Readings: Selections from Song of Songs
                John 2:1-11 Wedding feast at Cana                                                      

"A Touch of Spring!"

Around Hartlepool this last week the rain has been falling and the leaves have been falling, and I must say that I have found it hard going to summon up Spring in my mind. That is, until I read once more the Song of Songs!  The Partners in Learning resource material that you sent me suggested just a few verses here and there, but when I sat down to read it, I just had to read the whole lot!  After I had finished I had to go and take a cold shower, it is powerful stuff!

The Song of Songs is bursting with life.  It's got bursting ripe pomegranites, it's got rich wine, it's got pungent frangrances, heady perfumes, flocks of goats grazing in rich pastures; it's got raisins, apples, and the scent of myrrh, it's got vineyards and wild flowers, cedars and cypress trees, henna and nard, saffron and cinnamon, it has dripping honeycombs and dazzling lillies.

And amongst all of that it has two lovers, muscular thighs and swelling breasts, soft, inviting lips, gentle caresses and eyes burning with love and passion.  The Song of Songs is a throbbing celebration of love and passion, of life and joy, of sex and intimacy, of the potential for new life always ready to burst out of this fertile, life-giving creation which God has made and called "Good!"

To me, that is what Spring is all about!

Reading the Song of Songs is a joy.  It is a joy because it reminds us of who we are, and how God has made us.  God has made us to be passionate, loving people.  God has made us with a capacity for great joy and deep feeling.  It's not just about sex, though it is about time that the church realized that sex is one of God's fabulous gifts, it is also about creativity and fertility.

We are made in the image of God, and as such we too are creators, we are called to have fertile lives, fertile minds. I'm not talking now about having children, that's just one expression of the fertility and creativity which are a natural part of our lives, I'm talking about the whole of our lives and the way we give birth to love and joy and peace and hope.  Our lives should have the touch of Spring about them.

There's a children's story about a witches daughter, a little girl, who gets lost.  She wanders through a grey, lifeless, night-time city searchig for her Mum. Everywhere she puts her feet, flowers begin to grow - she leaves a trail of glorious colour and sweet perfume.  That's how your life should be, that's how my life should be.  Yet how oftenare we just the opposite?  How often do we drag our feet through life leaving a wintery trail behind us?  And what a travesty of the gospel that is.

In the second chapter of his gospel, John describes how Jesus burst onto the scene. Jesus already has disciples, and he has been baptized by John, then on the third day he is invited to a wedding.  This is the third day after he has been baptized in the river Jordan.

If I had been inventing a gospel, I would have had Jesus drawing crowds to hear a keynote speech.  This would have been a good place for the sermon on the mount, for instance.  Jesus would have set it out clearly and concisely.

But thank God that's not how it happened!  Jesus announces his arrival on the scene with wine!  Not just a single bottle, as you might find at a reserved URC house-warming party, and not your Blue-Nun or Liebfraumilch, such as you might find in abundance at any student party, NO!  Jesus announces his arrival on the scene with barrels-full of finest 1958 Chateau-Lafitte!  It is rich, it is abundant, it is full of joy and life, it is the best there can be!  Jesus is bringing to the world the very best of life that there can possibly be!  He starts as he means to go on.

Everywhere Jesus sets his feet, he brings the best that life has to offer.  "I have come that you might have life," he says (not half-life, or make-do-with-it life), "I have come that you might have fulness of life, abundance of life!"

And everywhere Jesus sets his feet, he brings the best that life has to offer.  Jesus' life has the touch of Spring about it.

A man up a tree, crippled with the guilt of his own wickedness is set free to live life abundantly for the first time... A woman, shunned for so many years because of her bleeding, touches his trailing cloak and finds healing... A government official, devastated by the imminent death of his son is given the miracle of new life, new hope, as his son recovers...  A woman caught in adultery is given new dignity and a new start... the blind regain their sight... lepers are made clean... Samaritans are drawn into his warm embrace... demons are driven out... people are fed and there are twelve baskets of abundance left over... John reckons that there are so many life-giving things that Jesus did that if they were all written down one-by-one the whole world could not contain the books that would be needed!

And everywhere Jesus sets his feet, he brings the best that life has to offer.  Jesus' life has the touch of Spring about it.

The wedding feast that announced it all was on the third day...

Now there is another third day.  It is the third day since Jesus' life-giving life has been ended.  It is the third day since abundance and life and joy and hope have been snuffed out.  Winter prevails.  Coldness and darkness, death and despair rule the world. Lives are shrivelled with the frost, hope is buried deep and dormant.

And then Jesus does it again!  He has set his feet in the coldest place, the darkest place, the loneliest place; he has set his feet on the face of death itself, and he has brought the touch of spring.  Death shrivels up as life rushes in, despair is no more as hope blooms in splendour, darkness is banished as light floods the world.

Thanks be to God for the touch of Spring in Jesus Christ.