
The above painting by Pieter Breugel is entitled "The Elder Peasant Wedding Banquet"
"Signs of Celebration"
Rev. Paul Mitchell
Vashon United Methodist Church
Vashon United Methodist Church
January 20, 2019
1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11
One of the great preachers of our
time, Frederick Buechner, describes the wedding at Cana as dreamlike.
“Like so much of the Gospel of John, the story of the wedding at Cana has
a curious luminousness about it, the quality almost of a dream where every gesture,
every detail, suggests the presence of meaning beneath meaning, where people
move with a kind of ritual stateliness, faces melting into other faces, voices
speaking words of elusive but inexhaustible significance. It is on the third day
that the wedding takes place; the third day that Jesus comes to change the
water into wine, and in the way of dreams the number three calls up that other
third day when just at daybreak, in another way and toward another end, Jesus
came and changed despair into rejoicing.
There are the six stone jars, and you wonder why six – some echo
half-heard of the six days of creation perhaps, the six days that precede the
seventh and holiest day, God's day.
And the cryptic words that Jesus speaks to his mother with their
inexplicable sharpness, their foreshadowing of an hour beyond this hour in Cana
of astonished gladness and feasting, of a final hour that was yet not final. But
beyond the mystery of what it means, detail by detail, level beneath level, maybe
the most important part of a dream is the part that stays with you when you wake
up from it.”[i]
As we wake from the dream, we try
to make sense of things that don’t, and trying to pin it down too firmly causes
the images to shred or melt. John’s elegant prose, rich symbolism, and literary
complexity certainly deserve detailed study and careful analysis of the metaphors
and nuances it uses, as well as the departures it takes from the other three
gospels – the ones we call synoptic, or from the same perspective. Personally,
I think it’s an error to suggest that any of the four share the same
perspective – or that that they differ in their most basic assertion – that
it is in Jesus Christ that we have definitively come to know the good news of
God’s unconditional love and expectation of justice.
In the Hebrew Scriptures
celebrations loom large as a way to describe how God relates to people. Isaiah
compares Israel's future to a wedding:
“As a young man marries a maiden,
so will your sons marry you;
as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride,
so will your God rejoice over you” (Isaiah 62:5).
Psalm 36 describe a feast of abundance
for “human and beast, both high and low” (36:7–8).
This is so also in the gospels. Jesus
compares God's realm – or basilea – to
“a ruler who prepared a wedding banquet
for their heir,” only to have people make feeble excuses about why they
cannot attend. The parable of the ten bridesmaids urges us to remain vigilant, like
we do at life-changing events like weddings. Life in God’s shalom requires
wedding etiquette, says Jesus:
“When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of
honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited.”
The Revelation of John describes
the consummation of human history as a great wedding party. And as for signs, the
Gospel John announces that the first sign of God’s presence in Jesus was at a
wedding at Cana. He uses the word shmei,wn, meaning sign, mark, symptom, or
example. Scholars sometimes make much of the seven signs in the gospel
of John, though the gospel only enumerates the first one, and states that not
all of the signs have been reported.
So, the first sign, mark, symptom,
or pointer of Jesus was at a wedding at Cana in Galilee. To the embarrassment
of the host, the wedding wine ran dry. In Jesus’ presence, with his mother Mary
and his disciples, six stone pots used for ritual washings were filled with
water, and when the steward poured them out it was wine. Empty pots used for
ritual purity overflowed with wine for profane celebration. The sign was one of
both quantity and quality. Each pot held twenty to thirty gallons, so the result
was 150 gallons of wine, far beyond what the revelers could drink (and reminiscent
of the extra food left over after the feeding of the 5,000).
There's an inverse ratio here
between the trivial problem of running out of wine at a wedding and the unanticipated
abundance of the solution. And whereas most hosts serve the best wine first when
people will appreciate the quality, and cheaper wine later when no one can taste
the difference, the circumstances in this story are reversed – saving the best
for last. God as revealed by this first sign of Jesus’ presence is not stern
and stingy. God is lavish, liberal, generous, and extravagant. God is like a
manager who pays a worker a full day's wages for one hour of work. God is like a
parent who welcomes home a wayward child with a ring, a robe, and a party. Water
turned to wine is excess for our emptiness. And when we in turn imitate the character
of God, it should be with the same extravagant generosity to others.
The Gospel of John is in some ways
the most intimate of the gospels. We feel up close and personal despite the
opening prologue with its sweeping, cosmic expanse. In contrast to that
opening, John is filled with intimate encounters and private audiences with
Jesus. Nearly a third of the book is known as the “final discourses” – a
collection of Jesus’ monologues delivered to his closest followers in private. Yet
none of the gospels tell us much about Jesus’ private life – almost nothing
about his home life or the relationships with his family. The majority of
Jesus’ life is a blank – private space, a mystery. We don’t know what dinner
time conversation was like or what domestic squabbles erupted. We don’t know
how his family spoke with each other and worked through the bumps and jostles of
daily life together.
