Reflection on the Word for the Sunday of January 16, 2022.
THE WEDDING CODE OF CANA - John 2:1-11
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine." And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come." His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."
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The New Testament story of the wedding in Cana, can be found only in the Gospel of John, and nowhere else. A Bible scholar, Rudolf Bultmann publicly thought, that the author of the Gospel of John may have used a source, called the Signs Gospel, which is considered to be lost. Nonetheless, Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a member of the Great Council, told Jesus during that memorable night of his visiting Jesus, that “Rabbi, we know, that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him.”
It is emphasized in the Gospel, that this miraculous sign of creating quality wine out of mere water, he performed at the wedding in Cana, Galilee, was the first of his miracles, which followed by many more, as it is written in the Gospel of John that “ This beginning of his signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”
It was the first of the seven signs in the Gospel of John by which Jesus' divine status is sought to be proven, and around which the gospel’s written structure was organized.
Rudolf Bultmann was actually an almost world famous German Lutheran theologian, the capital father of the so called the demythologization theorem, a deduced theory, which means, that he strongly suggested that the church should let the serious Biblical scholars to peel off the mythological layers from the Gospels in order to attempt to take a serious look at the factuality of the assumed historical events alluded by the Gospels.
He did not want to disarm the Gospel, he wanted only to reestablish the ultimate meaning of the Gospels, and to make it understandable for the modern or even post-modern era.
In his research, he asserted that the Gospels are not historical accounts with Smithsonian requirements of accuracy, but they were written in a so called hagiographic style, which is quite a bit closer to the genre of the holy legends than not.
Still, when the gap between the historically acceptable narrative and the mythologically sounding elements of the Gospel stories was being found under the microscope too big, he said, regarding the mission of the church, that the task of the church was always the proclamation of the Gospel and the announcing of the message of salvation, redemption and the forgiveness by faith and trust in God, and in him, who was sent by God, Jesus the Christ.
In this context, Bultmann argued, the historical accuracy, though it must be scientifically and finally established, it was not and still it is not that relevant or even that important for the message, because the language of this message in the Gospel must have used the contemporary communication channels, which were the myths and the legends genre story-telling.
Although we should feel, that this language has no real relevance today, as it is already two-thousand years old and more, but at that time, it was the spiritually accepted tunnel of communicating of faith messages, and it was the only language everybody easily understood, as they accepted the stories and the message behind the stories in their mythological and spiritual context.
To peel off the myths from the Gospel stories is like a translation between the first and the twenty-first centuries, where people were and are using different languages to phrase an important message in order that their contemporary audience might be able understand it.
Thus, that can be an utterly interesting question, that what really, but really happened then at the wedding of Cana? According to the Gospel message, the only thing happened there, that Jesus performed a miracle, so his disciples received an assurance, that Jesus is the Christ to follow. The Gospel of John states that Jesus attended the wedding together with his disciples. Jesus' mother was there too, and told the servants pointing at Jesus that, "Do whatever he tells you, … ."
It must have been a wedding with some family importance, as Jesus’ mother was with them, moreover, she gave orders to the servants there, as an authority. On the other hand, as this story is positioned in the Gospel of John right after when Apostle Philip introduced Nathanael to Jesus, and at the end the Gospel attests that Cana was the hometown of Nathanael, thus, it could have been the very wedding of Nathanael himself probably to a female relative of Jesus on his maternal side. Nathanael possibly became one of the Apostles, more than likely he was called Bartholomew on the list of the Apostles.
In the last two thousand years many scholars and researchers speculated, that who might have been the bridegroom, if he was not Nathanael. The famous Dominican scholar, St. Thomas de Aquinas from the Roman Church, as early as in the 13th century argued, that the groom must have been John the Baptist himself, but it does not match with the depictions of him, as John is described as an ascetic person, who was raised in the desert probably in the desert colony of the Qumran itself, the place, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. The members of this colony exercised celibacy, they were not married.
A twentieth century ultra-liberal thinker, the famous American bishop of the Episcopal Church of Newark, New Jersey, John Shelby Spong, passed away actually quite recently, on September 12, 2021 at the age of ninety, even suggested in his book, entitled Born of a Woman, that at this wedding Jesus, himself, got married to Mary Magdalene.
Most of the theorist, even the non-Christian ones, deem this suggestion as a fringe theory, which was reclaimed in the bestseller novel, entitled the Da Vinci Code written by Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code was an immediate hit, became very popular, albeit most of the applauding people forgot that the genre of this novel is fiction. Nonetheless, around seventeen million copies have been sold worldwide, 500 thousand in Canada only.
Even if we peel off all the layers of the possible legends and myths from the Gospels, it is very unlikely that Jesus was married, himself in Cana, moreover that he was married ever, but ever, though Jesus and the disciples were all Jews, and it would have been more than normal for him to marry.
It was and still is almost a commandment level obligation for Jews to start a family and have kids as it is written in the Book of Genesis, in the very first chapter that “ God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them. God said to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.’ ”
However, the Baptist movement was an offshoot of the Qumran, where the members did not marry. Although the Baptist movement, led by John, then Jesus, then his brother James the righteous, allowed the members to marry and having full families within the movement, still it could have happened easily that the top leaders followed the stricter rules of the Qumran, and they were not married.
Thus, although the historical accuracy of the Gospel is a bit blurry indeed, the major message is still true, that Jesus gave them a miraculous sign of his leadership in Cana, and the disciples believed in him. As Jesus said it later that “ Blessed is he (or she) who finds no occasion for stumbling in me.”
May we all be blessed in the same way, and may we bless the Lord always, AMEN .
