Second Sunday after Epiphany

Isaiah 62:1-5; Ps 36:5-10; I Cor 12:1-11; John 2: 1-11

Rev’d Dr Deborah Meister, ODM

For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you. (Isaiah 62:5)

Today’s Gospel beings us to a controversial incident: the first public miracle in Jesus’ ministry. Following his baptism by his cousin John, which we heard last week, each of the Gospels opens the story of Jesus’ ministry a bit differently. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus goes immediately into the wilderness to pray and to be tested for forty days; then he returns and begins to teach. John, however, is all about the miracles, which, for him, are signs of Christ’s divine mission and identity. And so, instead of starving in the wilderness, Jesus heads to a wedding, where he turns water into an astonishing quantity of wine. Really good wine, at that.

There’s a strange thing about this miracle: commentators hate it. They think it’s not dignified enough, not important enough, to have been Jesus’s first. You get the sense that they’d have preferred a healing, the feeding of a crowd — even raising someone from the dead. Those miracles, after all, would have had dignity; they’d have been worthy of the Savior of the World. Helping a family to have a good party just doesn’t meet the mark.

With respect to the commentators, I think they are missing the point. When reading scripture, context matters, and these are the readings of scholars who live in a safe and comfortable world — a world remarkably unlike the one into which Jesus was born. For people who live in the first world, a wedding feast is primarily a party — a particularly lavish one, but still, a party. But for a subjugated people, a people living under foreign domination whose laws are not their own and whose faith is jeopardized by the powerful, marriage is survival. Marriage is the promise that there will be a next generation, that the customs and language and traditions of a people will be passed on, that this time of darkness will not be the end. Just after Russia invaded Ukraine, The Washington Post ran a story about a couple who responded to the invasion by getting married, then going off to fight.^[1] This wedding shows that kind of spirit: it is the place where resistance claims a future and nourishes itself in joy.

But there’s something odd about this wedding which Jesus attends: We know next to nothing about it — not the names of the happy couple, not even how they were related to Jesus. The only thing which makes it extraordinary is Jesus’ presence and action — and that should tell us something. St. John the Evangelist is all about symbolism, and this particular miracle, in this context, carries serious symbolic weight. Throughout Scripture, the relationship between God and God’s people is described as a marriage — a rather turbulent marriage, but a marriage nonetheless. And while you and I know that, in the ancient world, marriages were often about property rights and bloodlines, the ideal of marriage was still one of tender love and mutual support. All these scriptural passages, such as the Isaiah reading we heard this morning, point toward a time in which the love between God and God’s people will be unblemished, unfailingly tender, in which the God the bridegroom will come to God’s people and take her in faithfulness forever.

John is tapping into that hope — that mystical hope for perfect union with God — when he places Jesus’ first miracle at a wedding feast. He’s jumping up and down; he’s pointing with all he’s got: This is the Bridegroom we were promised. This is the final consummation of the love between God and humankind.

The details of the miracle bear this out. John tells us that there were six stone jugs there for the Jewish rites of purification; he means, for the mikvah, the ritual bath in which faithful Jews would purify themselves on certain occasions (and still do). Observant Jewish men would use them before each sabbath; ritual bathing prepared one for the near presence of God. Indeed, the Jewish sabbath was viewed as a time of dwelling intimately with God. Even today, the hymn which welcomes sabbath imagines sabbath as a bride coming to meet her people — a time of renewed love and tenderness.  In a parallel move, women went to the mikvah just before they were married, and they used the mikvah to purify themselves after their monthly courses. This did not imply that there was anything wrong with female biology; it acknowledged that new life, in the form of a pregnancy, had not come, and prepared the woman for the renewed embraces of her husband.  In each case, the mikvah was not about dividing the pure from the impure, but about making what was ordinary into something holy. So the fact that Jesus used water which had been gathered for this purpose symbolized his entire ministry: that of re-sanctifying the people of God and preparing us to be held completely and eternally in divine love.

We need the spirit of that wedding now, that spirit of love and resistance. In the last week, it’s been hard to escape a pervasive sense that we are entering difficult times. The future leadership of our nation is unclear, while a nation which has been our closest ally is about to be under leadership whose goodwill cannot be assumed. Our current leaders have been in urgent meetings to plan a response to the threat of tariffs which have the capacity to inflict significant economic harm. And, as right-wing rhetoric about vulnerable people takes form as actual policy, many in our congregation fear for themselves and for those they love.

At times like these, it is easy to become fixated on what can go wrong — to turn our life into a perpetual session of doomscrolling.  But the wedding at Cana reminds us that we, God’s people, are not called to live in fear. Fear weakens us; hope and joy are what sustain us to endure. When we are going through something difficult, as individuals or as a community, we need our people around us. We need to gather, to break bread, to mourn, to sing, to open our hearts to one another and so to be fed. These simple acts of human companionship somehow strengthen us to continue, like a mother who sees her toddler fall, picks him up, dusts him off, and sets him on his feet again. Joy and community empower us to resist what is evil and to continue in God’s love.

For all that Cana’s wedding seems to be joyful, there are hints in it of a more difficult kind of redemption. The mikvah was also used by the High Priest to prepare himself for the act of atonement, and the prophet Isaiah writes of God treading the wine-press, which early Christians understood to foreshadow the cross. In our faith, the deep love and joy of God — the love and joy in which we have been clothed at our baptisms — bind us more closely to the mystery of human suffering, just as they bound Christ into it. The love that we share does not allow us to retreat into a safe but deadening indifference. In the words of James Otis Sargent Huntington, “Love must act as light must shine and fire must burn.”

During the last eight years, we at this Cathedral have been privileged to experience love acting in a very particular way: through the music of Nicholas Capozzoli. Many of our members and occasional visitors know him primarily as a consummate musician, but those of us who work closely with Nick know that his liturgical music comes from a place of deep faithfulness and spiritual vitality.  We speak a lot about the beauty of holiness, but that’s not just a set of words. Faithfulness and love create beauty, particularly when they are shared. Today, we rejoice in the gifts Nick has brought us even as we pray him and Caroline into their new life. We mourn and we celebrate all at once, and we do it together.

And so, as we move into a future which feels a bit uncertain, let us hold fast to Cana’s sign.  We are held in an everlasting love —  you and I and all this world. We may not understand that right now; we may struggle even to believe it; but on some level beyond our sight, this pain and darkness have already been overcome. That does not make them all right; it means they do not get to define the future. We do: we, the people of God, nourished in joy, sustained in hope, walking forward in love together.  And so, in hope and in eager expectation, we the church cry out “‘Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!’ The grace of the Lord Jesus be with us all.” (Rev 22:20)

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/06/ukraine-checkpoint-wedding/