But this small exchange between
mother and son at Cana sheds a sliver of light. There is really no indication
of the tone of her voice, but I picture her a little like a dowager countess – volumes
communicated in a stage whisper, “They
have no more wine.” Mary knows that Jesus’ presence makes a difference. But
Jesus demurs, saying that he isn’t ready and that it isn’t their business. Mary
takes action – perhaps knowing from experience that the difference this Jesus
makes is not to be the hero, but to empower others to participate in releasing
the grace that lies before, between, and beyond our lives – to empower the
creation of the beloved community.
In the preceding chapter in John, Jesus’
ministry begins with questions of identity and calling. Jesus is claimed as
God’s Own, and immediately begins to form and expand the beloved community, saying,
“Come and see!” Now at the wedding
feast, the community begins to unfold. It’s as if John is suggesting that the
usual categories into which we divide our lives aren’t relevant in Jesus’ life.
Work and witness and celebration and family life are all bound up together as a
new alternative is lived out by Jesus and his disciples. It seems that the Kin-dom
is going to be messy – perhaps a little like that chaotic baptismal scene we
observed last Sunday with the baptizer at the Jordan River – the Holy Spirit
shows up and things get risky and wet.
Jurgen Moltmann, in his book The
Church in the Power of the Spirit, describes Jesus’ earthly life as a
festal life. It isn’t a ruler’s life, or the life of a willing slave, but
a life of celebration. Jesus’ life demonstrates hope, liberation, and joy. It’s
life at a crowded table – not a table where we sit to escape from suffering, but
a table where this new alternative is made visible and viable. The outcasts are
included, there is enough for all, and good wine flows when we only expected cheap,
functional swill. It’s life in an expanding, inclusive beloved community. That’s
grace, isn’t it?
When I hear the story of Jesus’ presence
at the wedding at Cana, I can’t help but think of the 1987 film “Babette’s
Feast” based on a novella by the Danish author Isak Dinesen. Many commentaries
lift up the film as an example of the transformative power of sacrificial
giving and the formation of the beloved community – even the power of the Holy
Spirit to incorporate our disparately motivated actions into the song of
redemption, reconciliation, and the restoration of paradise.
Like Buechner’s comparison of the
gospel story to a dream, the film “has a
curious luminousness about it, the quality almost of a dream where every
gesture, every detail, suggests the presence of meaning beneath meaning, where
people move with a kind of ritual stateliness, faces melting into other faces, voices
speaking words of elusive but inexhaustible significance.”
On the
desolate northern coast of Denmark, in the tiny village of Nørre Vosburg, two elderly maiden sisters, daughters of
a gentle but strict pastor of a pietistic congregation, have taken in Babette, a
refugee from the Paris Commune of 1871, who has seemingly washed up on their
doorstep. Though they cannot pay her, they consent to her request to stay and serve
them. Unbeknownst to them, she is a world-class Parisian chef. After years of
serving them, Babette receives a ten-thousand-franc payout from the French
lottery. This strange, cold little community has become her home, and the sour,
bickering inhabitants have become her family. She chooses to stay and prepare a
meal to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding pastor. There
are twelve guests – all, but one, are scandalized by the extravagance of food
and wine that Babette procures for the meal, and they vow not to say a word
about the feast.
Course
after course are served, the finest wine flows, old wounds are healed, old rivalries
reconciled, old grudges forgiven. After the meal, and after the guests depart, Babette
reveals her true identity and calling. She is a gastronomical artist, and she
has spent her entire fortune on this “last supper.” Her sacrificial gift has redeemed, reconciled, and restored
paradise – the beloved community, and as a result, she will remain with them.
Philip Yancey put it this way, “Babette
landed among the graceless ones. …they heard sermons on grace nearly every Sunday
and the rest of the week tried to earn God’s favor with their pieties and
renunciations. Grace came to them in the form of a feast, Babette’s Feast, a
meal of a lifetime lavished on those who had in no way earned it, who barely
possessed the faculties to receive it. Grace came to Nørre Vosburg as it always comes: free of
charge, no strings attached, on the house.”[ii]
This
weekend we remember the life and legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who
also sought to redeem,
reconcile, and restore paradise – what he called the beloved community. He
famously had a dream – a dream that heard, “They
have not more wine,” but envisioned a community fortified with God’s
abundance, like unexpected good wine. King said, “But the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the
creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of
love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this type of understanding
goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant
gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles….”
Beloved, there are signs all
around us every day pointing to the redeeming, reconciling, restoring, and remaining
presence of God-with-Us – Emmanuel. We are easily distracted by the evil as
well as the inconsequential. May we, like Martin, like Babette, like Mary, ever
more clearly see the signs of celebration revealed in Jesus’ presence and our
identity and calling as beloved of God who build the beloved community.
Thanks be to God for endings transformed
into beginnings, for scarcity transformed into abundance, for waters transformed
into wine. Amen.
[i]
Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark
(New York: HarperOne, 1985), 90.
[ii]
Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing about Grace
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002).
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