THE MARRIAGE AT CANA
Jesus liked to go to weddings. For the man of the people who very seldom gives way to lavishness and gayety, who never eats and drinks as much as he would like, the day of his wedding is the most remarkable of all his life, a rich passage of generous gayety in his long, drab, commonplace existence. Wealthy people who can have banquets every evening, moderns who gulp down in a day what would have sufficed for a week to the poor man of olden times, no longer feel the solemn joyfulness of that day. But the poor man in the old days, the workingman, the countryman, the Oriental who lived all the year round on barley-bread, dried figs and a few fish and eggs, and only on great days killed a lamb or a kid, the man accustomed to stint himself, to calculate closely, to dispense with many things, to be satisfied with what is strictly necessary, saw in weddings the truest and greatest festival of his life. The other festivals, those of the people and those of the Church, were the same for everybody, and they are repeated every twelfth month; but a wedding was his very own festival and only came once for him in all the cycle of his years.
Then all the delights and splendors of the world were centered around the bride and groom, to make the day unforgettable for them. Torches went at night to meet the groom with singers, dancers and musicians. The house was filled with abundance, all sorts of meats cooked in all sorts of ways; wine-skins of wine leaning against the walls, vases of unguents for the friends; light, music, perfumes, gayety, dancing; nothing was lacking for the gratification of the senses. On that one day all the things which are the daily privilege of princes and rich men triumphed in the poor man’s house.
Jesus was pleased by this innocent joy, and touched by the exultation of those simple souls, snatched for those few hours from the gloomy, niggardly poverty of their everyday life. In weddings He saw more than a mere festival. Marriage is the supreme effort of the youth of man to conquer Fate with love, with the union of two affections, with the joining of two loving youths. It is the affirmation of a double faith in life, in the continuity and stability of life. The man who marries is a hostage in the hands of human society. Making himself the head of a new society and father of a new generation, he frees himself while he professes to bind himself. Marriage is a promise of happiness, and an acceptance of suffering. Illusion and conscience have their part in it. In the shadow of tragedy, which sends over the future a trembling hope of joy, is the heroic and holy greatness of marriage, which cannot be dispensed with, and yet, in the light of selfish reason, should not be accepted. Who has ever seen, except in this case, a condemnation so eagerly longed for?
For Jesus marriage has a still deeper meaning: it is the beginning of something eternal. Whom God hath joined, man cannot put asunder. When hearts have been united and bodies joined, no law nor sword can sever them. In this our human life, changeable, ephemeral, evasive, failing, frail, there is only one thing that ought to last forever till death and beyond death,—marriage, the only link of eternity in the perishable chain.
Jesus often speaks of weddings and banquets. Among the most beautiful parables is that of the King who sent out invitations to the wedding of his son, that other of the Virgins who wait by night for the arrival of the bridegroom’s friend; and that of the Lord who prepared a banquet. Christ compares Himself to a bridegroom feasted by His friends when He answers those who are scandalized because His disciples eat and drink.
He did not despise wine, and when with His Twelve, He drinks that wine which is His blood, He thinks of the new wine of the Kingdom. It is not surprising therefore that He should have accepted the invitation to the wedding at Cana. Every one knows the miracle He wrought that day. Six jars of water were changed by Jesus into wine, and into wine better than that which had been drunk. Old rationalists say that this was a present of wine kept hidden until then, a surprise of Jesus at the end of the meal, in honor of the bride and groom. And six hundred quarts of wine, they add, are a fine present, showing the liberality of the Master.
These Voltairian vermin have not noticed that only John, the man of allegories, the philosophizer, tells of the Marriage at Cana. It was not a sleight-of-hand trick, but a true transmutation, performed with the power of Spirit over matter, and at the same time it is one of those Parables in fact, instead of in words, a Parable told by actual deeds.
But whoever does not stop at the literal meaning of the story, sees that the water turned into wine symbolizes the new epoch which begins with the Gospel. Before the Annunciation and the vigil in the desert, water was enough; the world was left to sorrow. But now the joyful tidings are come, the Kingdom is at hand, happiness is near. Men are about to pass from sadness to joy, from the widowhood of the old law to the new marriage with the new law. The Bridegroom is with us. Now is no time for sadness, but for enthusiasm. There will be no more fasting but rejoicings; no more water but wine.
Remember the words of the steward to the Bridegroom, “Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but Thou hast kept the good wine until now.” Such was the old usage, the usage of the Jews of old times and of the heathen. But Jesus meant to overturn this old amphictyonic usage also. The men of old gave the good and then the poor; He, after the good wine, gives better. Sour, unripened wine, the poor quality which was drunk at the beginning, symbolizes the wine of the old law, the wine that has turned sour and can no longer be drunk. Christ’s wine, finer and stronger, which cheers the heart and warms the blood, is the new wine of the Kingdom, wine intended for the marriage of Heaven and earth, wine which gives that divine intoxication which will be called later, “the foolishness of God.”
The marriage of Cana, which in John is the first miracle, is an allegory of the evangelical revolution.