We usually look at the Lectionary readings with an eye to the lesson they teach us. What action do they urge? Today, differently, we ask: What do the readings tell us about what God, not ourselves, is doing in the world today?
In the first reading from Isaiah, God looks at a city in ruins, and its inhabitants whose mood matches the run-down buildings, littered streets, and broken-down walls. A lone voice breaks the silence and refuses to be quiet. Not a message to “brace up,” or “be strong in adversity,” but a joyful cry that God has seen the pain and humiliation and intends to reverse it. It is a glimpse of God’s own feelings! The people will be given a new name, one that expresses in marriage metaphors their new state. No longer “divorced,” but “married.” Recall the first commandment, “I am a jealous God,” that uses “jealous,” a marital metaphor, the feelings of a man wooing a woman for marriage. The delight of the bridegroom at his bride gives us a glimpse of the Lord’s delight to have Israel as his bride.
The Gospel sees marriage from another perspective though still teaching about God’s action in the world. The marriage feast at Cana is the first of the seven signs in John’s Gospel. The event seems too worldly to function as a sign — a boisterous wedding feast. In this joyous celebration, God’s promises will be realized somewhat differently, for country weddings could last several days, providing a break from the routine of rural life.
Though a miracle takes place, it is “ordinary” and totally in keeping with wedding customs. It may not have struck the wedding guests as anything other than one of the guests generously saving the bride and groom from embarrassment for running out of wine at their wedding feast. Jesus’s mother pressures him to do something he didn’t want to do, at least in that place. “When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servers, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’” The mother knows her son. At his bidding, the servants take large stone jars filled with water and bring it to the headwater, who on tasting it, declares, “Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now.”
The Scriptures speak about God, and Jesus, and love with symbols and metaphors. The first of Jesus’s signs was a country wedding, people having a good time at an event that brightened their humdrum lives. More signs will follow this one. And Jesus’s mother will appear again, at the very end of the gospel (John 19:26-27), permitting us to sense something of the important role she plays among Jesus’s followers.
By Richard Clifford, S.J. former President of the Weston Jesuit School of Theology and Founding Dean of the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry