2 Epiphany, Year C 2024: John 2:1-11

I love going to weddings. While it might be en vogue to complain about them, I’m on the positive end of the complaining spectrum. Even when the couple has made choices that I wouldn’t have made, or that I think they’ll cringe a little bit about some of those choices when they look back on the day in a few years, I always have a great time. There’s a special kind of optimism at weddings that permeates the space. It’s an opportunity to get together, get dressed up, and to celebrate a love that everyone at that event intends on being everlasting. And in the Episcopal marriage liturgy, everyone witnessing the marriage is asked, “Will all of you witnessing these promises do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage?” to which the people respond, “we will”. Everyone in attendance makes a promise to be a community, a support system, for this newly formed family.

And there’s something exciting about  that joy and optimism. Like a small child’s birthday party: an event where everyone makes a tacit agreement to leave our troubles at the door and bask in the light. Jesus shows us this practice in today’s Gospel: a time of joy in the midst of suffering. John just told us at the beginning of the last chapter about the light shining in the darkness and not being overcome by the darkness. And here we see the light in this wedding. These are an occupied people under Rome’s thumb in the poor, peasant community of Cana. But even in the midst of their poverty, weddings were still celebrated all out! Wedding banquets were the most festive occasions in first century Palestine, especially in the peasant class. Wedding banquets typically lasted seven days and those invited might be expected to contribute provisions such as wine. The banquets featured dancing, wine, and vast quantities of food. The normal peasant diet was meager: grains, vegetables, fruit, olives, eggs, and an occasional fish. Meat and poultry were infrequently eaten, since people were reluctant to kill the few animals they had. But at a wedding banquet, there were copious amounts of foods of all kinds. (Borg, 204-5)

It’s unclear how far into the wedding we are at the time of this story. Although John starts the story with “On the third day,” he is probably referring to Jesus’ timeline, not the third day of the wedding banquet. It is simply next in line after the previous two stories of Jesus’ baptism and of Jesus’ calling of his disciples and begins with “the next day” in Jesus’ life. We at least know that this happens well into the celebration.

Jesus’ mother approaches him and tells him “they have no wine.” Jesus’ response of “woman” sometimes draws a strong reaction from modern readers, where calling someone “woman” is considered disrespectful. When I was pregnant with my oldest, my husband and I were at a Lamaze class where one of the men kept calling his pregnant partner “woman” and I still think about that woman and hope she’s ok. But Jesus was not in 21st century America. There is no evidence that he was being disrespectful to his mother. As an observant first century Jew, it would have been a clear violation of Torah for him to speak to his mother disrespectfully (and to do so in public, yikes). Plus, we have another example of Jesus calling his mother “woman” in the Gospel of John in chapter 19, this time from the cross. “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.” So we can move past the potential distraction of a grown Jesus who is rude to his mother in public and go back into this week-long celebration.

Jesus chooses this event. This very human event in an extraordinary week in the life of his community is where he begins his public ministry - John notes that this was “the first of (Jesus’) signs” in Cana of Galilee - thought to be around 5 miles from Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth. Even though he basically says to his mother that it isn’t their business that the wedding host is out of wine, she still manages to turn it over to him. She doesn’t tell him to do anything. Rather, she acknowledges his authority by instructing the servants to “do whatever he tells you.” Jesus could have said “go and find more wine”. He could have done nothing.

But Jesus chooses to enter into this multi-layered event. A joyful occasion in the midst of the hard life of a Jewish peasant living under foreign rule. And Jesus takes something that is a symbol of the Jewishness of the event - the jugs of water that were not there for drinking, but were there to be used for Jewish rites of purification - and bends them to his new, reinterpreted purpose, something he will continue to do throughout his earthly ministry. And by so doing, invites us in to a reimagined wedding feast between God and His church - a banquet in which there is always enough for all and the wine never runs out.

This feast takes place in a creation that was renewed by the resurrection, but also one in which there is still suffering. There is still sadness. There is still fear. So while we are invited into the celebration, along with infinite plus-ones, it is still hard sometimes to see a renewed creation. To not just know or believe, but to really feel that the resurrection transformed the trajectory of creation in the same way as Jesus transformed the water in those basins into wine. It requires a lot of trust, and a willingness to accept the invitation that brings us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, and out of death into life.

It can be so easy to get stuck so far in despair that we can’t see the light. My brother’s funeral was two days before my first wedding anniversary. And as much as I love my husband, I wasn’t in a particularly celebratory mood. But we still celebrated. We still did something special - although it was certainly more muted than it would have been otherwise. We did our best to accept the invitation into the light - a light that was still surrounded by the darkness of our grief, but was not overcome. It was, and remains, light.

We are invited to the wedding banquet of the revealed glory of Jesus. To accept the invitation means we have the opportunity for a life of abundance and the freedom of extending the invitation to all. There is, in the kingdom of God, always more than enough for everyone. Amen.