Did you attend the wedding?
Last week’s Gospel told of a wedding at Cana in Galilee among whose invited guests were Mary, Jesus and his disciples. There must have been a lot of guests because right off the bat the Gospel says the wine ran short – indeed, since Mary is recorded as saying “They have no wine”, the host must have run out of it altogether. Imagine that happening at a wedding (nowadays referred to as an “event”) in Sonoma County! Imagine the host having to make a quick run to Whole Foods to resupply the bar! But not to worry, because these newlyweds had Jesus to pull the rabbit out of the hat – so to speak. So, were you there?
There are three ways of being there. First of all, you can be there by simply reading about the wedding as a past event – very past, two thousand years in the past and spatially 7500 miles from Sonoma County. That’s quite a distance. In a way it means you are not there at all. The wedding is past history and that’s the way people have been reading it for centuries – as past history. And what they take away from it is the miracle – Jesus changing water into wine, which proves? That he must be divine, a miracle worker to whom I can appeal to cure my aunt. This, I think, is the way fundamentalists understand the text.
Or secondly you can more closely experience that long ago wedding and miracle as a sign, a signal of something bigger than you realize – which is why the Gospel author John calls the event a semeion, which is Greek for sign. It’s not just the party host who has run out of wine, it’s the whole tradition of God’s People (especially its hierarchy) that has lost all zest, run out of wine, out of spirit, become like six empty water jars, lost all marital intimacy with God. But along comes Jesus to save the situation, to turn what had become flavorless water into the best of wine, into the Good News of the early church. Such an understanding places you closer to the Cana event as when, for instance, Pope John XXIII called for Vatican II – which was an extension of the Cana wedding and miracle right into our own times.
But thirdly and personally, far from being two thousand years and 7500 hundred miles distant from that day in Cana of Galilee, you can be there even now – insofar as you may be a large but empty water jar, yourself an “event’ without zest, hardly fun to be with, hollow, a cause of concern to others – so that it is about you that Mary says to Jesus, “Sally or Joe has no wine.” So that Jesus, whom John’s Gospel sometimes calls the source of living water, must replenish your being and what’s more turn that living water into wine – spirit, joy, faith, energy, love, imagination, God’s own way of being – so that your life as a party can at last begin! Such a reading or rather experience of the wedding feast of Cana puts you right there in the midst of it – even as a guest of honor, forever contemporary with Jesus, Mary and his earliest disciples.
P.S. I find that the poetry of Angela Leighton whom I quoted last week is more readily available at Amazon.com: Books. Just use her name and/or the title Spills.