This is a fantastically rich story, and the problem is always working out what one selects to talk about.
Gospel of the day: John 2:1-11
I don't know about you, but I've never been all that interested in wedding planning. I can't say I would ever sit down and watch "Don't tell the Bride", or anything like that, though clearly some people do.
However. As (some of you) know, I recently got engaged, which meant that I suddenly found the subject of wedding planning a lot more interesting than I’d ever have expected to. So the other day, I was looking through a book about how to plan your wedding. It was full of advice – some of it decidedly more useful than others. I have to say I find it slightly worrying that it needs to be pointed out that it’s unreasonable to expect your guests to dress according to a strict colour scheme. But some of it was handy, such as the guide to how much alcohol you’ll need for the reception.
“Allow a couple of glasses of champagne per person for the drinks reception, more if it goes beyond an hour, half a bottle of wine per head for the meal, and half a glass of champagne for the toasts (a bottle of champagne half fills eight glasses).”
They also advise, in these budget conscious times, serving cava, not champagne, and house wine rather than anything more expensive. Sound advice when you’re on a budget, though – having spent the next five minutes mentally reviewing all the people I was likely to invite, and considering how much they might drink, I couldn’t come to any conclusions about whether or not it the amount they recommend is sufficient or not. I expect I’d end up panicking about what would happen if the drink ran out.
It’s probably not surprising, in the circumstances, that I found all this good advice coming back to me when I looked at the Gospel reading. The parents of the happy couple in this story seem to have followed the advice on the cheapness of the wine – but they definitely didn’t get the calculations about how much wine to buy right! And you can imagine the panic among the servants, later spreading to Mary, as they try to find some way to stop everyone noticing. Which sounds quite impossible, because if there’s one thing everyone notices at a party, it’s when the drink runs out.
Now, running out of wine at a wedding is not the greatest disaster in the world – though I’m not sure that bride and groom would necessarily agree. It’s not like the situation in the Old Testament reading, for instance, where the widow and her child are in real danger of starving to death before her kindness to Elijah is rewarded by God. But all the same it would be an embarrassing, perhaps even humiliating situation, shaming the family in front of their neighbours. Hospitality, after all, was an important social duty, and getting it wrong was at least a moderately serious matter. This would certainly explain why Mary is so keen to help them “save face”.
Even though we might be tempted to think that the smooth running of a wedding reception is far too trivial a matter to merit God intervening in it – though that probably also says something about our assumptions about what matters to God – that’s not the hardest thing to deal with in the reading. The tricky part when we’re looking at this reading is how Jesus is apparently reluctant to help, so reluctant that he’s quite off hand with his mother. How do we make sense of this?
Certainly we can learn that we shouldn’t lose faith if our prayers aren’t answered immediately. Jesus isn’t being as rude to Mary as we might think from the way he calls her “woman!”, because it could be quite a respectful form of address in Greek, it’s still a very strange way to talk to your mother. Perhaps it would be closer to the spirit of the original to use something like ‘Madam’ or ‘Ma’am’ – but either way, it’s slightly disturbing that Jesus is shown so distant and cold. I think that the reason it’s portrayed as it is is that the Gospel writer is making the point that Jesus answers to the concerns of the Father – the redemptive work that will become manifest in his “hour”, which as usual in John means his death. Now, Mary does not know what Father is doing in Jesus. But Mary does know enough to recognise the work of God in her son. And this is where Mary’s response becomes an example to every Christian.
In a striking gesture of faith, she just tells the servants to do what Jesus tells them, even before he’s agreed to help. That is, she doesn’t allow herself to be put off by the fact that she can’t quite see what Jesus is doing. Rather, she has faith that Jesus will act in love.
And when Jesus does respond, it is in a way that’s a strange mix of the unobtrusive and the spectacular, which I think echoes the way God works more generally.
It’s unobtrusive, because Jesus doesn’t draw attention to the fact that he’s performing a miracle; the servants take the wine to the steward as if they had just found some more wine somewhere. And yet, the miracle has an excessive, generous quality. Jesus provides a massive amount of top quality wine, much more than the most lavish wedding reception could require. The stone jars of water, used for purification in accordance with the Law become full of the new wine. And this works as a symbol of the wider story told in the Gospel, the story of how God becomes a human being in a particular, obscure historical context, and transforms not just the lives of all those around him, but the lives of all humanity, and transforming all creation.
The Father’s grace, manifest in Jesus, overflows and springs the boundaries of what we think is appropriate. It may not always be immediately apparent what God is doing in, around, and through us, but in this miracle we are reminded that the God who made himself known in Jesus is generous, exciting, and – dare I say it? – intoxicating.
