At the reception when Meg and I got married, the beer gave
out. Actually, there was plenty of it—we
ordered a quarter-keg of Liberty Ale and I had my best man pick it up that
afternoon, after which my brothers took charge of it. But somewhere along the line the tap got
broken, and they spent the whole reception, and several hours back at their motel
room after it was over, coaxing a slow dribble of beer from a tantalizingly full
container. The irony was that St.
Gregory’s Church, where the wedding and reception took place, is directly
across the street from the Anchor Brewery, where that keg had been filled. So if Jesus had been there, he wouldn’t have
needed to perform a miracle. He could
have just sent some volunteers across the street to commandeer a delivery truck,
backed it up to the church and started rolling off more beer.
Now, that would have been gratuitous—the beer wasn’t flowing,
but we had wine, and it wasn’t a hard-drinking crowd, anyway. The altar table at St. Gregory’s is in the
middle of a large octagonal hardwood floor, which is sprung for dancing. And the altar’s also portable, so when you
move it to one side, you’re ready to go. We had a good DJ, and our friends like to
dance, so the party was on, no matter what.
But what Jesus did in Cana was gratuitous, too. Maybe it was a little sad that they were out
of wine, but surely they didn’t need one-hundred twenty to one-hundred eighty
gallons of it. And that stupendous
quantity is the first clue we have that the point of this story goes beyond the
mere fact that Jesus could change water into wine.
The Gospel of John says that this is the
first of Jesus’ miraculous signs. This
wedding is where the public ministry of Jesus begins. No one is sure exactly where Cana would be if
it were still standing, but it seems to have been a village in Galilee, not far
from Nazareth. The three “synoptic”
gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, also say that Jesus’ ministry began in
Galilee. But in those versions Jesus does
a lot of his work there, in all kinds of settings, in the houses of the people,
and by the road and beside the lake. But
this is the only place in John where we see Jesus in the company of the
Galilean people, in the course of their ordinary lives.
So you could say that this scene at the wedding in Cana
stands for a whole phase of Jesus’ ministry, as he carried it out in the
everyday social milieu of the people he knew best. And it suggests that what he gave them was an
extravagant experience of celebration, of participation in an overflowing spirit
of gladness and community. And we can
see this by entering into the imaginative world of this story and playing there
for a minute. We just have to ask, “What
happens to all that good wine?”
Well the wedding party has already drunk a lot of the cheap
stuff, so I suppose the next in line would be the lower-ranking among the
invited guests, and then I guess it would be the turn of the servants, who’d be
ready to unwind after filling all those water jars. The news would travel fast, and pretty soon
the wedding crashers would arrive, and the servants’ friends would be coming
by, and by the next day or the next, folks would be wandering the streets of
Cana, giving the stuff away. That
wedding would be remembered as the biggest party in the history of the town,
when everyone got to join in a celebration that went on for days.
Now Jesus’ disciples were at the wedding—John mentions that
at the beginning of the story and again at the end—and the result of what
happened was that they believed in him.
But here again, I think it’s not just the fact that he turned water into
wine that made the impression. It was
the way hr transformed an ordinary village wedding into a celebration that overflowed
to embrace everyone in the community, where everyone got to share in the joy of
the bride and groom. In this miracle Jesus
gave his disciples a vision of a greater and even more inclusive wedding feast,
of which his whole ministry was the sign. and at which he is the host. And if the host, then also the bridegroom.
The ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, the things that he said
and did in the towns and villages of ancient Palestine, was a public
demonstration that God really does love us.
Jesus spoke and acted for the God of scriptures like the 62nd
chapter of Isaiah, a God who desires his people, who finds them beautiful and
chooses them for his very own and pledges faithfulness to them that will last
forever. And in the company of Jesus,
those people saw a vision of what a faithful response to the love of God looks
like as they united with one another in an inclusive community of abundance and
celebration and love.
Meg and I didn’t worry too much when the beer ran out at our wedding,
because it wasn’t really our party, at least not entirely. It was a church wedding, and I don’t mean merely
that it took place in a church. We threw
in a few wrinkles, like a neo-pagan invocation of the ancestors and the four directions,
but basically the ceremony was a celebration of the Holy Eucharist like it
happens every Sunday at St. Gregory’s.
We invited our friends and family, but also the whole church congregation,
and we trusted that the people of Saint Gregory’s would know how to embrace a
company of strangers and help them become a worshipping community.
The husband of the parish administrator turned out to be a
pastry chef and gave us an incredible three-tiered cake. While Meg’s mom and stepdad went to Costco
for the food and drinks, some folks from the congregation went to San Francisco’s
wholesale flower market, and brought back materials from which they made arrangements
and a bridal bouquet. We recruited
volunteers to set up the tables after the ceremony and to bring out the food
and to serve the champagne. Various people were photographs, and somebody even
brought a video camera. The church choir
sang an anthem. One of our priests gave
the sermon, another performed the wedding, and the third did a beautiful job
chanting the neo-pagan invocation to an improvised tone.
In this way we got to have a bigger and more beautiful
wedding than a psychotherapist intern and a seminarian could ever have afforded
otherwise. Not that it was perfect. The tap on the beer keg broke. Our wedding album, such as it is, is full of blurry
underexposed snapshots of people having a wonderful time. The best portrait of the two of us was taken
from behind us as we greeted a line of people after the ceremony. Meg and I are looking at each other, smiling
radiantly, and right between us, looking directly at the camera, is a mentally
ill woman from the neighborhood named Audrey who ate practically a whole
platter of Costco sushi and drank too much champagne. A minute after that picture was taken, she
was hanging onto us and gushing about how she loved us and this was the best
party she could ever remember.
It was a celebration of love, and it was a profound
experience for Meg and me to be at the heart of it. But it was also about a kind of love that
modern individualistic ideas about romance don’t do justice to. It was an occasion for an outpouring of the
gifts of a whole community, a community that expanded to embrace a whole
company of strangers, where we all danced together around Jesus’ table to a
single song of joy. And in that sense it
was the continuation of a wedding feast that started a long time ago. It was about Meg and me, but it also shone
with a glory that was manifested in a place called Cana, the glory of the love
that God bears toward everyone, and what it will look like when we’re all
married together.
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