I COULD stay awake. Reading a novel would worsen my wakefulness. Instead, I made a decision that a scholarly article would have me dozing off in minutes.
As the marriage at Cana was looming, I searched a digital archive for articles about it; however the one which I chosen was no soporific: its medieval interpretations of Cana offered possibilities that I had never considered. They weren’t mainstream, but they were stimulating enough to maintain me awake and reading; so I’m mentioning them here.
First, some context. The marriage at Cana derives a few of its meaning from its place inside John’s Gospel, and a few from its place throughout the liturgy. In the latter, it stands third in a series of epiphanies of the Lord. The first was to the Gentiles. The second — his baptism — was God’s epiphany to his Son. The third is the sign at Cana.
Epiphanies need witnesses, but this has just one direct witness: the steward. No one else shares his standpoint. Its setting looks atypical, amid individuals who should not searching or preparing for it. It simply happens of their midst. If there have been no other message in John 2.1-11, this revelation in regards to the miraculous in on a regular basis existence would offer food for thought.
There is more. One vein in that seam of Gospel gold which I need to mine isn’t within the text in any respect: the bride. She should have been there; for the bridegroom definitely is, and he can’t be marrying himself. Nor could he, in Bible days, be marrying one other “he”. Yet John doesn’t mention her.
That lack of a mention could restrain us from spiritual speculation, but earlier generations of Christians haven’t been squeamish about taking an imaginative approach. Spotting the gap within the story, they filled it by imagining the invisible bride. They read the Cana story in the sunshine of other passages in scripture — Matthew, Mark, and Luke, for instance, all confer with Christ as a bridegroom — or quote his own words implying the identical. Revelation gives further confirmation of the identical image (18.23).
Taken on their very own, this might mean not more than that Christ signified celebration, fulfilment, and latest beginnings. But one other New Testament passage was added to the combination: one which used the language of marriage theologically. Ephesians 5.22-32, a chunk of Pauline social teaching, argued that the wedding relationship may very well be understood as a model of the connection between Christ and his Church. Grammatical gender was some help; for the name “Christ” is masculine, whereas the noun “church” is feminine.
The teaching of Ephesians about subjection and rule inside marriage has change into socially retro, however it was theologically influential in earlier centuries. The direction of such developments was influenced by Augustine of Hippo’s “take” on this Gospel. For him, what mattered was not the bridegroom of Cana, however the everlasting bridegroom: Christ. He went to the marriage to hunt down his bride: she was not the bride at Cana, but humanity needing redemption by his blood. Water and wine together pointed to the eucharist, which mustn’t surprise us. So Christ’s overflowing love — signified within the water change into wine — was lavished upon his bride, the Church.
Following this august pointer, Bernard of Clairvaux directed his monks to see themselves as brides of Christ, though they struggled to adapt to their spiritual femininity. Another medieval idea was that the bridegroom at the marriage was John, the beloved disciple, and that, after drinking the miraculous wine, he abandoned his intention to marry and followed Jesus as an alternative. That potent linkage of virginity with the stuff of the eucharist wouldn’t have found favour with Augustine, who all the time insisted that marriage was God’s good gift to humankind.
An much more surprising medieval variation of the Cana story, in devotional picture and text, showed the bride — not the bridegroom — receiving the wine from the steward. This seems to have been a pastoral adaptation, meeting the devotional needs of ladies, each lay and non secular. There was no hint of this in any real textual variant (nymphe, “bride”, for nymphios, “bridegroom”).
Some traditions emphasised the part played by Jesus’s mother. Others made it “the aborted wedding at Cana”. Still others put within the foreground a bride who was logically but not textually, present. This is precious permission to look imaginatively for ourselves throughout the Gospel, hearing its spirit in addition to its letter (2 Corinthians 3.6).
