The Marriage Feast at Cana
17 January 2010
From the Office of Lauds on the Feast of the Epiphany:
Today the Church is joined to her celestial spouse, because in Jordan Christ washes her sins; the Magi hasten with gifts to the royal marriage-feasts; and the guests exult in the water turned to wine.
When Pope John Paul II added five episodes from Our Lord’s adult ministry to the mysteries of the Holy Rosary under the title the Luminous Mysteries, or Mysteries of Light, he surely knew what he was doing when he chose as one of them the miracle of Cana. The story of the wedding at Cana is one of the richest and most engaging in the Gospels; it cannot fail to strike us, no matter how often we might hear it. On one level, it can be read as an example of the sheer generosity of God in Christ, the superabundance of the divine gift marvellously represented by the provision of vast quantities of free booze to keep the party going. (You can, if you search hard enough, come across sermons preached on this text in protestant conventicles in which care is taken to show that although Jesus provided the wine, he never consumed any himself. Such exegesis will find no favour here.) One hundred and twenty gallons of wine: wine that maketh glad the heart of man ; wine, the biblical symbol of plenty and rejoicing. Here is a welcome encouragement to exuberance and excess. A Pusey House solution to the problem, we might say.
The story of the wedding at Cana is not only, or even principally, however, about Our Lord’s willingness to provide without limit for a party. It is rather, a theophany, a demonstration, a showing forth, of the divinity of Christ. It completes that threefold mystery comprehended in the sentence from the Church’s prayer with which I began, and which holds together the visit of the wise men offer their worship to the new-born King, Our Lord’s baptism in the river Jordan and the proclamation of his divine Sonship, and this miracle. St John sets it ‘on the third day,’ the day meeting between God and Israel on Mount Sinai in Exodus 19; and the day of the Resurrection, ‘history’s final and decisive theophany. ’ The feast at Cana – a wedding feast – is, therefore, symbolic of the messianic banquet, and the true bridegroom is not the newly-wed husband, but Our Lord himself. Today, the Church is joined to her celestial spouse. In the inevitably more anaemic modern translation of that antiphon, we lose the nuptial imagery, but there it is, the controlling metaphor in the older version, for even the wise men are described as not simply visiting the infant Christ with their gifts, but hastening to the marriage feast. As our first reading from Isaiah exemplifies, a most powerful metaphor in the Hebrew scriptures for the relationship between God and his people, God and Israel, is that of husband and wife. For the prophets Jeremiah and, especially, Hosea, when Israel strays from her one true God by turning to idols and worshipping them, it is as if a faithless bride had turned her back on her husband. In the luxurious and provocative poetry of the he Song of Solomon, the Church sees an allegory of divine love. So, when Lady Longford was asked famously whether she had ever considered divorcing her husband, and replied, murder often, divorce never, she was not only cementing a reputation for an acid tongue, but reflecting something deeply authentic about the marriage bond.
This nuptial imagery is, of course, no less important in the New Testament. St Matthew and St Luke give us parables of the wedding-banquet, and of the bridesmaids who fail to get to the feast, and meet the bridegroom, because they have foolishly failed to provide oil for their lamps. S Paul tells the Christians in Corinth that he feels ‘a divine jealousy’ for them, for he has betrothed them to Christ, and presented them to him as a pure bride to her one husband. The Letter to the Ephesians, famously, finds in the love of husband for wife an echo of that of Christ for his Church. The heavenly multitudes, in the vision of St John the Divine, cry Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready. The holy city, the New Jerusalem, is prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
So whether as the king or the bridegroom of the parables, under the mystic title of the Lamb in the Book of Revelation, or by simple analogy in the writings of St Paul, it is now Christ who has become the faithful husband of his people, taking the place occupied in the prophecies of Isaiah, Hosea and the others by God, the Lord, of the Old Testament. The Messiah has come – the Bridegroom is here; the banquet is ready; all may partake of the feast. The new wine of the Kingdom is ready to be drunk.
