The Wedding at Cana of Galilee
If we read this event in the same way we would read one recorded by Matthew, Mark or Luke then we meet a significant problem: why are we being told this? At face value this new tale adds nothing significant to the older gospel accounts, and even leaves us with unresolvable issues. One of these is, given that John’s gospel contains so few incidents from the life of Jesus, and that the older evangelists’ gospels did not consider this worth mentioning - just what is John telling us through this (to him, at least) deeply significant event?
As I said previously, this is a spiritual gospel. We are not to read this as a text from a news-gathering website. This account is to be nibbled, savoured, reflected, upon and digested. For John is ever and everywhere telling us something deep and profound. For he has already given us in chapter 1 an account of the Godhead before creation began, the close of the era of the Old Covenant prophets, and the calling of the first male disciples.
This is also our second encounter, albeit veiled, with the town of Cana. John has just told us of Nathaniel (also named Bartholomew), and later we will learn that this disciple was himself from Cana. Later in chapter 4, we read that Jesus also did his second miracle - or sign - in Cana where he healed from a distance a boy who was seriously ill in Capernaum. And it is here, in chapter 2, we read of Jesus first miracle/sign in Cana.
Behold!
John calls these events ‘signs’. In my younger years I attended a postgraduate group of Christian scholars who were preparing a paper on the miracles of Christ. The gist of the matter was that these are signposts that point us away from the simple happening to a heavenly meaning. Later I was told by an ancient languages scholar working for Tyndale Bible translators, that in Hebrew the word ‘hiney’, meaning ‘behold’, tells us not to look at what we are currently staring at, but instead to look away and see what we are missing.
So we read this strange encounter of people, a place and various objects as if through other eyes. We who live in the West, with a long adherence to academic scholasticism, must also learn to turn off the simple functions of the mind as it seeks to uncover ‘what happened?’ and instead to unveil ‘why has this happened?’ We must ever remember that when we read this gospel (or John’s other works) it is not an earlier book we are reading. For it is most likely that the writings before the last five books, all by by John, of the New Testament were written during the lifetimes of the first generation of Christians. However, John is writing later to a third or even fourth generation of Christians. He is writing after the Didache or 1 Clement were written and just a decade before his former pupil Ignatius of Antioch wrote his six letters to churches in Greece and Rome.
John’s gospel is a very late book. He writes to a different world from, say, Matthew. And his purposes are also different. For example, as a hard-core Reformed chap asked to me recently, why is there no mention of Mary after the gospels in the New Testament? This seems an obvious question, but it is an easily formed misunderstanding of the purpose of the order of the books in the NT. For there lies a big gap of time after when Peter and Paul wrote their letters, and when John was writing his letters, apocrypha, and gospel.
If we consider this, that John was completing the canon of the Bible, and that he spent many years in the AD30’s into the 40’s living intimately closely with Mother Mary, the reader must ask himself instead: why, at this point in the writing of scripture, does it seem necessary to return Mary to a central place in the two final books of the canon? [Revelation (19:11-12.18) and the final gospel (chapters 2 and 19].
I think I have stirred this pot enough. I hope you have been mildly unsettled. If so, then we are ready to dig into the rich soil that John and others have prepared for us. And here we must now seek to understand what fruit has grown out of his work, which is itself the very heart of the beloved disciple.
A Marriage Feast
First, the event is a marriage feast. Now ancient societies had a kind of liturgy to this oh-so-important event. The bride and groom were betrothed; this is not the same as a mere engagement today which can be checked into and out of. This was a legally binding agreement that promised a woman to a man, and this man to this woman. We actually read quite a lot about such betrothals and the subsequent wedding in the parables of Jesus.
The wedding would not have been ready to be consummated until the groom was ready to take his promised bride to their new home. Once betrothed, he went away to prepare a place for her, and he promised that once this place was ready he would come and take her to his home.That should sound familiar; it is Jesus tale of how he will return for each one of us to take to a place in heaven which he has prepared for each of us. So, when we see a wedding feast in the Bible, we see a consummation of God’s salvation promises to His people.
Also, the groom would be attended by his closest friends when he came to get his bride. He would come at night, call upon the house where his betrothed was sleeping (the father or guardian of the bride would be well aware of the timing of the groom’s arrival, but she may not have been told explicitly when this would happen.) He would then carry her off, accompanied by his friends, to the groom’s house. Any maiden friends of the virgin awaiting her beau would have to be ready and prepared for the arrival of the groom’s company. If some of this virginal company were lax, perhaps forgetting to keep sufficient oil for their lamps, then they would be unable to follow the triumphant groom to the wedding celebration.
