By R. Leigh Spruill
For those Christians whose image of Jesus may be a bit formal and serious, perhaps even colorless and humorless, it may seem incongruous to imagine him having a rollicking good time at a party. So what do we make of Jesus with his mother at this wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, the first of his great signs and miracles in the Gospel According to John?
We recall from sermons or Bible studies that a typical Palestinian Jewish wedding feast at the time of Jesus would include a number of days of feasting and celebrating. The Story of the Wedding Feast at Cana suggests Jesus is right in the thick of things. There is no suggestion that Jesus is off in the corner somewhere, arms folded disapprovingly across his chest, scowling at those having a good time.
If we have difficulty imagining Jesus enjoying himself at a party we might ask ourselves why this is so. Christianity is serious business, to be sure. But that does not mean it is only serious. It is a religion marked by joy, as it celebrates the very best in redeemed humanity including our need for fun and laughter and merry-making.
G.K. Chesterton once wrote about the danger when Christians think the faith is merely solemn: “You cannot be too solemn about golf to be a good golfer; you can be a great deal too solemn about Christianity to be a good Christian. … In anything that covers the whole of your life — in your philosophy and your religion — you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.” It was Chesterton who also once said, “It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
A wedding feast. A party. Jesus is there. Celebration. Mirth. Lightness.
And yet I am having a hard time applying this festive story to the major news event of the past week. Is there any feast or party or celebration on Haiti?
With you, I have been so moved by the images and stories coming out of that impoverished island nation since the earthquake. The mind staggers to imagine death on such a scale from a single event. And we weep with those who mourn there and pray for the injured and perhaps some still alive trapped under the rubble.
Why is it that such an enormous natural disaster happens in the very the country in our hemisphere least well-equipped to handle and respond to one? I do not know the answer.
No, there is no celebration on Haiti right now.
So how would this gospel story of Jesus at a wedding feast connect with the people of Haiti right now? Once more, I do not know for sure, but I if were there this very morning I would leave the preaching for later and instead dig in to help the rescue efforts. That is what that island nation needs right now.
Yet I am not there. Rather I am here with you. So in addition to our prayers and our donations — our spiritual and material aid — we engage in some Christian intellectual discernment. What does this story of the Wedding Feast at Cana mean for us at a time like this?
How can people celebrate in a world like this, where out of the blue the earth’s tectonic plates suddenly move, causing such devastation? How does one enjoy a feast in a world like this where a young woman I knew dies in a car accident driving to a hair appointment; or where cancer strikes a vigorous friend in the prime of his life; or where a happily married couple finds itself in divorce proceedings because of an irrational and spontaneous affair; or where a successful career is derailed by an unforeseen “great recession”?
… “They have no wine.” That’s what his mother told him. That’s it. The party is over. Just when things were going so well, this happens. … The wine gave out.
This wine is a metaphor for the lifeblood of the gathering — it is what keeps the party alive. And the gathering — the wedding party — is a metaphor for the people of God. No wine, no party, no nothing. Go home, people. It’s over.
And it happens, doesn’t it? The wine gives out all the time! Accidents and disasters, illness and suffering, war and injustice, sin and evil and death — they always end up ruining everything! Just count on it.
“They have no wine.” Jesus’ mother brings this sobering reality to his attention. Yet surprisingly, the gospel story is that this is not the end of the party. Jesus directs the servants for the feast to fill six stone jars with water and fill them to the brim. And so they do. Jesus then asks the servers to take some to the chief steward, the head caterer. He tastes what has been drawn. The miracle: the water has been turned to wine.
Several years ago, I was with a group on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. We visited Cana and saw such a stone water jar that had been excavated and dated to the time of Jesus. It was large, so much so it would fill up this pulpit where I stand now. If filled with wine, it would be a ridiculous amount. Six such jars filled with wine would keep a party going for a long, long time.
The chief steward does not understand. “Where did this new wine come from? Did we not just run out? And not only that — the quality of the wine! It is excellent, like some $200 French Bordeaux. Everyone serves the good stuff first, because after three or four glasses who cares if the wine is good or bad? But here we have the best saved for last!”
And this is a key detail in the story. Everybody who goes to a party knows that eventually it will wind down. Sooner or later the wine gives out. And perhaps too one also senses that the best wine comes first. It never gets any better as things go along, but might get worse.
