Epiphany 2 2025 -The Wedding
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
John 2:1–11

“You have kept the good wine until now.” – John 2:10

In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen

There’s something wrong at the wedding at Cana in Galilee.  Things go wrong at weddings. I’ve been a priest now for 30 years and the stories abound: there’s the shock of no flowers at the service because although they were ordered in the hectic run up to the day, no one remembered to pay for them.  There’s the truly bizarre, like the spectacle of an ex-husband entering the church and rolling a bowling ball down the aisle toward the couple about to be wed.  The stories are so great in number that they could derail our reflection on this passage from the start.

Early in premarital counseling, I try to address the issue head on, telling the intending couple that things go wrong at weddings, and that whatever happens, it will all turn out ok.  They never want to hear it. I think it’s that in our culture, we have now replaced the celebration of the wedding with “wedding as performance art,” which means that the truth that things go wrong is too unpalatable to consider.  This is also perhaps why the two hardest people for me to deal with as a priest going into a wedding were always the wedding planner – whose livelihood depended on things not going wrong – and the mother-of-the-bride- who having learned that things go wrong at a wedding when she experienced her own, often has developed over the years a rather controlling desire to relive her wedding dreams through the person of her daughter. 

God bless them, their efforts almost never work.  Their efforts, however, do point to the high-anxiety, low-stakes world we have made for ourselves: from posting photos of our meals and our workouts to everything being turned into a joyless routine geared toward excellence- meditation, travel, raising children, home decor- we have sacrificed the living of life for the management and curation of it. Living “Your Best Life Now,” demands it. So we strive and strive and strive, even as we fail and fail and fail. Anxiety and fear skyrocket, as do stress-related illnesses, that nagging sense of emptiness, pharmaceutical hacks, and self-help cures. But our human reality means that, try as we might, we’ll never get it right.  Not really.  Things just go wrong at weddings, and everywhere else.

And so it shouldn’t surprise us that there’s something wrong at the wedding at Cana of Galilee.  Jewish weddings of that time were quite different affair then what we’re used to.   There was a formal betrothal celebration, with a contract between the families, a bride-price, and several rituals. The betrothal was, in some ways, more important than the wedding itself.  For the wedding proper, friends and family would come from near and far for a 7-day live-in party, not just a service and reception.

It’s in the midst of the multi-day party that we join the Cana wedding in progress today.  As the festivities have run on, it seems they’ve run out of wine.  Here is a failure of planning, a loss of honor, a sense of shame that dwarfs all my wedding tales.  Everybody knows what’s expected- a seven-day party.  How could you possibly allow the event to run out of wine?  Further, in an age without a nearby Sam’s Club, how can this mistake possibly be fixed?

On the surface, the story we have today is simple enough: despite an initial pushback towards his mother- because Jesus is the Messiah, and not a caterer- he nonetheless intervenes and in the midst of potential embarrassment, performance expectations, and uncertainty, he provides a stupendous amount – we can estimate it at about 2160 standard glasses – of not just wine, but the very best wine.  The wine flows, the party continues, the steward is impressed, the bridegroom is praised, and Mary and the disciples gain faith in Jesus. “The end.” That’s the story as we have it. But the meaning? The meaning goes deeper, for it connects to a deeper story, and a deeper performance anxiety.  John tells us that what happens at Cana is Jesus’ first sign, which means it’s not about the wine or the party. It’s about him. It’s about his work. The wedding and the wine are simply pretext and context for a deeper story and a deeper issue.

See, there’s something else wrong at the wedding at Cana in Galilee. It has everything to do with the jars Jesus uses to hold the wine.  Those large water pots are for the Jewish rite of purification. They are a reminder that, at the most basic of levels, all is not well and that there is a need greater than that of a further supply of wine. Water from them is used for the washing away of sin. It is used, but it doesn’t work. Saint Augustine muses that it is tasteless and colorless and joyless, and it doesn’t take away sin. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, we hear that religious rituals “can never … make perfect those who draw near.… In these sacrifices [these purifications] there is a reminder of sin year after year” (Heb. 10:1–3). The water in the story represents all our human attempts, and especially our religious attempts, to make things right.

