This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him (St. John 2:11).
Today’s tale of Jesus saving a wedding is only told in the Apostle John’s eye witness account, which isn’t surprising as it comes very early in the ministry of Jesus (we don’t even have all of the 12 apostles gathered yet), but John relays this story to us because he, maybe better than any other evangelist, recognizes the immense importance of Christ’s every act. He sees the life and ministry of Jesus as the artfully managed drama of God’s gracious self-manifestation to the world. Every step Jesus takes, every word he utters, becomes another tile in the king-sized mosaic that reads: “God is love.” St. John expresses his own frustration with the limitations of human communication when he writes in the last verse of His witness, “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (St. John 21:25). John has to be selective, but he includes this wedding. Why?
Well, to start, weddings are important. That may sound obvious, but I can assure you it is not obvious to a growing number of humans. For example, I was driving back from CVS the other night and happened upon the popular “Delilah” radio show. The segment featured a 28-year-old woman calling in for relationship advice. The caller had been dating her boyfriend for 8 years and saw no need to be married because she, and her boyfriend (of course), didn’t think a piece of paper would change anything. After saying a quick prayer for this poor confused girl, we should shudder to hear what horrors the sexual revolution’s complete cultural victory has wrought. If weddings are just a piece of paper or opportunities for adults to play dress up and pretend, then yes, this woman is right, but what a sad, small vision of human relationships this presents—what a sad, small vision of love. By disconnecting sex and love and marriage, we have lost sight of their purpose. The most elevated ideal in our culture, able to be abandoned at whim, is a couple who don’t cheat on each other and stay together for a long time. This should be the ideal for Emperor Penguins, not human beings. We expect so much more from our fellow men when it comes to science and law and technology, but we limit our greatest possible achievement in love to what is regularly accomplished by a beaver—that is insanity. Christianity says there must be more to sex and love and marriage than being a good penguin or a bad dog. We will investigate that claim today.
In John chapter 2, we see that both Jesus and His disciples were invited to this wedding. The invitation makes sense given our Lord’s growing reputation and the custom of inviting holy teachers to wedding feasts. Anyone who has ever seen the beginning of The Godfather, and its presentation of a Sicilian wedding, has some idea of the massive feasting and revelry that went into a 1st century Jewish wedding. The groom and bride were treated like kings and queens and often whole towns were invited to attend as all came to witness an event that symbolically joined two families as well as two people. The crisis comes into view as St. Mary the Virgin approaches her Son and tells Him that the wedding had run out of wine. It is interesting to note that John doesn’t ever use Mary’s name, always referring to her as “the mother of Jesus.” For John, the most important part of the Virgin Mary’s identity is her role as the human mother of Jesus. Similarly, John never uses his own name in his own book always referring to himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” It is the Son of God as Creator and Savior who gives meaning and identity in the lives of those He has created and saved: John helps us remember that fact.
What comes next is actually a bit shocking to our sensibilities: “And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come. His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you’” (St. John 2:4-5). We must be careful as we interpret this section of the story. The worst sermon I have ever heard on the Wedding at Cana cited this exchange between Mary and Jesus and said, “See, this is why you should ask Mary for things because Mary is like a nice mother while Jesus is like a mean father.” And with only a few words, this inept priest transformed our loving God, who humiliated and sacrificed himself for His church, into the most grotesque stereotype available. The second worst sermon I’ve heard on this passage said, “See, Jesus treated his mother like garbage, so we have no reason to respect her either;” thus, accusing our Lord of breaking the 5th commandment to score some cheap points in the war over the Virgin Mary. Lord defend us from such squabbling. At first glance the term, “Woman,” does seem to be a bit cold, but the Greek idiom is much closer to something like “Dear Madam,” and we must remember that John later uses the same term to describe Jesus’ words from the cross wherein he lovingly put John in charge of His mother’s well-being. We should notice, however, that there is some distance being established between Jesus and His mother. Our Lord is making it clear that He is no longer able to act under her authority, an authority He humbly put Himself under as a child in last week’s Gospel reading (see St. Luke 2:51). We see a similar distancing occur in Mark chapter 3 and Matthew chapter 12. She is still His mother, and He still loves her, but the reason for His incarnation is quickly approaching, and He must be about His Father’s business. As the 2nd century church father Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon puts it, “The action of the Son of God is dependent only on the will of the Father.” St. John’s shorthand for this approaching climax of Christ’s mission is the “hour,” which refers to Christ’s crucifixion but also His resurrection and glorified life in the new earth. All of time comes to its climax at the crucifixion of Christ, the creation’s “high noon,” and everything after that event is proceeding towards a new day. Jesus will save the wedding, but John wants to make sure we see that this saving act is part of His march towards the cross and victory. This loving correction from Jesus explains why Mary responds to Him in the way she does. She doesn’t nag Him or demand He act, she simply tells the servants to do what He says, and she trusts that Jesus will do the right thing; it is Mary’s faith in her Son that is so beautifully displayed in this exchange—a faith we would do well to admire and should pray to imitate.