It is at this point that we need to pay attention to the exchange between the Mother of Our Lord and the servants, and the Lord and His Blessed Mother, for it is in these words that we see that the consummation of the marriage feast is not yet, is still to come. Do whatever he tells you; Woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come. According to Aquinas, Mary’s response exhibits the quality of perfect obedience; but it is not obedience provoked by fear or marked by servility; rather, it is Christian obedience, that gracious obedience rooted in trust which we can say characterises the bride’s promise to obey in the marriage rite. Dante associates Mary’s obedience with that prayerful reflection, that quality of pondering, with which St Luke especially associates her. In the twenty second canto of the Purgatory, we are in the sixth circle of hell, among the gluttons; and there, the poet reminds us of Mary’s actions at Cana, as well as of her perpetual ministry of intercession:
More thoughtful Mary was, of making
The marriage feast complete and honourable
Than of her mouth, which now for you responds
And so Our Lord replies: Woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come. In the Fourth Gospel, the Hour means one thing and one thing only – the hour of Christ’s glorification and the hour of his crucifixion, one and the same thing, according to St John. Our Lord’s words to Mary, which introduce the sign of the miraculous and abundant provision of wine, point forward to another occasion when the Mother of Jesus will be present along with her Son, and when he will again address her simply as Woman. This will not be a domestic family affair (like the celebration of an ordinary wedding), but rather the occasion of the inauguration of the household of faith of the new covenant, in which all who are sons and daughters of the Father, and disciples of the Son, will have Mary for their mother. The miraculous provision of wine at Cana is a sign, therefore, of that which is to come, that Hour when blood, not wine, will flow: and flow from Our Lord’s own body, pierced in the side by the soldier’s lance. It is this blood which seals and inaugurates the new covenant: it is this blood which truly shows that the Bridegroom has been sealed in marriage to his Bride, and the Lord and his Church are one. Cana the sign, and Calvary the consummation. The third day, the day of the marriage feast, is not only the day of resurrection, but also the sixth day of Christ’s ministry: the Sabbath day, the day of the Cross.
There is yet one stage further which we must take our reflection upon today’s Gospel, if we are to hear all that with which it resonates. At Cana, water is made wine. On the Cross, out from Our Lord’s pierced side flow blood and water: the ‘foundation of the sacramental life in the Church .’ Images of Our Lord’s passion have frequently depicted Christ in the wine-press, figuratively a vine, squeezed such as the fruit of that vine – literally, Christ’s blood – is pressed out, becoming the wine of the perpetual memorial of the New Covenant, the Precious Blood of the sacrifice of the altar. Water into wine; wine into blood. The miracle at Cana casts its light forward not only to Calvary but to the Mass, where the sacrifice of Calvary is offered not in the natural and bloody form of Good Friday, but in unbloody and sacramental mode. Here we remind ourselves that the Mass, this Mass, every Mass, is a sacrifice: not a new sacrifice (how could we ever have need of such), not a repetition of the sacrifice of Calvary (there could be none), but the same sacrifice, sacramentally performed, the Body and Blood of Christ offered to his Father for our salvation, but under those very tokens ordained by Him, broken bread, wine outpoured.
The wedding feast at Cana in Galilee heralds the messianic Hour. The hour of God’s nuptial feast with his people has begun, in the coming of Jesus, who identifies Himself as the bridegroom of God’s promised marriage with his people. In Jesus, God and Man become one, become, as it were a marriage, as God takes to himself flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, makes Himself as closely one with us as Adam with Eve. But the marriage of God and Man must pass through the Cross, must pass through the taking away of the Bridegroom which is sacramentally re-enacted at this and every altar of sacrifice of the new Covenant. Yet even as we come to the foot of the Cross and offer the divine Victim, so we celebrate the Divine Liturgy obviam sponso, looking for the coming of the Bridegroom, expectant for his return. For the Mass is also the pledge, promise and foretaste of the marriage banquet of heaven, the wedding supper of the Lamb, when the union of God with redeemed humanity shall be perfected. Here we receive the Body and Blood of Christ under the signs of bread and wine, and the divine life penetrates us, suffuses us, irradiates us, transforms us, vivifies us, strengthens us for the journey; there, as we drink the new wine of the Kingdom, we shall see Him face to face.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son + and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Fr Jonathan Baker Principal