This is well elucidated by Jesus in his teachings: the unknown day when Christ will return, will he find us prepared?; the foolish and wise virgins who await the bridegroom. And this gives us a solid foundation to understand this tale of the wedding at Cana. Yet, there is a clear problem: where is the bride, and where is the bridegroom? Yes, we have a clue in the disciples of Jesus being invited to accompany him to the feast. And if they are the friends of the bridegroom, then Jesus must be the groom.
This much, in symbolic fashion, we can safely take from John’s tale, but anything further tests the limits of the wedding feast setting. I once read Dan Brown’s travesty The Da Vinci code; there is much to criticise here, but the wild idea that this Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and its further implication repeated elsewhere that this was their wedding feast at Cana, are worse than pulp fiction. If we read this into the tale then we are slipping back into a thin rationalisation of the tale, and seeking to tie up what appear to be loose ends.
But there are no loose ends. The wedding setting and its meanings are perfectly complete, and there is much more that can be garnered. I cannot pretend to understand it all; scripture is a deep well, a bright light, a sharp sword, a burning coal which will plumb, illuminate, cut and cauterise the human soul. The modern question in so many Bible studies of ‘how does this make you feel?’ cuts no ice. Instead, we must explore on, even using a lectio divina approach to slow us down, allowing the reader to savour the meal, or as John quotes Jesus in his gospel, we must ‘gnaw’ over this meal.
Mary, the Mother of Jesus
The next notable fact is that we read first that “Mary was there” and secondly that “and Jesus and his disciples were also invited”. This caught me when I read it, then read it again. For, in every part of John’s gospel Jesus is the primary person, but even so he doesn’t hog the centre stage. Throughout his gospel we are reading tales of an individual person - John the Baptist, Simon Peter, Pontius Pilate - and their interface with Jesus.
This little tale has Mary as literally the prime, yet also spiritually the secondary, person at the wedding. Everyone else moves around them, speaking very little; apart from Mary and Jesus we only know a single sentence of what the master of the feast (MC) said. In chapter 1 we saw God and Jesus, John the Baptist and Jesus, and the disciples and Jesus. Now we are considering is the relationship between his mother Mary and Jesus.
We are told that there was a potentially awful problem: there was no more wine. And they went and told - who? - Mary. She went and told her Son. He curiously demurred. She went back and spoke to the servants to reassure them that Jesus would fix the problem. And this he did.
Before we step further into this spiritual analysis of John’s account of this four-way conversation - servants → Mary → Jesus → Mary → servants → Jesus → MC - we have to acknowledge that there has opened up a great gulf in the Christian Church’s thinking on Mother Mary in more modern times, seemingly taking root in the 18th century. As ever, I believe, much of this is due to early misunderstandings and current fear. This is almost always the case where human conflict occurs.
If we can all try to come to some kind of agreement, then it would have be on the basis, firstly, of the Biblical record. There are some stark facts here that the scriptures attest (the texts in italics are my musings). Let us consider them now.
Mary was a virgin when Gabriel approached her, and she was already engraced by God and the Lord was already with her before the angel appeared (Luke tells us that Stephen the Martyr was “full of grace”, so there is no problem with her probably being so, as translated into the Latin ‘pleni gratia’ by Jerome.) Scripture records that she is to be called the most blessed of women (there are no other candidates), and we are all to call her “Blessed”.
She remained a virgin, after Joseph wed her, until the birth of Jesus. There is no strong evidence that she ceased to be a virgin in her lifetime. We should not get uptight about the English word ‘until’ which carries the feeling in our tongue of ‘but, what then?’. In Greek - ἕως - it covers only the time from start to end of the said event (in this case, Mary’s confinement) and does not speak in any way of a ‘before’ or ‘after’.
What of the question of the references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters? This takes time so we must unpack the evidence carefully. The idea that Jesus had half-brothers and -sisters by an earlier marriage of Joseph arises from apocryphal gospels, and so can be ignored safely. Again, like the word ‘until’ we can be led astray by understanding the words used in our English translation in an unnecessarily singular context; we need to return to the Biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek. The parallel word in Hebrew - אָח - denotes exclusively either a brother of the same parentage, or a close relative. In Greek it can carry a host of meanings: womb-brother, close relative, or member of a tribe, group, etc. We cannot say ‘adelphos’ translates simply and only as ‘womb-brother’ and then imply that these men and women are Jesus’ siblings of his parents; this meaning is not clear.
