not his mouth.

        -Isaiah 53:7

I imagine Isaiah on a height, catching glimpses of Golgotha set for a banquet. And someone struggling uphill with a cross. It explains his insistence that salvation is coming – and that it is going to be a catastrophe.

In the same way, I think John wants me to see Cana while blood and water spill from Jesus' side. “This is our God; we have waited for him.” And what we've done to him, now that he's come, is appalling. But this is also the sixth day.

So when I see the woman standing at the cross, the woman at the wedding – I see the archetype of creation over the maximal expression of our wrong. I see Jesus' mother standing at the cross in a crux of time, where the woman with child blurs into the woman taken from man's side. Where the wedding-day feast merges with the feast of the paschal lamb. Where the Word's torn flesh is re-stitched to our bones.

God made the world in six days, but making things inside of our severely constrained proportions can take an almost unbearably long time. Jesus sped Judas on a destructive course: “What you are doing, do quicker” (13:26). But he waited for two days when he heard that Lazarus was sick. Jesus' brothers want him to hurry up and reveal himself to the world: Jesus tells them that their time is always, while his time is ripening (7:4-6). Destructive time is always here – the world hurls itself to chaos every hour. Meanwhile, I strain to wait for God's work in my soul, or in a loved one's sickness.

Through the whole of John's record of Jesus' pre-Good Friday ministry, the Father is working, and Jesus is working (5:17). There are six days leading up Cana, and six days leading up to Passover – but the entire life of Jesus lengthens out (so that the world cannot contain the record of all he said and did) to fill the reverberations of six days. God made the world in six days; but Jesus took thirty plus years remaking it. His contentions with the religious rulers sharpen around this point: the rulers seek to put him to death because even on the Sabbaths, Jesus is working (5:18).

On the Sabbath after Good Friday, Jesus ceased from work. Alcuin says that “As man was made on the sixth day, and God rested the seventh; so Christ suffered on the sixth day, and rested in the grave on the seventh.”

And on the eighth day – the first day of a new week – John brings us to a garden.

It isn't a coincidence. It's all the echoes emerging from the distortion chamber, clamoring joy: “This very day, in our writer's conviction, a whole New Time begins...”^[2] In that garden of new time, the risen man's first action is to comfort a grieving woman. She is crying – so hard she can't see to whom she is speaking – because of death, and because she has lost the Lord.

These women at the cross and at the tomb, Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, have “faithfully made [their] way to the center of history.”^[3] And they just waited there, even though it was dark and shattering. They must have thought they were standing in the twilight of everything. But they stayed close to Jesus. And for all time, they are crowned with Eve's poignancy again – but without fault. “For whereas in Paradise, the woman gave the man the deadly fruit, a woman from the sepulcher announced life to men” (Gregory the Great, of Mary Magdalene).  

Gregory-like, we could say that the first woman's hungering look at a tree led to disruption in the human family. And another woman, Jesus' mother – whose whole life must have ached in her eyes, looking at her crucified son – was the first person to find a new family around the cross.

Later that eighth, first day, Jesus meets his brothers. And he breathes on them, and they receive his Spirit. “Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature,” Genesis 2:7.

~

I read here and there that John is supposed to have structured his gospel more polemically-theologically, and less verifiably-accurately. But John's whole contention is that his eyes have actually seen, his hands have actually handled, his ears have actually heard the stuff of his particular witness. At the cross, John sees significance and symbol, time and meter, history and theology converge.

He told us so, almost as soon as he began to tell us anything. Meaning became matter: the Word became flesh. And he keeps trying to tell us. The Light doesn't float ethereal and exalted above this plane of degenerate physicality. Light and this plane collided, and the catastrophe was new creation.

I am still colliding with Light: it comforts me that Isaiah keeps shouting about salvation        being a catastrophe, because it feels like one. But I and all of us, gone astray, have long been a catastrophe. For a human being like Jesus to recreate a human being like me requires the patience of God.

And John comforts me, with his insistence that God did not throw the damaged world in the trash, or distill out of it some kind of spiritual gas. His recreating work was not just a movement of Spirit on water. It was a movement of his Spirit on water. But it was also a muscular effort on hard, dry clay. It meant getting splinters from the piece of wood that hinges history. It took a lifetime of days and hours, and at their apex – when his disciples were expecting Cana – it was trauma. Betrayal, torture, and a cup of sour wine.

Easter itself can feel like sour wine if your loved one, who is gone now, was with you last year. My best friend's mother died recently, and she's still slammed with grief. There's no gas to distill out of that. Jesus didn't do so. He died too.

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone” (12:24). I believe that what Jesus planted in death is still ripening. But I didn't think about that very clearly, having my hand traced on the page for sermon notes. I thought about the little one tracing my fingers, and my best friend, and all of us centuries later, gathered around Jesus on the sixth day.

And I wondered if a little girl traced his hand on day eight, wound and all.

Footnotes