For those at the heart of them, every wedding is memorable. From the simplest ceremony to the grandest of occasions, weddings create memories of hope, love, and togetherness.
But I confess that having been involved in quite a lot of weddings professionally, those that are most memorable to me are the ones where something’s gone wrong.
The bride who arrives so late that the organist has gone home (not here, I hasten to add). The one that needed bouncers to keep the peace between two warring factions of a family. The one where the wedding planner tried to tell me how the service would run (it didn’t work out well for the wedding planner). The time when the congregation were already quite merry before the ceremony had even started and I ended up having to shout at them to be quiet so that the vows were audible enough to be witnessed.
We remember the wedding at Cana, of course – we’re still telling the story of it, nearly 2000 years on. And we remember it in the church because it’s the first of Jesus’ signs in St John’s Gospel, a revelation of his glory, which is why we hear it at Epiphany. But until Jesus showed up it was about to be memorable for all the wrong reasons.
In Jesus’ day, weddings were big events. They lasted days and involved extended family and whole communities. They were times of feasting and celebration, and families would save up for them to be able to be generous in their hospitality. From the way John tells it, this wedding celebration has been going on for a while by the time Jesus arrives. But it’s about to come to a shuddering, dried-up halt. The wine has run out.
This is embarrassing for the couple, and shameful for their families. The wedding would be remembered, and retold, for its lack of hospitality, the family shame woven into village lore. And Mary’s alert to what’s going on, so she intercedes with her son: ‘They have no wine’, she says, clearly expecting him to do something about it, and trusting that he can. But his reply sounds rather peremptory: ‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.’
However we translate it, this is not a particularly loving way for a son to speak to his mother. There’s an echo here of the single-mindedness the boy Jesus showed in St Luke’s Gospel when Mary and Joseph lost him and then found him in the temple. In John’s Gospel there is no nativity story, no account of Jesus’ early life. Jesus is from the Father, and he is about his Father’s business. Even here, he is focussed on the hour that is coming.
Mary, however, is undeterred. ‘Do whatever he tells you’, she says to the servants. And while Jesus’ hour has not yet come – in John that hour comes when he is handed over and crucified – Jesus’ actions anticipate the hour. And when that hour comes, Mary will again be present, and again addressed as ‘woman’ as Jesus speaks to her from the cross, where the cup of salvation in his blood is poured out for many.
In Jewish expectation of the messianic age, wine played a big part. Isaiah painted a picture of God’s promised deliverance as ‘a feast of rich food’ for all peoples, ‘a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear’ (25.6). Through Amos, God had promised that ‘the days are coming… when the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it’ (9.13). In our reading today from Isaiah, Zion’s salvation is depicted as a wedding feast in which God, the bridegroom, rejoices over his people.
So, when Jesus acts to replenish the wine, he’s not just averting social disaster for the families. He’s announcing that the true bridegroom has come, that the promised age is here, that the messianic feast starts now.
Jesus’ first sign is one that brings abundance, just as later in John’s Gospel he will tell people that he came that they may have life and have it abundantly. The stone water jars that he tells the servants to fill were big: each held up to 30 gallons. Which means that Jesus provides more wine than can possibly have been needed: the equivalent of around 800 bottles of it, or 80 suitcases-full, in today’s metric.
And convention and common sense made it the custom to serve the best wine first: break out the vintage Petrus early to impress the guests, then bring out the stuff you picked up on 3 for 2 at Tesco later, when they’ve had a bit too much and won’t notice the difference. But not here. The best wine is saved till last. The messianic age has broken into the present.
And the thing that doesn’t often get noticed in this story is that most people don’t realise this. There’s a whole wedding feast going on, with lots of guests, and the only ones who witness Jesus’ turning of the water into wine are his mother, his disciples, and the servants. The steward doesn’t know where the new wine has come from; the bridegroom doesn’t know but just receives it gratefully as gift; the other guests are in the dark. In another sign of abundance later in the Gospel, 5000 people will witness Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fishes.
Here, Jesus does the first of his signs in Cana of Galilee, a village so insignificant it’s been lost to history, and his disciples believed in him. The messianic age has arrived, foretold in rich wine flowing in abundance, and only 4 or 5 people believe in him.
And after the party ends, they carry on with normal life. Jesus and his disciples and his mother and his brothers go to Capernaum for a few days, but the disciples carry with them the taste of the kingdom. They will go on seeing signs of it as Jesus’ ministry unfolds and will themselves be drawn into it in signs of healing and mercy, of forgiveness and abundance, of love and of service. John’s Gospel starts by telling us that Jesus is the Father’s only son, full of grace and truth. And as the story develops, we see how grace and truth have taken on tangible form: in wine, in oil, in bread, in water, in speech, in touch.
And these go on being the vehicles for epiphanies. God’s revelation of who he is doesn’t always come with blazing light and the sound of trumpets. In Cana it happened in an out of the way place witnessed by a handful of people.
It can happen in your life as you encounter the grace and truth of God, the signs of his love offered to you in bread and wine, in water and oil, in speech and touch. And like the first disciples, you too can be drawn into this new thing that the Lord is doing as you carry with you the taste of the kingdom into your daily lives and show its reality in acts of generosity and hospitality, of hope and forgiveness, of service and of love. These can all be moments of epiphany, where the new age breaks into the present, and where God’s glory is revealed, in and through his people, through you and through me.