Are you ready to hear that we, that you, are precious, beloved, delighted in, worthy of the best wine, desired in sacred union with the Creator of all?! We continue on from last week to see and hear that not only was Jesus the precious Beloved one of God but so are we. Some of us will be uncomfortable to hear several weeks running that we precious, beloved, delighted in, worthy of the best wine, desired in sacred union. It sounds too much and too overwhelming. We want God’s love but many of us want it in small polite doses, to save it for a quiet Sabbath day or a time of disaster when we run out of our own resources or at least contain it in formal times of worship. But the imagery of wedding banquets and marriage do not make for small polite encounters with the divine. (Second Sunday after Epiphany. Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 36:5-10; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; and John 2:1-11.)
And if and when we find ourselves forsaken and overwhelmed by the fire or the flood, disease or abandonment, disillusion or confusion, to then be reminded that we are precious, that we are desired and being sought out to be lavished with love, is the meal and drink of life and healing. But what fools we are to wait until we are desolate before we hear or respond to the invitation to feast on the abundance of God and drink from the river of delights. God’s abundant love is there when we need it and it is there long before we know or admit that we desire it.
This sumptuous feast and the miracle of wine from water is how the gospel of John reports the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. According to John, Jesus is baptised, begins to gather his disciples, and then attends this wedding and turns it into a feast to remember. Teaching and healing will come later but to begin with is generous celebration. Now a wedding feast was much more than just a party - it was a significant community event and deeply symbolic of more than just a private love between two people and a first century audience would have understood the references to the relationship between God and the chosen ones as individuals and as community.
You may like to read what I wrote three years ago on this text.
The image of sacred or mystical marriage appears in many spiritual (and psychological) traditions. In each tradition there is a slightly different focus but some of the common understandings are that the image of marriage, of sacred union, speaks to: the relationship between the divine and the human community; the need for each individual soul to find union with the divine; and the need for the different aspects of each self or person to marry or become unified – the masculine and feminine, the dark and the light, the unconscious and conscious, spirit and matter, as we grow in grace and mature in faith.
The image and metaphor of bride and bridegroom, marriage and wedding feast, are frequently used in the Hebrew bible to describe the relationship of God and God’s chosen people. These images emphasise the faithfulness of God and the love for the people. There is also great generosity and abundance in images of banquets at which God shall provide all the food and drink. And this understanding is carried over and ascribed to Jesus in several parables and later as the bridegroom of the church. So, it makes wonderful sense that according to John, Jesus should begin his ministry with a wedding feast – a celebration of his arrival and a promise of things to come. And with references to what is to come, to the passionate outpouring of love that is the purpose of Jesus’ life.
Images of marriage are also used as metaphors for the relationship between the individual soul and the divine. Maybe the language of the Song of Songs is the best known. Such erotic images of love, desire and union make many of us a little uncomfortable and we are more comfortable thinking about God as father, king, shepherd, potter, even midwife. We of course do not need to chose one or the other image and most of us will have preferred images of God that we relate to. The image of God as bridegroom inviting us into marriage and sacred union is a powerful reminder that the love of the Creator of all that is, the Source of all power and love in the universe, is not some small neat invitation to once a week worship and polite prayer requests but an enticement to turn towards the very life force that caused all to come into being and sustains all our days and moments. We are invited into the grand love affair that sparked all that is and will not be sated until we are completely consumed and taken back home.
I confess that I have only come to dare to consider the invitation to me in the imagery of marriage and union since my own call to priestly ministry (twenty-five plus years ago now) came in the imagery of marriage. I found this most confusing and even disturbing at the time but I have come to recognise it as a central image in our tradition that we have coyly ignored at our own cost. “The big and hidden secret is this: an infinite God seeks and desires intimacy with the human soul. Once we experience such intimacy, only the intimate language of lovers describes the experience for us: mystery, tenderness, singularity, specialness, changing the rules “for me,” nakedness, risk, ecstasy, incessant longing, and of course also, necessary suffering. This is the mystical vocabulary of the saints.” (Richard Rohr in Daily Meditations May 2021)
And the metaphor of sacred marriage speaks to the journey of the individual self and our need to grow into oneness, to marry the different gifts, desires and aspects of ourselves so that we can become most fully who we were made to be. (In manufacturing the process of bringing together the parts just before completion, such as the car body and the chassis, is often referred to as marrying.) This understanding is quite explicit in Jungian psychology and depth psychology. While I will not pretend that this is an explicit focus in the Bible it is inherent in texts such as Psalm 139 where there is a wonderful sense of the different body parts coming together in the mother’s womb at the right time as part of our formation. And in Paul’s use of the body as an image of community there is also this sense of needing all the parts and functions to be valued, including the humbler aspects, in order that the whole can be healthy and fruitful.
Which brings us full circle back to understanding the imagery of marriage and weddings as being about the call to a full and lovingly alive community which gathers and feeds and provides drink for all. The imagery of marriage and weddings is not only about our personal relationship with God but very much about our full participation in community with the knowledge that the community is of great value to God, is the natural expression of Creator energy. That we as a people, a species, are not forsaken but precious, beloved, and invited into life abundant one and all. And yes, suffering redemptive love is at the heart of the banquet and foreshadowed in the miracle of the wine. It is not one or the other but all. So however we come we are welcome, we belong.
Even so, come Lord Jesus the Christ, come entice us into life in you.
A photograph from my son and daughter-in-law's wedding.
This is my work informed by all I have heard, read and experienced. I am indebted to the wisdom of others. This week I am particularly grateful to Richard Rohr.
If anyone needs to do more textual homework I recommend to you: Ominous clouds overshadowing a joyous celebration (John 2; Epiphany 2C) An Informed Faith
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