Prayers and Sermon

January 19, 2025

Recording of Weekly Prayers:

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Wedding (and Lament) at Cana

Joshua Maria Garcia

Recording of the Sermon:

“…and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,

so shall your God rejoice over you.”

May I speak in the name of God + Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

I was at the tail end of the Covid lockdown, attending spiritual direction on the phone, and my director would always answer the phone the same way: “Hi Joshua, who is God to you today?” To be honest with you, this question really got on my nerves. I would offer a canned response like, “God is Creator, Jesus is God,” or, “I’m a Trinitarian!” Nevertheless, she persisted, asking me each month, at our scheduled time, “Joshua, who is God to you today?”

Finally, one day, I got fed up and I said, “What do you mean who is God? I am a Christian, you are a Christian, we both know who God is.” And then I went on a rant about creedal orthodoxy and Trinitarianism. But my rant did not last long before my director gently interrupted and said, “I know all that, Joshua. What I am asking is, who is God…to you? How is God making God-self known to you today?” I paused, and did my best to open my ears to listen, and immediately I thought of my grandmother, who died around that time. I thought of her hugs, the way she embraced so openly, softly, and sincerely. I would sacrifice so much to have a hug like that again. I shared this with my spiritual director, and she asked, “Do you know that’s the way God loves you?”

I don’t remember how I answered that, but it was something like, “Yes, of course, the Bible says…the evidence suggests…” I know in my rational mind that this is what I am supposed to believe. But that’s not what she was asking. She asked again, “Do you know that’s the way God loves you? How have you experienced that love of God in your life?”

Okay, hold that question in mind while we address some literary analysis.

The Wedding at Cana is not a story about a wedding. A wedding happens in the story, but that’s not what it’s about. As any good Bible commentary will tell you, Jesus’ miraculous transformation of water into wine is the first of John’s Seven Signs, which demonstrate the divinity of Jesus. But while the miracle has symbolic value, it is not the miracle itself which gets us in touch with the divinity of Jesus.

You will notice that John’s unique telling, which appears nowhere else in the Synoptic Gospels, the other gospels, never mentions a bride and barely acknowledges a groom. In fact, few of the formal trappings of a wedding are present at Cana, and that should be very surprising to us, because first century Judaean weddings were seven days long. They involved processions, role playing, two written contracts, and yes, a lot of food, wine, and dancing. Jewish marriage was and is a sampling of the messianic age, and many of the scriptures cited during the marriage ritual allude to the coming Messiah, and the destruction and restoration of the Jerusalem Temple. Cana has none of that, at least not explicitly, and it’s not a mistake. To a first century reader, this story screams, “Do you get it? It’s not really about the wedding!” And as if to aggressively highlight that point, John has set the wedding in a town that does not exist.

There are at least four villages in northern Israel and southern Lebanon, all within historic Galilee, which claim to be the Cana of wedding fame. It will not surprise you to learn they have economies heavily reliant on tourism. But I think it’s likely that John made up the name Cana, or Qanah, because it sounds like two other words in Hebrew. One is qniyah, which means “acquisition” or “wedding.” Considering this, we might as well rename the Wedding at Cana, “the Wedding at Wedding-town.” Not a real place! But the other word it sounds like is qinah, that is lament, and all these words apparently share the same Semitic root. John is playing with language, to signal to the reader that this story is symbolic.

He mentions no bride, but our ears prick up when Jesus calls his mother, “woman,” which in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, also means “wife.” Now in English I know it sounds rude to call your mother “woman,” but this is only an English problem. In fact, it’s literally an English problem, as in it comes from England. What John 2:4 says in Greek is, “Madam, what does this have to do with us?” Jesus employs the Greek gunai, woman as an honorific; he is not being rude but rather extra polite. Jesus sounding rude toward his mother in this story wasn’t an issue until the King James Bible, which bent the translation of his speech to intentionally diminish the importance of Mary.

You see, Catholics use the Wedding at Cana as proof of Mary’s catalytic participation in the ministry of Jesus, as well as her intercessory role for the Church today. After all, the bartender doesn’t go to Jesus about the wine, he goes through Mary. This deference to the Mother of Christ serves as the basis of the Latin teaching, Ad Iesum Per Mariam, to Jesus through Mary. With the Reformation in full swing in England, King James would not have liked that, and his translators changed it to “Woman, what have you to do with me?” Not only does it sound rude, it also disguises Mary’s near equal footing in the original grammar of our verse. Jesus says, “Madam, what has this to do with me and with you,” with both “me” and “you” in the same grammatical case.

The truth is, neither Jesus nor the author of John dismiss Mary by calling her “woman.” Nor does John dismiss her by never using her first name in his entire Gospel. Instead, something deeper and more powerful is happening here, which we learn from the next three times that John has Jesus calling a nameless female character, “woman.”

When Jesus meets the Samaritan at the well, he calls her “woman” and reveals himself to her as the promised Messiah. Do you hear that? He told some Samaritan woman before he told a Jewish man that he was the Messiah of Israel. But do you remember the rest of that story? Jesus specifically mentions that she has no husband, that she has been divorced five times, and is cohabiting with a lover. And do you remember any other Bible stories where a man and a woman meet at a well, and how those ones typically end in…a wedding?!

Later in John, when the scribes and Pharisees bring a woman caught in adultery to Jesus, he calls her “woman” and saves her life. Notice that there is no husband in that story to accuse her, which is very strange, because to be an adulteress in Jewish law, one must have a husband present to at least issue the charge. There must be an injured party for there to be a crime, since ancient marriage law is mostly about protecting property and assessing damages…and so is modern marriage law. Strangely, Jesus is the one given the opportunity to accuse her, he’s the one put into the role of husband, and he refuses to play along. Like the kingdom of King Jesus, his marriage – his love – is not of this world.

Finally, when Jesus is dying on the cross, his mother and beloved disciple stand on either side of him, opposite each other, with Jesus between them and elevated above them. We couldn’t make it look more like a wedding if we put a chuppah, a wedding canopy over it. Then Jesus gives his mother to his disciple, and he gives the disciple to his mother, because she has no husband anymore to take care of her after her son dies. And he says again, “Woman, here is your son! Here is your mother!” And then he drinks wine. It’s a wedding scene.

But the crucifixion is not just qniyah, it’s not just acquisition of relationship, a cause to celebrate. Now it is also qinah, lament. Here the reader ought to recall what happened at Qanah, the Wedding at Cana, when Jesus said to his mother, “Woman…my time has not yet come.” For here, on Calvary, his time has come, and this moment is what it all was leading up to – this is what his ministry, his suffering, Mary’s suffering, the sword that pierced her heart – this is what it was for. It wasn’t for the miracles, to get the attention of a traumatized and cynical audience, and it was not to display the literary genius of John, or whoever authored the Johannine texts (it was probably a committee). All of this was for this cosmic, timeless moment when Jesus gives his mother to the disciple and the disciple to his mother. And Mary and the beloved disciple are nameless, so that we may see ourselves in them, so that we may experience his love for us. On the Tree, his tree of death, our Tree of Life, his arms spread wide open, to embrace us, we imagine, and yes, he does embrace us, but he also gives us to each other. In and through spiritual marriage and lament, I am yours, and you are mine.

Let’s recap. At Cana, Jesus rescues the bride and groom from a grave faux pas. At the well, he offers the Samaritan woman companionship and hope. He acquits the alleged adulteress, and her accuser is erased from the story, replaced by a lover who will never abandon her. I wonder: will Jesus replace my accuser to be a lover who will never abandon me? Maybe then I can overcome my need to sound smart, and just answer the question my spiritual director asks, “Who is God to you today?”

Today, God is here, revealed to us in this story, present with us in this place. God is in this community, this communion, because we have received the invitation, we have answered it. And we have brought our insufficiencies and shame, our guilt and grief, with all the good and bad we carry, the worry, despair, and hope. Here we are, some rejoicing at the Wedding, others grieving a Mother’s Lament, all of us deeply known and beloved disciples of Jesus. Love, divine love, is present with it all.

The story is symbolic, but I need you to hear that right: I did not say that the story is just symbolic, there is no such thing as just symbolic. In utilizing the tangible trappings of marriage, which are so culturally vital to the Jewish people, John crosses the comfortable boundary line we draw between sign and signified, between story and moral. As we dive deeper into storytelling, especially John’s storytelling, we begin to wonder if this story of love is even more real than we are. Literary analysis is not about mastering literature, noticing how it emerges from human consciousness like a thing we construct. At a more fundamental level, literary critics are concerned with how human consciousness emerges from story.

John says, “You think the wedding is a symbol of the Church’s relationship with Jesus and his mother? Fine, but what if you are a symbol of the wedding.” The Word of God does indeed emerge from human experience – someone had to write this stuff down – but more importantly the Word of God is a loving person from whom we emerge into being. The Gospel according to John is not a bunch of stories about Jesus, the way that we might like to read Matthew or Luke, who conveniently write along an almost western narrative arc. John shows us how Jesus, who is Love, is our story, and it is from him, from Love, that we emerge into existence, and it is to him, only in union with one another, that we return to union with God, that is our true marriage, that is salvation.

Did you hold the question in mind?

For the past few years, I’ve been seeing the same spiritual director monthly, with few interruptions. Without exaggeration, I can tell you that our conversation has been about that one question the entire time: “How have you experienced that love of God in your life?” My answer changes day to day, and minute by minute, but what I have been delighted to find, with so much support and guidance, is that such love, God’s love is life’s only constant. There is no miracle so mysterious or impressive that it can prove to the intellectual mind what we say we believe, but dwelling in the sheltering shadow of the love of God, most explicitly expressed in the person of Jesus Christ and this his Church – that is better proof. Like a grandmother silently embracing her children, Jesus teaches us that there is at least one knowable thing, and we find it here, together.

Let us pray: Jesus you show your abundant love to every tender heart you touch. Soften our hearts today to receive you and embolden us to share you. Whenever we fail to love you, or one another, gently turn our eyes toward your wide-open embrace – mercy for our redeemed but broken world. We ask this in the holy name of Love + Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.