Moving on in the narrative, St. John lets us know that there are six stone water jars used for ritual purification sitting empty and ignored. These jars already reveal that all is not right even within this festive celebration of new life. After all, ritual washings are not about cleanliness, they are about holiness, and the need to be made pure and holy—to be made whole—haunts every occasion of this fallen world—even weddings. The Jewish ritual washings, like all practices that stem from the law, serve to alert us to our part in the dirtying of the world, but they can never make us clean. A reality Jesus has come to correct. Jesus could have chosen any containers within which to manifest His glory, He could have made wine appear in the glasses of all the participants, but John tells us that Jesus took these stone symbols of the law’s failure to wash us clean, and he filled them with the miraculous, celebratory wine of the earth’s true bridegroom. John tells us that this miraculous wine is a sign, and it is very much that; it is a sign that the world is moving from the perpetual fast of our fallen existence—the darkness that mars all of our happy occasions—into the eternal feasting of the new earth to come. As the prophet Isaiah writes, “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; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation” (Isaiah 25:6-9). The celebratory wine that saved this wedding is a harbinger of the blood spilled on Calvary: blood that saved the people of the new world to come; blood the people saved for that new world drink every Eucharist as they prepare for the eternal feast we will share at the great table made from the wood of the cross. Our belief in that coming reality is not a blind faith but a trust centered in the chronicled activity of God made man; it is a trust fortified by the gift of these miraculous signs.
Finally, St. John would have us see that the self-manifestation of God through the incarnation and signs of Jesus Christ changes everything about human life. We no longer have to peer into the vastness of the night sky and be crushed by fear and questions. Every activity of our lives has been given a new meaning because the Creator of those stars and planets, comets and quasars has stepped into the confusions of human existence and written a new story with His own body that gives meaning to our every breath, every loss, and every love. It is love that has been the most changed by God revealing and establishing a new way to live. Our age is obsessed with sex, and there is a strong temptation to avoid talking about it from the pulpit, but that temptation has ceded the field to the restrictive, animalistic faith statements of the materialists who would have us act like chimpanzees with cell phones. The new humanity Jesus embodied and now offers the world through His church transforms human love from being a contest of dominance and self-satisfaction into a sacramental sign of the spiritual union with Christ. Our Lord has saved love from ending at the grave or a lawyer’s office or the fornicator’s regret sullied heart by making sex and love and marriage an instrument of greater union with Him. Real Christian marriages are a living sign, a miracle, that shows the world how Christ will love his bride—the church—after she wins her final battles in this fallen world. The pure life lived in a Christian marriage, or in Christian single life, or in a Christian life assaulted by divorce, reveals the transformed heart of the Christian and shakes the foundational beliefs of an evil world that would have us be slaves to our desires. Jesus is saving people, but He is also saving weddings, saving love, and saving all those crushed by the sexual confusion of our age. Only Christ can heal the real pain we suffer when our enemies and friends and spouses use the world’s cheap, counterfeit love to hurt us. His love is the purpose of our life, and that love has already built an eternal home for us in the new earth to come. So, let us pray that as Christ transformed plain water into celebratory wine, that we may be transformed from the uninspired lovers of the fallen world into the liberated bride of Christ—prepared for His wedding feast, ready for eternity.