In one of his films from more than a decade ago, Jack Nicholson plays a character with all sorts of psychological problems. In one scene he walks through a medical waiting room of depressed psychiatric patients and asks them, “What if this is as good at it gets?” It is the line from which the movie takes its name. It is sorry-looking bunch in that waiting room and so is Nicholson’s character. But what if things never get any better? This is as good as it gets. You just hope life doesn’t get too much worse.
After the vagaries of life throw enough punches at you, perhaps even the cheap stuff will get you by. Maybe you just stop noticing what it tastes like anyway.
Christians are not simple optimists. We are realists. We know this world is broken and sinful and death-riddled. In fact our doctrines take these realities as seriously as any religion on the planet (more so, I would argue). So we are not cheery Pollyannas. A kind of falsely upbeat, “things will turn around” attitude does not come from our creeds. Christians are not all that optimistic about human nature or the ways of the world.
But we are people of hope. And to be people of hope is to see more, to see beyond, the brokenness and sinfulness and death of this world.
Given the news of the day and given our own lives, this is a challenge for us. We tend to fret that the ordinary wine of the lives we are already living will run out more than we yearn for this excellent new wine poured out in Christ that would transform the old. That is, we strive to maintain who we already are more than we are prepared to give ourselves away and gain something larger.
If any of this is even a little true of us, then we find ourselves struggling against a very real temptation, one that often goes unnoticed: sloth. We often think of sloth as laziness; physical inertia or a kind of personal slovenliness. But the church defines sloth as a spiritual reality. At its root lies perhaps the most common spiritual condition we see in congregations: the despairing notion that this is as good as it gets. This — here, today, whatever you are dealing with this moment — is it. Spiritual lethargy. A shortage of spiritual imagination. A failure to take spiritual risk and go deeper in the faith.
Dorothy Sayers said that “[sloth] stays alive only because there is nothing it would die for.” Well, thanks be to God, that is never Jesus’ problem.
Of course, we are meant to get all these metaphors in this miracle story today. The first of the signs Jesus accomplishes in John is at a wedding, the start of a new relationship, and so Jesus ushers in a new relationship with God. We also have this familiar biblical image of marriage: Jesus as our bridegroom, and we, the church, are his bride because he loves us and promises fidelity to us no matter what — no matter the travails and calamities of this world … no matter what. And the new wine? The blood of the cross, “the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.”
“The steward called the bridegroom and said to him, ‘everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” And now it is poured out. It is ours to have and to drink. … Or not. We can note that when the old wine ran out, no one ran to Jesus and asked him to do something about it. His mother merely commented on the fact. “Isn’t this just the way of the world? The wine always runs out.”
No, it doesn’t. Jesus takes the initiative. He loves us that much? And that love is costly love too. He was willing to die to the very same sin and pain and suffering of this world not so that we might avoid them, but that we might overcome them. And somehow, someway, in words that transcend my abilities to speak and our collective ability to articulate in the face of great tragedy — in the face of the earthquakes of life — we are in fact given power to overcome them. Jesus loves us that much.
So again, we Christians do not deny the tragic nature of our world. We ache, and we pray over it. The Christian is not one who stands before terrible things and says, “It’s not so bad.” The Christian does not stand before the blackness of tragedy and say, “It’s not so dark.” The Christian does not say when the wine runs out, “Well, it was good enough while it lasted.”
We Christians affirm more than tragedy, more than the fallenness of creation. We affirm the love of Jesus by the blood of the cross that is greater than these things. And this affirmation should rightly make us a joyful people too. The scandal of the gospel is that despite the worst thing that can happen in this life, God in Christ has overcome it — not for Jesus’ sake, but for ours. Faith, then, is the ultimate, supremely joyful act in the face of all the world’s sadness and badness.
An English professor I know named Ralph Wood once wrote that it is not Christianity but “unbelief that constitutes the ultimate lack of humor. Sin is the refusal to be cheered by God’s unstinting largesse. It is the glum unwillingness to celebrate God’s” gift of grace in Christ who overcomes what would otherwise be a merely tragic vision of the world.
We are not a people bound for death. We are a people bound for life, life more abundant than we dare to trust. But whatever rubble and hunger and pain and sorrow covers our life today or tomorrow, our true identity — today and tomorrow — is found in a celebration, a feast, a party.
“Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”
The Rev. R. Leigh Spruill, rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church, Nashville, preached this sermon on Jan. 17.
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