I COULD not sleep. Reading a novel would worsen my wakefulness. Instead, I decided that a scholarly article would have me dozing off in minutes.
As the wedding at Cana was looming, I searched a digital archive for articles about it; but the one that I selected was no soporific: its medieval interpretations of Cana offered possibilities that I had never thought of. They were not mainstream, but they were stimulating enough to keep me awake and reading; so I am mentioning them here.
First, some context. The marriage at Cana derives some of its meaning from its place within John’s Gospel, and some from its place within 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 only one direct witness: the steward. No one else shares his point of view. Its setting looks ordinary, amid people who are not searching or preparing for it. It simply happens in their midst. If there were no other message in John 2.1-11, this revelation about the miraculous in everyday existence would offer food for thought.
There is more. One vein in that seam of Gospel gold which I want to mine is not in the text at all: the bride. She must have been there; for the bridegroom definitely is, and he cannot be marrying himself. Nor could he, in Bible days, be marrying another “he”. Yet John does not mention her.
That lack of a mention could restrain us from spiritual speculation, but earlier generations of Christians have not been squeamish about taking an imaginative approach. Spotting the gap in the story, they filled it by imagining the invisible bride. They read the Cana story in the light of other passages in scripture — Matthew, Mark, and Luke, for example, all refer to Christ as a bridegroom — or quote his own words implying the same. Revelation gives further confirmation of the same image (18.23).
Taken on their own, this might mean no more than that Christ signified celebration, fulfilment, and new beginnings. But another New Testament passage was added to the mix: one that used the language of marriage theologically. Ephesians 5.22-32, a piece of Pauline social teaching, argued that the marriage relationship could be understood as a model of the relationship 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 within marriage has become socially unfashionable, but 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, but the eternal bridegroom: Christ. He went to the wedding to seek out 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 should not surprise us. So Christ’s overflowing love — signified in the water become 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 wedding was John, the beloved disciple, and that, after drinking the miraculous wine, he abandoned his intention to marry and followed Jesus instead. That potent linkage of virginity with the stuff of the eucharist would not have found favour with Augustine, who always insisted that marriage was God’s good gift to humankind.
An even 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 women, both lay and religious. There was no hint of this in any genuine 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 in the foreground a bride who was logically but not textually, present. This is precious permission to look imaginatively for ourselves within the Gospel, hearing its spirit as well as its letter (2 Corinthians 3.6).