Cana

 

Image: the altar at the ‘Cardboard Cathedral’ in Christchurch

Aotearoa New Zealand, choir stalls, pulpit, and cathedra, November 2023.

Reflection on John 2.1–11 for the Third Sunday after Epiphany, the 21^st of January 2024.  Written by Philip Harvey for the pew notes of St Peter’s Eastern Hill, Melbourne 

As happens in life, we suddenly find ourselves at a wedding. Everyone is here, it seems. We are told it is the third day, a familiar expression. Thomas Merton puts it this way in his poem ‘Cana’:

Once when our minds were Galilees,

And clean as skies our faces,

Our simple rooms were charmed with sun.

Our thoughts went in and out in whiter coats than God’s disciples. 

But somehow the party is flagging and it’s Mary who flags the problem, “They have no wine.” Views vary on her exchange of words with Jesus. Rainer Maria Rilke reads it thus (‘Of the Marriage at Cana’):

And so she followed after him, amazed.

But there on that day at the wedding feast
when, unexpectedly, more wine was needed,
she looked, and begged a gesture at the least
and did not understand when he protested.

Then he did it. And she saw much later
how she had thrust him then upon his way.
Now he'd become a real miracle-maker,
and in this act unalterably there lay
the sacrifice.  

Alexander Pope says what happens next in a one-liner: “The conscious water saw its master and blushed.” A line Pope seems to have elaborated from Richard Crashaw and John Dryden, but what is language in all its abundance, if it isn’t here to share? 

Graciously invited by Jesus, the first to test the waters is the chief steward, whose middle management job is defined by Seamus Heaney in ‘Cana Revisited’ as “to supervise consumption or supplies.” So, imagine his surprise and relief at finding the best wine kept until now, the weight of responsibility lifted in an act of equalising grace.  There is more than enough for everyone. This is called the first miracle Jesus performed and it is an epiphany, revealing God in our midst, then and now for everyone.    

Malcolm Guite, in one of his sonnets, says it is “A truth that you can taste upon the tongue … Where you can taste and touch and feel and see,/ The spring of love, the fount of all forgiving,/ Flows when you need it, rich, abundant, free.” Cana astounds, but it is not a transitory event. This good wine is offered to everyone to partake, as Guite states clearly in conclusion:

Better than waters of some outer weeping,
That leave you still with all your hidden sin,
Here is a vintage richer for the keeping
That works its transformation from within.
‘What price?’ you ask me, as we raise the glass,
‘It cost our Saviour everything he has.’