By Canon James Mustard
One of the great joys of my ordained ministry has been to officiate at weddings, the joining together of two people, and the bringing together of two families before God. But the following lines in the Preface have always unsettled me:
Marriage is a way of life made holy by God,
and blessed by the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ
with those celebrating a wedding at Cana in Galilee.
The reference to the miracle at Cana in the English marriage service dates from the Reformation, the 1549 Prayer Book, and is a nod to marriage as a state that may be permitted the officiating priest as well as a happy couple. For the first time, all three parties at the altar might be in and entering a married state. Our marriage service gives us a snapshot of a long-forgotten Anglican controversy of clerical marriage: it politicized the miracle. Yet I think the lowest priority of St John is to say that marriage is made holy, simply by the presence of Jesus at a wedding. By that token, are all picnics made holy by the miracle of loaves and fishes?
Indeed, first and foremost, the miracle at Cana sits alongside that of the miracle of loaves and fishes as a miracle of abundance. Two hundred gallons of wine are produced for the thirsty. For the guests, wine production is commonplace but takes at least a year. Here, Jesus fast-tracks that process, giving the people instantly what they need: practical sustenance. This is a miracle of hydration, not intoxication, of God’s priority for the poor and thirsty.
Secondly, and no less importantly, it is also a vision of the Church, both then and this morning. Mary, mother of Jesus and the disciples are gathered in celebration. From our perspective, it is vision of the Church, the communion of saints, as a Eucharistic community, gathered around the body of Christ and his abundant, life-giving blood. Again, like the miracle of loaves and fishes, it is a vision of God’s abundant, Eucharistic grace.
If this miracle is about marriage, it is a commentary about the importance of God’s grace in Christ over and above any social contract. A Jewish marriage, such as at Cana, is not just a joyful celebration of two people’s love, it also marks the continuity of a genetic relationship with God: the hope of a next generation to be born into the Jewish community, the next generation keeping the covenant of God with his chosen people. In that context, marriage is everything. Without marriage, there is no relationship with God.
Whereas, for the Church, then as now, marriage is entirely incidental to membership of the Body of Christ. We talk sometimes of Church family, or Christian home, even Christian nations. But our membership of the Body of Christ, the Church, has nothing to do with who our parents might be. For ours is an adoptive faith, with membership through Baptism. The wedding at Cana is therefore a powerful symbol of God revealed and at work first and foremost NOT through marriage.
Over recent years, the Church of England has spent a lot of time agonizing over what marriage is, who can marry, and how we can and cannot acknowledge marriages in church. Procreation has been put on a pedestal. But one of the ironies of that whole debate – presumably because it is so inconvenient – is that it has shied away from referencing any theology of baptism. Indeed, if one were to come up with an ideal model of Christian household, it might look to adoptive parenthood as that which most closely models the adoptive, baptismal, grace of Christ. Certainly, it need not be procreative. After all, Jesus himself was not conceived in the usual way!
The miracle at Cana is an epiphany for the faithful who partake week-by-week in a strange ritual of dried bread and cheap sherry wine. It reminds us that God’s grace is often counter-cultural. It’s not passed on by dynasties, it’s not dependent upon marriage. It’s an elemental faith of water, bread and wine, and its abundance is in our communion. The inherited DNA of the Church is passed on in the water of baptism. Our priority is not for our immediate families, but for those beyond our homes, for the poor, the hungry and the thirsty.
For me, then, this is one of the most powerful episodes in the gospels because it constantly challenges our attempts to domesticate God. This is one of the key themes of the Queer Religion exhibition we will be hosting in our new Friends’ Cloister Gallery in February: that making a priority for the poor, bypassing social norms, offering a radical invitation by adoption, ignoring genealogy and proclaiming equality of all members, is directly opposed to almost every other human institution. Yes, Jesus may have attended a wedding, but he turned its meaning on its head.