For the whole history of their existence as a people, the Israelites have tried to live up to the covenant, to fulfill the requirements of the law: sometimes devoutly, sometimes half-heartedly, sometimes with their fingers crossed behind their back, but they have tried.  It has gotten them nowhere, not really. Slavery, idolatry, sin and exile have been the result.  In our Isaiah reading today, in verse four, we read:

You shall no more be termed “Forsaken,” and your land shall no more be termed “Desolate,” but you shall be called “My Delight Is in Her,” and your land “Married;” for the Lord delights in you and your land shall be married.

What Isaiah is prophesying is this: the day is coming when God will no longer abandon his wayward bride.  He will delight in her and marry her.  And wine? In the Old Testament, both Jeremiah and Amos use the symbol of sweet wine as a sign of deliverance from exile.  The prophet Joel links an abundance of wine with prosperity.  Simply put, a marriage feast with plenty of sweet wine is what God‘s people have waiting for.

In Jesus, their longings find fulfillment. He takes the jars of water that are used for purification- jars that speak of sinfulness and separation from God, and of a cleansing that simply does not work, jars full of performance anxiety- and by his pleasure transforms them into jars that speak of celebration, of God-with-us, revealed in the midst of human life.  He fills them with grace and love.  Fleming Rutledge writes

What has Jesus done? Twenty-one hundred glasses of the finest vintage for one little wedding party in a backwater village! What does this mean? It is the Gospel of John that gives us Jesus’s words, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (10:10).

Our weddings may be simpler than the one at Cana, but our lives have become more complex. As I mentioned above, the pressures of our technological life combined with the same old moralisms, have driven us to new levels of despair, anxiety, and broken living.  If there was something wrong at the wedding at Cana of Galilee, the fact is that there’s something wrong here and now, too. You can feel it, can’t you? I certainly do.  Despite the promises made to us about technology, I seem to have less free time, not more. And what I see on my screens does not free me but rather condemns me. I rush from one thing to the next in the midst of a crumbling world: not thin enough, not wealthy enough, not good enough- and certainly not holy enough.  I fail: as a father, husband, Christian, priest.  Whatever the role, whatever the identity, I fail.  Rutledge again:

Jesus sees our predicament. He hears our news—the wine has run out, and we are still in our sins. He sees us, he sees our whole society, he sees the whole world full of disease and violence and cruelty and death, afflicted with conditions that religious rituals have never been able to improve. He sees us, he loves us, and he has come to pour out his life for us. The message of Christmas was that the Son of God is born among us. The message of Epiphany is that the Son of God is powerful to save.

Powerful to save. And save, he does. That’s why we are gathered here today, around this altar.  Because the wine Israel was looking for does not find its fullest expression at Cana. The events of Holy Week proclaim that that wine is found here.  As the Eastern Orthodox hymn appointed for this feast sings out:

When Christ, as a sign of His power,
clearly changed the water into wine
All the crowd rejoiced, for they considered the taste marvelous.
Now we all partake at the banquet in the church
For Christ’s blood is changed into wine
And we drink it with holy joy

Despite living in very different cultures, we are the same kind people with the same basic problem as those gathered at Cana. And yet here, at this celebration, is a wine that speaks a better word than the wine of Cana. Here, Christ is transforming our shame, our anxiety, our guilt, our failed performance into communion, celebration, peace and joy.  We need only receive.

In our Collect of the Day, we pray that we might be “illumined by the word and sacraments.”   If what we receive is Jesus, what is our illumination? In other words, what is the perspective that we gain in receiving Jesus in, with, and under the forms of bread and wine. In the words of Dominican priest Father Timothy Radcliffe in his book, Why Go To Church?, it is this. He writes:

The Eucharist… is a sign of God’s secret purpose, which is to unite all things in Christ. In the Eucharist we celebrate that the mess of human history, with its violence and sin, its wars and genocides, is somehow, in ways that we cannot now understand, on its way to the kingdom.

God’s salvation project, culminated in the Eucharist, is just that: his. He is doing it, and he will accomplish it. We can lay down all our performance anxiety, our striving, and our ever-present sense of failure. Our life, as Christians, is ultimately about him, not about us.

Beloved, God’s presence simply isn’t a reward for “doing it right.” It’s a gift, a current reality.  Here.  Today.  At this very Altar.  Turns out, he’s not a guest – he’s the Bridegroom.  And we are his:

for better for worse,
for richer and for poorer,
In sickness and in health,
as long as we shall live- and beyond.