Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 20 January 2013

Wedding Feast at Cana- Jan Vermeyen

I want to encourage all who wonder about Jesus to think of him as someone who loved life, loved people and excused many of our foibles. The Gospel this Sunday places him right at the heart of a very human party, a wedding at Cana. We all know about weddings, the joys, the hopes, the heartfelt promises, but also the very real encounter of human beings in their rawness.

Weddings bring out the best, but also the worst in our nature. I dare you to think of any wedding you have attended as a close relative of the bride or groom and say it has been a wholly positive experience. There is always something that goes wrong and yet in hindsight and as years pass, it becomes a story of consequence, part of the hallmark that says, this experience was important!

The wedding at Cana, the first miracle that revealed Jesus as more than a simple human and gifted person, but as somebody touched and filled by the divine One, centres around the wine used in the wedding feast. Don’t speculate about values or weights of the jars or the taste of the wine finally produced by the steward. Instead think of a wider connection between the material world and the reign of God.

Paul in his letter to the Corinthians writes about gifts and the way God works through different people, a God who distributes different gifts among peoples for a purpose. But what purpose? Perhaps the prophet Isaiah can help; he mentions the delight of God in his people, those who not only God loves but actually and unequivocally in very sensual terms, desires like a bridegroom for his future wife. How wonderful is this?

I hope all of you feel a wonder at how the prophets describe God’s love for us, not in pious but in sensual and very earthbound terms. Isaiah says ‘as the bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so will your God rejoice in you’. Tremendous words that give us hope, a God who rejoices in us, loves us, desires us? Yes, for that is what is true. The wedding at Cana brings together our material world and the love of God, in the words of an English mystic the very water of Cana becomes a symbol of God's great and never ending love for us, ‘the conscious waters saw their Lord and blushed’. Why did it blush? Because of the very desire of God which is all about how much we are loved.

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.