“The mother of Jesus said
to him, ‘They have no wine.’” St. John
2:3
A friend of
mine made her debut on reality TV a few years ago. Now, this was in England, where they spend
even less on broadcast production than here, and where they seem to find the
clergy endlessly fascinating. She was
part of a series that followed newly ordained clergy in her rural diocese in
the West Country.
And when the
time came for her to officiate at her first wedding, the BBC camera crews were
on hand. She was nervous, of course, and
I guess her hands shook a bit, and she would be the first one to say that she’s
always been a little clumsy. She took
the rings, as she practiced many times before, and laid them on her open prayer
book for the blessing. And then she
dropped them—right through enormous cast iron grate on the chancel floor, down
into the belly of a Victorian coal furnace.
I think they ended up calling the local fire department to get them
out. Of the hundreds of hours of film
they shot that summer, well you can guess which scene got top billing in that
episode.
There’s just
something about weddings. They seem to court
disaster. Take any priest out for a beer
and ask him about wedding stories and you’re bound to hear a few stories that
will leave you in stitches—the best man who left the ring in the glovebox, the
bridesmaid’s wardrobe malfunction, the unexpected but highly entertaining
guests, dueling mothers of the bride. Just
go home and youtube it. You’ll see what
I mean.
We want
weddings to be perfect. We spend far too
much money on them, and invest every piece of them with emotional drama. There’s a great deal of beauty, but a
terrible amount of pressure. You get
that many rented suits, pinned tea roses and fondant icing in one place and
something is bound to bust loose.
Things had gone
awry at the marriage feast at Cana. They’d
run out of wine. Ancient Palestinian
weddings were multi-day affairs, and all guests were expected to furnish a
flask or two for the festivities. And
somehow, for this crowd, it wasn’t enough.
Maybe the guests were a bit cheap.
Maybe they were particularly thirsty.
Some scholars even suggest that Jesus and His disciples may have arrived
uninvited and drained the last of the wine.
It was embarrassing. People
always read symbolism into wedding mishaps, and this one augured a shortage of
joy, a failure to thrive.
There was
plenty of water on hand, though, over a hundred gallons in big stone jars for
the ceremonial washings of hands and dishes that began and ended the
meals. It suggests earnest intentions, a
desire to do right by God and the requirements of the law. But the planning hadn’t extended far enough. We intend the best: in religion, in creating
a just society, in reconciling people, in creating things of beauty and
power. We plan. We work hard.
We expect so much. It’s duty that
outlasts joy. We keep the form of the
thing long after the life within it has spent itself out. Lakes of cold water, and not a drop of
wine.
But there
was a guest at that wedding. There was One
who had come bring abundant life to the world.
He was the source of light, the One who blazed forth the Father’s
eternal joy. There was a legend that
when the Messiah came, he would work miracles—like Moses, who had struck the
rock and water poured out, like Elijjah who blessed a barrel of flour and a
cruse of oil that never ran out. The
Messiah would bring wine, the rabbis said, and plenty of it. A Jewish text written at just about the same
time as Saint John’s Gospel prophesied that in the Messiah’s day, each vine
would have a thousand branches, and each branch a thousand clusters, each
cluster a thousand grapes, and each grape would yield 120 gallons of wine.[1]
Unlike the
Prayer Book’s marriage rite,[2]
Saint John doesn’t describe this event as Jesus’ first miracle. Instead, he calls it, like the rest of the wonders
Jesus worked, “a sign.” And, he adds, “he
manifested His glory, and His disciples believed in Him.” God had raised up miracle-workers before, and
there were tricksters and conjurers then as there have always been. But there is only One Redeemer. Only one was sent by the Father, “full of
grace and truth.”[3] This is no ordinary wedding mishap, this
event at Cana. This sign—the cold barrels
of water turned to rich wine—that was a sign of His own purpose and
mission. It marked Him out as the
Promised One and it revealed what He had come to do.
Jesus said
to His mother, you might remember, that His hour
had not yet come. Just as when Saint
John talks of a sign instead of a miracle, that is no mistake. Jesus doesn’t just mean that He isn’t ready
to have His talents revealed. His hour
is that crowning purpose of His life, that painful duty for which, He would
tell these same disciples, the Father had sent Him into the world.[4] He would also be completely spent, you could say,
like those flasks that had run out at the feasts. He would be regarded as a failure by the
world, and a threat. He would go down
into the depths, emptied of all but love: condemned, stripped, beaten, crucified.
But then, He
would rise in glory. Throwing open the
cold stone door of the tomb, He would pour life and joy into this tired
world. He would bring hope to troubled
people, and awaken courage of the face of despair. He would reconcile enemies, and make saints
of the wicked.
He is the
new wine of the everlasting Kingdom. He is the very best, saved for these last
days, when God is making all things new.
He manifests His glory, and we too, like those ancient disciples, can
believe in Him and find what we have long sought. He invites us to drink of Him, and today
again we approach His Altar. There He fills
us with life no one else can give.
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