.800w.tn.jpg) |
| "The Marriage Feast at Cana" Bartolome Esteban Murilo, 1672 |
Water turned to wine, huh?
The Gospel lesson for Epiphany 2, Year C
(John 2:1-11) is one I preach on a lot. It’s really a great text for a wedding
homily if you think about it. I always use the example from verse 10:
“…everyone serves the good wine first,
then the inferior wine when the guests have become drunk…”
I think this is a good admonition to newly
married couples. When you’re dating, you dress up, bust out the cologne, pay
for nice dinners, have adventurous dates, hold doors, send flowers, etc. But
when you’ve been married for a few years you start acting like a slob and walk
around the house in sweat pants or eat Pringles out of the can while sitting on
the sofa watching football. You gain 15 pounds, leave the cap off the
toothpaste, and forget your anniversary. Hey! You’re married. You don’t need to
impress her anymore.
In the world of this Gospel text, good
impressions counted for a lot. Especially with wine. They served the good stuff
first and only brought out the cheap vino when the guests were too bombed to
know the difference. Wine was only consumed for special occasions anyway, and
it had a way of getting nasty if it sat in the skins too long. A wedding,
however, was certainly a special occasion in the ancient Near East. It carried
with it social obligations which were a matter of family pride—not greatly
unlike an Italian wedding in South Philly. The whole village would be invited
to participate in the procession and feasting. If the wine gave out too soon,
the family of the couple could be disgraced by their poverty and inability to
provide.
In our Gospel lesson, Jesus’ mom gets
really worried when the wine runs out too soon (v. 3). She mentions this to her
Son, confident that he’ll know what to do. He’s at first reluctant saying, “Woman,
what concern is that to you or to me? My hour has not yet come.”[i] This has no effect on
Mary, however, as she just assumes her boy will honor whatever she wishes. And she’s
right (like all moms). Jesus does.
So what’s so special here? Believe me,
there are lots of places we can go
with this story. The one place I hope we avoid, however, is the simplistic
reading that Jesus did a cool magic trick and created faith in his followers. I
don’t think that leaves us with much.
Here’s just one of the things I really like
about this story: It’s about
transformation. I’m sure the folks whose kids were getting married were
really nice people. After all, they invited the Virgin Mary to their wedding,
and I’m certain she didn’t hang with dirtballs and lowlifes. Note that John
first mentions Jesus’ mother as the primary
guest, and says Jesus was also invited.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Jesus was invited out of
courtesy because of his relationship to Mary, and that the other disciples were
invited out of courtesy because of their relationship to him. In essence, the
groom’s folks are Mary’s friends, and she is concerned about their reputation.
By performing this miracle, Jesus transforms
a potentially embarrassing or even shameful inadequacy into an occasion in
which the sommelier praises the groom
(and, by extension, his family) for his exquisite taste in saving the very best
until last.
But that’s what our faith teaches that Jesus
does. He transforms. He takes the shameful, the impoverished, the mediocre, the
inadequate, the unimportant and commonplace by the world’s standards and
transforms it into an occasion for joy and praise.
How? And what does this mean for us?
The answer goes back to the question: what
does faith in Jesus mean to you? It can’t be just about church membership or a
doctrine you signed onto at your baptism or confirmation. No. What faith in
Jesus demands is a living, daily belief in the power of love and forgiveness.
It’s about believing in the miracle of sacrifice by knowing that God always has
more gifts to bestow on us than we stand to lose by generosity or chance. It’s
about believing in resurrection and eternal life and the very existence of the
soul. It’s about the strength which comes from knowing that we may never be
cured, but we can always be made whole. When we take Jesus—as he is revealed in
the scriptures—as our paradigm for life, our shame is transformed into
confidence, our guilt into wisdom and gratitude, our poverty into abundance,
and our ordinary moments and events into miniature festivals of joy.
I think it’s significant that this passage
ends with:
Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in
Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (v. 11)
Just his disciples? Probably. The rest of
the folks at that wedding got nothing else out of it but a good time and a bad
hangover. But for some, it mattered that Jesus was present in their lives and
in that moment. Their minds were opened to know God’s goodness and purpose, and
to believe that the really good stuff
was still to come.
Thanks again for visiting this week. I
appreciate it!
[i]
Now, I don’t know about you, but if I ever addressed my mom as “Woman”—no matter
how old I was—she’d have slapped the taste out of my mouth. But I guess if you’re
Jesus you can get away with stuff like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment