Wed

Scripture: Second Sunday after Epiphany, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

  

Marriage. Marriage is what brings us together today.

Our Gospel reading this morning is the story of the Wedding at Cana, the first of St John’s seven signs. See, when John penned his account of the Good News of Jesus Christ, he structured Jesus’ ministry around seven miraculous signs. These were by no means, John assures us, the only wonders worked by Jesus. Indeed, if all His miracles were written down, there wouldn’t be enough books to contain them. Yet John selects just seven to serve as signs pointing to who Jesus truly is: to His identity, His deepest being. And the first of these signs is that Jesus makes 120 gallons of good hooch for a wedding.

In the Holy Land of Jesus’ day, weddings were a massive communal event. A new family was being formed, new children would be born, and this was cause both to rejoice and to offer the entire community’s support. Marriage, after all, is well worth celebrating, but that doesn’t mean it’s ever easy. It truly does take a village. Anyway, this particular wedding seems to have garnered more of a celebration than expected, because the newlyweds soon run out of wine. Wine in the Bible represents a lot of things: passion, joy, prosperity, a safe source of drink. “Wine maketh glad the heart of Man,” as the Psalmist sings. But to run out of wine at your wedding would be a great loss of face. After all, if this groom cannot support his own nuptial festivities, how could he ever hope to support his wife and kids?

Thankfully, it’s Jesus to the rescue—or rather, His Mother. “They have no wine,” Mary tells her Son, her words pregnant with expectation. “Woman,” He replies—and this is not a dismissive address but actually a title of honor in the Greek—“what concern is that, to you and to Me? My hour is not yet come.” In other words, not my circus, not my monkeys. The Son of God did not come to earth in order to provide refreshment at a party. Nevertheless, Mary has confidence in the superabundance of His grace, and so she wisely advises the servants, “Do whatever it is that He tells you.”

And so, quietly, surreptitiously, Jesus transforms anywhere from 120 to 150 gallons of fresh water into delicious, high quality wine. Not only may the wedding feast continue, but it has now been improved, brought closer to divine perfection. Astounded at this turn of events yet ignorant of the miracle performed, the steward congratulates the bridegroom. “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you! You have kept the good wine until now.” In this, John proclaims, Christ reveals to us His glory.

Now as one might imagine, this is an excellent text from which to preach at weddings. It reminds us of the importance that the Bible has ever placed upon marriage: how it is not merely a social or legal agreement, but a full and true giving of two complementary persons, one to another. In an ancient world that treated women as property, or as flawed men, it was the witness of the Hebrew God that husband and wife complemented and completed one another. For in the beginning God made Man in His image, both male and female.

Marriage, in Judaism, was an act of love not in that it was simply passion or emotion—love is not the same thing as feeling in love—but in that the married couple promised each to put the other’s wellbeing before his or her own. It wasn’t about benefiting you or getting what you deserved or even being happy. It was about loving a fellow sinner as yourself, the two becoming one flesh. And that’s how God described His relationship to Israel. He loved them not because they were flawless but in spite of their flaws. And He poured Himself out for them.

True love isn’t about happily ever after. It’s about steadfastness and selflessness and a whole lot of forgiveness. It’s about flossing beside the same person in the bathroom for the next 50 years. It’s about realizing that oftentimes the more you love someone, the more you want to kill them. Passion is a wonderful thing, I tell those newlyweds, but passion won’t keep your marriage going. Rather, if you do it right—if you keep the promises of Christ and His self-sacrificial love before your eyes—marriage will keep your passion going. You will grow older together, wiser together. And the world will say to you, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you! You have kept the good wine until now.”

So then, if this were a wedding—if we had a young bride and groom up front—I’d end this here and now. But there’s something else going on here. It seems to me that the Wedding at Cana is about so much more than earthly marriage. John is using this story, this miracle, as a sign pointing us to a deeper truth about Jesus. You see, John didn’t only write this Gospel. He also wrote the Book of Revelation, a fantastic vision of heavenly glory that prophesies the history of the early Church and the victory of the newly Risen Christ.

A lot of people don’t know what to do with the Book of Revelation because it uses a bewildering array of imagery drawn from the Old Testament prophets. In it, John is given nothing less than a glimpse into the worship of the saints and angels around the throne of God in the highest Heaven. It is the image upon which we base our Sunday worship, with this sanctuary and our Sabbath here serving as a sketch and shadow of the true worship and eternal Sabbath going on in Heaven.

Jesus appears in this worship in many ways: as a Lion, as a Lamb, as a Giant, as the Son of Man, and as a great Conqueror riding upon a white horse. And in all of these appearances, Jesus is celebrating His victorious wedding feast. That’s right. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus is getting married. When John looked up into the true worship of Heaven, the ceaseless adoration of saints and angels in the direct presence of God beyond all time and space, he did not witness a sacrifice, or a coronation, or some sort of Roman military triumph. What he saw, what he wrote down in his Revelation to share with us, was a wedding feast that has no end. Heaven is a wedding. Now if that don’t beat all.

So who’s the Bride? Who’s this lucky lady? Whom does Jesus celebrate and honor and elevate, claiming her as His own, giving to her everything that He is, loving her selflessly as flesh of His flesh and bone of His bone? Who is the Bride of Christ? Well, that would be you and me. The Church. The People of God. Think about it. In Baptism, Christ has washed us of our sin and taken us as His own, dying and rising that we might live forever in Him. Think of the white garments we wear to the baptismal font. Rather look like the white garments of a bride, do they not?

When we gather at the Lord’s Table to celebrate the Eucharist, we are given Christ’s own Body and Blood, poured out for us. At this Altar we are joined with the saints of every time and place to enjoy a foretaste of the feast to come—the wedding feast. We are getting married. We come forward to offer to Jesus everything we have and everything we are, even in our brokenness and sin, and He takes all of that, all of us, upon Himself. And in return, in glorious exchange, He pours out upon us all that He has, all that He is, dying and rising for us, claiming us as His own Body. Jesus has wed Himself to us, and not even death and hell can keep Him from our side.

It is no coincidence that John begins his Gospel by presenting Jesus as the unexpected host of a miraculous wedding, then ends his Revelation by revealing that Heaven itself is an eternal wedding and we are the Bride of Christ. “My hour has not yet come,” Jesus told His Blessed Mother. Not my circus, not my monkeys. The Wedding at Cana wasn’t His wedding. This, brothers and sisters, this is His wedding, here in this place, to you and to me.

Welcome to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. Welcome to your eternal reward. O, dearly beloved. Welcome home.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.