A Wedding Epiphany
Second Sunday after the Epiphany, January 16, 2022
Isaiah 62:1-5 • 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 • John 2:1-11
John 2:2 “Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.”
If it seems today that we are rushing away from the familiar Christmas story, it is because we are! John’s Gospel presses the accelerator to the floor! However, it also hangs on to a majestic vision in the rear view mirror. It opens with a return to the creation story. “In the beginning, God created ... becomes “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” For John, this same Word, who spoke the created cosmos into existence, was born incarnate in a human being, Jesus, to live among us as our sibling.
With a vision this cosmic, John rushes through the account of Jesus’ Baptism by John the Baptist and the calling of the first four disciples, Peter, Andrew, Philip and Nathaniel - all in the first of his twenty-one chapters!
Then with lightning speed he soars from the cosmos to the village of Cana. Cana, mentioned only twice in the Bible? Cana, the hometown of Nathaniel, who just days before ridiculed the possibility that Jesus could be a prophet if he came from lowly Nazareth? In a strange twist of history, Jesus chose to put Cana on the map of salvation history.
A wedding feast in this ordinary small town became the shrine of an unexplainable experience. Jesus, we are told, performed here the “first of the signs that revealed his glory.” The word for “first” takes us back to the creation story! It would be better translated, Jesus’ “beginning sign revealed his glory.” This beginning would go on through many such signs. Each an indication of the breaking into time of the extravagant grace of God for our human good: healings, multiplication of foods, transformation of persons, and the raising of the dead.
But we are getting ahead of the immediate story, the “signness” of the wedding in Cana. Jesus’ Mother must have had family or friends living there who invited her. Through her, Jesus and his first disciples were “also” invited. She is not called by her name in the entire story. Nor are we given the names of the bride or bridegroom. Jesus is the only one named. His presence is central to the signness of the event.
When the wine supply ran out during the seven day celebration, Jesus’ Mother calls attention to the need but does not ask him to address it. Jesus reminds her that his “hour” has not yet come – a mild scolding. But if his disclosure of being the Word made flesh” is his ”epiphany” vocation, then why not in this hour? In response, Jesus urges the servants to fill six 25 gallon stone jars “to the brim” with water, customarily used for daily rites of purification.
When the wine steward samples the additional liquid he scolds the bridegroom for reserving the superior wine until so late in the celebration.
The response of the disciples to the glory revealed in Jesus at the Cana wedding was that they believed in him as Emmanuel, God with us. Their eyes were fixed on his glory and not on the sign of bounteous wine. The wine pointed to the mystery of God’s presence and power in Jesus.
St. Augustine and others discovered that in the face of divine mystery, “we do not seek to understand in order to believe. We believe in order to understand.” This does not excuse us from using our brains. It frees us to recognize the unexplainable signs of God’s love around us every day. A new hymn invites us to sing:
Incarnate, God appears embracing all our tears: Hallelujah! God’s majesty eternally revealed to set the cosmos free.2
1 I acknowledge gratefully the use of insights from the work of Gail R. O’Day in The New Interpreter’s Bible, The Gospel of John, Vol. 9 (Nashville, TN, Abingdon Press, 1995.
2 Arthur G. Clyde, “Keep Awake, Be Always Ready,” No. 112, The New Century Hymnal (Pilgrim Press, Cleveland, OH, 1995).