Epiphany 2

“Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” Let’s add one more item to that list of essential wedding ingredients: “Something to go wrong.” You could call it “Murphy’s Law: The wedding corollary.”

It’s not a bad thing to mention to brides and grooms during premarital counseling. There they are, feeling nervous that everything may not go according to plan at their wedding. “Don’t worry,” you can assure them, “It won’t go according to plan.” There is always something (or someone) forgotten, neglected, backwards or late. There is always a slip-up, mishap or stumbling over words, stairs or long dresses.

“Don’t worry,” you can tell them, “Something will go wrong — and it will very likely become the centerpiece of your favorite wedding story years from now!”

 At the marriage at Cana, something went quite wrong. Only this was no minor glitch. According to the customs of the day, it was a social disaster: The wine ran out.

But then, Mary — who somehow must have known what her son could do, even though John tells us this was his first miracle — turns to one of the servants and gestures in Jesus’ direction. “Do whatever he tells you,” she instructs.

And Jesus tells him. He commands the servant to take the six stone jars lined up against the wall — jars typically used to hold the water used for washing hands and feet upon entering the house, according to the law. Then he tells him to fill them with water. The servant does so, and when he pours some back out — wonder of wonders — it has turned to wine!

And not just any wine. This is the finest vintage, the stuff most hosts would serve first, to impress their guests. It’s not the bargain label they hold in reserve for later in the banquet, for those party animals who don’t know when to stop.

The bride and the groom look at each other with astonishment and relief. If, as the servants claim, it is true that all six of the stone jars are now filled with wine, there’s not a chance of running short. Each of those stone jars holds 20-30 gallons. That’s at least 120 gallons of wine – at least 600 bottles! Jesus has taken their family’s shameful deficiency and transformed it into overflowing abundance!

Jesus loved a good party. It’s one of the things about him the scribes and Pharisees loved to criticize. They might have aspired to asceticism. They might have measured their lives by fasting and austere discipline. But this tradesman-rabbi from Nazareth was none of these things.

Jesus comes to celebrate all that’s good about this world and human life, and to teach us what needs to be done to make sure such goodness continues to abound.

By growing to maturity in a small Jewish village — and later in tramping, with his disciples, the length and breadth of that sunny land — Jesus took on human life in all its rich variety. He took it on, and he redeemed it. In being born to a human mother, in growing up in an ordinary family, in being baptized, in attending wedding feasts, in playing with children — even in fashioning that whip of cords and letting his anger run its course as he drove the money changers from the temple — Jesus hallowed this human life of ours. He made the experiences of birth, marriage and even death more sacred and meaningful.

In a small, out-of-the-way village such as Cana, a wedding could be the social event of the year, the focus of enormous pressures on the families involved. Jesus was happy to play a small role in making that social event successful.

You may have noticed that the water jars Jesus uses are special. John takes pains to tell us they are the stone jars for the Jewish rites of purification. Upon entering the banquet hall, all the wedding guests were expected to wash their hands and feet in the biblically prescribed manner to make themselves ritually pure for the celebration. This was in fulfillment of the law, so surely every guest, Jesus included, would have done so. That’s why those jars are sitting there empty, and why Jesus has to instruct the servants to fill them back up with water.

Surely, it’s not without a sense of humor that Jesus singles out these containers to hold the wine. He could have easily used the wineskins or clay jugs that the first round of drinks had come in. It would have been perfectly logical for him to do so. Instead, Jesus makes use of the purification vessels. Why?

Jesus chooses these six stone jars to make a point. Yes, Jesus is faithful to God’s law, but he has seen too many people burdened by the overly zealous application of it. He has seen the law — which was first given in its pristine form, the Ten Commandments, to free the human race from sin — transformed into an intricate machine for crushing the human spirit. Remember what Jesus tells his disciples when they’re hungry one Sabbath day, and he sends them into the fields to harvest food: “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

Jesus will go forth, eventually, to take up a cross and die. In so doing, he will bear the burden of the world’s sin. In these bright and beautiful days he has left, the Savior of the world is not one to be weighed down by care and worry. He is not one to borrow trouble by gazing solemnly out into the distant future. “Today’s trouble is enough for today,” he teaches, in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:34). At the wedding feast, let the wine be poured. Let the people dance. And let the bride and groom be radiant with joy.

 For John, the changing of water into wine is a sign. That’s what he calls it. John studiously avoids the Greek word for “miracle” — even though that’s the word most of us would use in retelling this story. People of our age look back on this event and focus on the suspension of natural laws. People of John’s age, by contrast, would have taken it for granted that supernatural wonders like this could take place.

For John, the most important feature of the water turning to wine is the greater reality to which it points — the reality of God’s redeeming love, already at work in the person of Jesus Christ. The wedding at Cana is a tantalizing glimpse, a sneak preview, of all that will one day come to pass — the rescue of the universe from the forces of darkness and the everlasting celebration that will follow.

For the early church, that celebration finds its focus in the sacrament of the Lord’s supper — and, for this reason, it’s no accident that wine is the central feature of the Cana event. At the center of many other religions of the Roman world is the acrid smoke of burning sacrificial meat, the whispered words of mysterious revelation, or the re-enactment of a cosmic drama. But the center of Christian worship is different. At the center of Christian worship is a feast of bread and wine, the first fruits of a greater celebration yet to come.

Of this “first sign” Jesus did “in Cana of Galilee,” John says it “revealed his glory” (John 2:11). That’s the future dimension of this story, the one we’re all so likely to miss if we allow ourselves to be dazzled by the miraculous nature of the event. For John, what’s most significant about the wedding of Cana is the way it points us to the future and the way it functions as a sign in the truest sense.

 Richard Wilbur is a former poet laureate of the United States. In 1971, his son got married. When your father is a famous poet, what you get for a wedding present is a poem. In these brief and beautiful words, Wilbur captures the wonder of this sign of water turned to wine: its joy and its promise.

“A Wedding Toast”

St. John tells how, at Cana’s wedding feast,
The water-pots poured wine in such amount
That by his sober count
There were a hundred gallons at the least.

It made no earthly sense, unless to show
How whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to sweet excess
That can without depletion overflow,

Which is to say that what love sees is true;
That the world’s fullness is not made but found,
Life hungers to abound
And pour its plenty out for such as you.

Now, if your loves will lend an ear to mine,
I toast you both, good son and dear new daughter,
May you not lack for water,
And may that water smack of Cana’s wine.

May the same be true for us and all whom we love. As the years unfold before us, may we discover — both in our own lives and in the life of the world — that God “has kept the best wine until last!”