Eschatological Bride


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Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

Not once, in a quarter-century as an officiant, have I ever witnessed a sad wedding. Have you? I’ve seen large weddings and small, indoors and out, summer and winter, daylight and dark, ceremonious and informal, secular, Christian, multifaith, and Wiccan. I’ve officiated from Montana mountaintops to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And every one of those nuptials has been happy. How could they not be?

Weddings involve families and friends, music and beauty, memories of the past and promises of the future. And afterward, of course, there is food and drink and cheer. The atmosphere’s electric with new beginnings, new possibilities. Young marriages especially tend to spin off three or four new couples in a cascading reaction, weddings begetting weddings. I remember one ceremony wherein three or four of the bridesmaids were women whom I had previously wed. It was bride-a-palooza.

And amidst all the joy and the hope and the fresh new life together, there’s this underlying acknowledgement that this is how life ought to be, with grandparents smiling, nieces and nephews running amok. We get a glimpse, a reminder, of the fullness of life together, reaffirming bedrock truths of love and celebration. And it doesn’t matter if you’re single or married or divorced yourself; every guest, every relative, every musician, every priest feels most human at a wedding.

At least that’s my experience.

John’s Gospel starts with a wedding. And his Revelation ends with one as well. This has to do with his eschatology, how John understands our transition to the messianic age to come. Because the Word of God who is God has taken on flesh in Christ, entering our world in order to rescue us from perishing, the end of the age—not in the sense of finality, but in the sense of achieving the goal—has already been accomplished. In the words of Addison Hart*:

The Incarnation has definitively revealed God to human beings. To encounter Jesus is also to see the invisible Father, because He and the Father are eternally one …  What Christ finished on the Cross … was the taking away of the sin of the world. By doing this, He carried out the judgment of the world and overthrew the power of its ruler, the devil … Both the salvation and judgment of the cosmos have already, in effect, happened.

All that is left for us to do is to follow and listen to Jesus. John does affirm that the Last Day is coming, but it isn’t so much a final judgment for him as it is the revelation of the reality of how things actually already are. Christ is already victorious, risen, and glorified. He rules for all eternity, having conquered earth and hell and heaven by the outpouring of His infinite self-giving life. And once we see things for the way they really are—when we finally witness reality in its fullness, subjected in love to Jesus Christ our Lord—it will look like a wedding.

Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. John says it ends in a wedding, an infinite, glorious, joyous wedding uniting the whole of Creation. Keep in mind that this imagery, this symbolism, comes from a time and a place with a very different relationship to food than we have here today.

Feasting was rare—exceedingly rare. The main difference between a poor person and a rich person is that the rich person’s food source was secure. In times of famine, they weren’t the ones going hungry. Yet even those who had enough food generally did not eat their fill. They ate what they needed to survive, to have strength for their daily labors. Feasting was for big celebrations, for honored guests; for weddings.

A wedding feast could last a week or more. Everyone was invited: entire towns, entire clans. And for days there would be reunions and stories and dancing and food and ever-flowing drink. It was a holiday, a vacation, a glimpse of a world beyond scarcity and worry. And that’s what life in God is like, they said. The nature of God is grace, generosity, superabundance, provision and protection and love. Such is the banquet prophesied by Isaiah. Such is the wedding feast of which Jesus spoke in His parables.

And the wedding is always that between Creator and Creation, God and humankind, Yahweh and Israel, Christ and His Church. The divine gives all of His divinity to humanity, and humanity gives everything that’s human back to God. It is a glorious exchange. It is hope and joy and bliss and love, utterly indescribable save in terms of jubilation. Such is whence we come, from that paradise of delight; such is whither we go, to where Christ prepares our place.

Weddings seem more real because they are. They show us the deeper reality, the love undergirding the world.

Our Gospel reading this morning discloses the first of the Johannine signs: seven miraculous revelations pointing beyond themselves to who and what Christ is. It is also the third of the great Epiphany stories—following the Visitation of the Magi and Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan River—and one of the Luminous Mysteries, for those who pray the Rosary. Jesus is invited to a wedding, along with His Apostles and His Mother.

Alas, the hosting couple underestimates demand, and long before the feast is out, their wine is running dry. More here is at stake than mere desire to keep the party going. This would prove humiliating, a lasting social stigma: not to be able to provide for one’s guests, for one’s community? Oh, the scandal of it! Mary, discerning and discreet, brings the dilemma to Jesus’ attention. Only she isn’t exactly Mary, is she? John never calls her that, not once within His Gospel. She is only ever “the mother of Jesus.”

“Woman,” Christ replies, “what concern is that to you and me? My hour has not come.” Yet Mary knows her Son too well. “Do whatever he tells you,” she instructs the servers. Jesus directs them to fill several large ablution jars with water, and when it is drawn—you guessed it—the water has turned to wine, and not the cheap stuff either. The banquet manager is astounded. “Everyone serves the good wine first, and the bad once we’ve gotten drunk,” he tells the couple. “But you have saved the good wine until now.”

Here is superabundance personified. For the oenophiles among us, those jars work out to between 600 and 900 modern bottles of wine, and that’s before cutting it with water, which was the standard classical practice. Wine, remember, symbolizes joy. Here we have a foreshadowing of Jesus as the Bridegroom, come to claim His Bride. We shall see more glimpses of this in His feeding of the multitudes, and in the Eucharistic Last Supper. He is Lord, Host, Husband, Provider, King, Son and Word of God.

The Hebrews would recognize the messianic theme within this story, whilst Gentiles would likely note the dionysian parallels. This is who Christ is: the God-Man; the Word made flesh; the Light of the world, descending to darkness, in order to rescue us all. And take note of the one who instigates this sign: “Woman,” He calls her, offensive to modern ears perhaps yet rich in biblical symbols.

Neither dismissive nor condescending, “Woman” brings to mind Eve, the mother of all the living, whom the early Church already saw recapitulated in Mary. She also recalls Woman Wisdom, a feminine embodiment of the divine, who calls the wise in the Book of Proverbs to “drink of the wine I have mixed.” Yet as the Mother of Jesus, the Mother of the Bridegroom, she is the type of the Church, who is to be His Bride.

Throughout the Johannine corpus, the Church is a woman, called as a Bride to embrace her beloved, called as a mother to bear forth the Christ. She is us, spiritually speaking. We are called to offer up our prayers and petitions to Christ. He hears us as surely as here He heard His own mother. And we are called to guide the world to “do whatever He tells you.”

The wine will not run out. The feast will never end. The Bridegroom is already on His way to claim His Bride. And all that has been left to us is to welcome all His guests.

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



*Credit where credit is due: Much of this homily draws from Addison Hodges Hart's reflection on the Wedding at Cana from his book Silent Rosary.






Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Nidaros Lutheran
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