The Celebration and Blessing of the Marriage of Alexis Kruza and Raymond Chin

“…There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.  Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding…”John 2:1-11

             We have this wonderful wedding celebration today, but who would have expected this in light of from where they have come?  I’m talking about our Gospel lesson we’ve just heard from the Gospel of John, chapter 2: the wedding at Cana of Galilee.  Just preceding this story, in John 1, Jesus has called his first four disciples: Andrew, Simon Peter, Philip, and Nathanael.[i]  They were fishermen from Galilee, not scholars.  We don’t even know if they were literate.  We have no sense they were well-traveled, other than knowing about the Sea of Galilee, which is actually a very large lake.  So we would have every reason to think that Jesus would begin with these first four disciples by teaching them about Jewish law, or the psalms, or the prophesies predicting the coming of the Messiah. He might have taught them about healing.  Jesus might have schooled them about political and religious power: about the Roman occupying forces or about the divisions and competing political rivalries within Judaism among the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Scribes, the Zealots, and the Essenes.  He might have started with his disciples by teaching them how to pray.  Clearly, they have a lot to learn.  He might have found for them a place to live, a home base.  But how does Jesus begin the formation of his first four disciples?  Not in a classroom. Where does Jesus begin?  He takes them to a party, to a wedding feast.

In Jesus’ day, the celebration of a wedding did not occupy part of a day.  A wedding celebration was feasting for a week.  In Aramaic – which was Jesus’ first language – the word for “wedding feast” has the same roots as the word for “drink,” as in drinking wine, “wine to make the heart glad,” as we read in the psalms.[ii]Plenty of wine.  Weddings were great celebrations, for an entire village, and for both family and friends from nearby and far away.  A wedding feast was typically a huge gathering, a really fine time that went on for days and days, and not to be missed.  Jesus and his disciples clearly showed up to a lot of feasts and celebrations, among them weddings, enough so that his detractors called him “a glutton and drunkard.”[iii]  I’m not suggesting anything here spurious about Jesus’ character, but I am saying that, for Jesus it was clearly not all work and no play.

In our Gospel lesson for today, something miraculous happens.  The wine runs out, which is pitiable at a party, especially at a week-long party.  Somehow Jesus makes wine appear in what had been large jugs of water.  Miraculous.  But the Gospel writer does not actually call this a miracle.  In the Gospel according to John, this is called “a sign,” because this has more to do with Jesus’ power than it does with the actual appearance of this new, fine wine.[iv]  This is a sign of things to come.  Which is important to remember.

Another feature of a wedding is the making of vowed promises.  It’s not just the bride and groom who promise their love and faithfulness to one another.  They ask for help.  They ask for the help of their family and friends so that they can be faithful to their vowed promises.  And that’s significant for two reasons.  For one, we make principled promises, such Alexis and Raymond will today, because on a tough day, we might easily rationalize or justify doing something else. We don’t just do this at weddings.  For example, we periodically are invited to renew our baptismal vows.[v]  We may have been baptized years, even decades, ago.  But when we are periodically invited to renew our baptismal vows, we are asked, yet again: “Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?”  We don’t say in response, “I already answered that.”  No, the answer we give is, “I will, with God’s help.” [...]