We need to consider the wealth of other biblical evidence; and I do mean wealth! Who are the purported other children of Jesus’ mother Mary? They are James, Joseph, Simon, Judas and Salome, plus others brothers and sisters. The key to finding our way through this puzzle may lie firstly in the gospel accounts of the crucifixion. We read in Mark that there were some women watching from a distance, who included Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, Joseph and Salome. However, John writes that near the cross stood Jesus mother, Mary the wife of Cleopas, and Mary Magdalene. And so we know that there were at least three Marys who stood at the cross, one of whom was most probably Mary the wife of Clopas, and she was the mother of James and Joseph.
Papias, writing in the late 1st or early 2nd century, who produced a highly acclaimed set of commentaries on the gospels (now, sadly lost), wrote that this Mary was the wife of Cleophas, also called Alpheus, and the mother of James, Simon, Thaddeus and Joseph. (As an aside Cleophas was named as one of the men walking dejectly to Emmaus (Luke 24.18) after the resurrection). Clopas and his wife Mary were thus the father and mother of the Apostle ‘little’ James who went on to lead the church in Jerusalem (Acts 1.13, 15.13-19).
Ever Virgin?
To return briefly to the contention that Mary bore other children other than Jesus, if we were to consider this as a criminal case then the prosecution would have to have proved that there is no room for reasonable doubt that this is the case. Clearly, from the evidence we are presented with, there is no case to answer. The evidence does prove the opposite, that the ‘other’ Mary who stood with Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalen at the cross was almost definitely married to Cleopas, who was also known as Alpheus, and that they definitely had one son called ‘little’ James who was one of the Twelve and later chaired the Council of Jerusalem in the book of Acts.
As to the other individuals proposed by some to be womb-brothers of Christ, the evidence, if considered under the civil code of ‘on the balance of probabilities’, then there is a reasonable chance that Joseph (who is later recorded as the third Bishop of Jerusalem) is ‘little’ James’ brother. Whether or not the others named - Simon, Jude and Salome are children of the womb of Mary wife of Cleopas there is nothing beyond their listing as brothers and sisters of James and Joseph, and we have already discussed that the words we have do not clearly indicate in the Greek that they are children of the same womb.
What we are left with, having considered the scriptural evidence is that there are no safe grounds for concluding that Jesus had siblings of the womb of Mary. Perhaps she is what the Church universally believed until modern times, a unique lifetime-virgin mother.
For my tiny tuppence-worth, I would add that if Mary had continued to have children after Jesus, meaning she would have ceased to be a virgin, and carried to term at least five named children, and others, and that Joseph had died sometime before 30AD, then the story would get very complicated indeed, requiring a lot of assumptions re these near-silent individuals. Further, if Mary and Joseph had consummated their marriage some time after 4BC, having a very visible and large brood of children, it is difficult to see why she would be suddenly referred to as a virgin from AD30 by people who would have been familiar with her and her other children.
No, to my eye, the familiar tale of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Jesus’ mother, remains by far the most obvious candidate for truth. However, there are other aspects of Mariology that are beyond this particular consideration. None of them carries anything like this weight of solid gospel evidence.
The further tale in the early Fathers that Cleopas/Alpheus was the womb-brother of Joseph (the step-father of Jesus) and so Mary wife of Cleopas was the sister-in-law of Mary the mother of Jesus, and so of ‘little’ James and Joseph, plus these others were then Jesus’ first cousins. This is intriguing and does not unsettle the wider tale. Hegessipus, a second century writer, cited by Eusebius, said that "After the martyrdom of James, it was unanimously decided that Simeon, son of Clopas, was worthy to occupy the see of Jerusalem. He was, it is said, a cousin of the Saviour”. And so, as is recorded in scripture, Mary the wife of Cleopas, who is also recorded as being a ‘sister’ of Mary the mother of Jesus, is a non-womb-sister also; two womb-sisters growing up together with the same given name seems highly unlikely.
In all, as the net is stretched as wide as it can go in order to bring in as much information as possible, the onus lies heavily on those modernists who would deny the perpetual virginity of Mary, the ever-blessed mother of Jesus, for them to prove their difficult case.
to be continued