What About the Wedding?

Part Four of Great Marriages of the Bible

File: Wedding at Cana Xu Jihua.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

I have not, tragically, been keeping up with all your comments this week, but I did see one clever person suggest that I “take a day off,” which is, truly, the best advice in the world, and I will—next week. I will absolutely sleep through the daily blog and hopefully scrape myself up off the floor and see what life looks like. The reason I’m bashing along in the usual way this week is because it makes me feel just a touch more sane. Not that I am insane or anything, just keyed up. Plunking a few words down in the early dawn calms my spirits and makes me feel like everything is going to be ok.

Does this make me a control freak? I hope not. For this morning, I want to veer slightly off course and imagine what it would be like if Martha had been invited to the wedding celebration of the young man in John who failed to procure enough wine for his own feast.

You remember the wedding that took place at Cana, in Galilee? I know, none of us were there in body, but I feel like in spirit, that occasion is recapitulated over and over every time anyone gets married, or does anything of significance. One of the best things about that wedding is that the bride and groom are not named. This is important to me because one of the surest ways to get yourself named in the Bible is to do something unusually foolish or wicked. Like, you could be an obscure and yet evil king of Israel, or you could be that awful grandson of Moses who goes around at the end of Judges grifting. I can’t remember his name, actually, but I know it’s in there.

Of course, some good people are also named—the woman in the city of Jerusalem to whom, in a moment of supreme irony, the Priest of God appeals, having found the book of the law under the reign of Josiah and not being clear what to do about it. I actually can’t remember her name either but I know it’s there.Mercifully, the groom in John does not have his name recorded, so that, whenever we get to heaven, we will have a harder time sniffing him out to ask him what on earth happened.

What a colossal failure, to run out of wine like that.