The Unexpected Jesus: Week 2 // The Wedding in Cana
If you are parched in the wilderness, well, this wedding has an invitation with your name on it.
Hi friends,
Thank you for your beautiful responses to this series, especially last week’s exploration of the Incarnation. This week, we’re taking a run at the wedding in Cana.
There is an audio version on The Secret Field Notes Podcast, too. Here’s the link to listen to that (and here’s an article explaining how to add this Secret Field Notes Podcast feed to your podcast app, too so that you have it in your preferred app as soon as it’s published). Just as a note, the platform I use to send these newsletters - Substack - provides an AI-version of narration for accessibility on every post, which is great, but if you want to hear actual me reading it to you, then you do need to go to this other link and press play there.
Scripture Reading
John 2:1-11a (First Nations Version)
Three days later there was a wedding in Village of Reeds (Cana), in the territory of Circle of Nations (Galilee). Bitter Tears (Mary), the mother of Creator Sets Free (Jesus), was there. Creator Sets Free (Jesus) and the ones who walked the road with him were invited as guests to the wedding.
During the celebration, they ran out of wine. So the mother of Creator Sets Free (Jesus) said to him, “Son, they have no more wine.”
“Honoured woman,” he said to her. “Why are you telling me? Is this our concern? It is not yet my time to show who I am.”
But his mother turned to the helpers and said, “Do whatever he says.”
There were six traditional stone water pots, used for purification ceremonies, that could hold large amounts of water.
“Fill them to the top,” Creator Sets Free (Jesus) told them, “and take some to the headman of the feast.”
They filled the pots until they could hold no more and did what he said.
The water had turned into wine. The headman did not know where it had come from, but the helpers who were serving the wine knew.
The headman took a drink and called to the groom, “Everyone serves the best wine first, and after the guests have had enough to drink, they bring out the watered-down wine. But even though you served the good wine at first, you have saved the best wine for last.”
This was the first of the signs through which Creator Sets Free (Jesus) displayed his power. When his new followers saw this, their trust in him grew stronger.”
We’re at a moment in time when it feels out of place or even insensitive to read a story about a wedding feast. There is a lot of suffering and grief, not just on a global scale, but in the lives of each other. It may be hard to read or hear about a feast when we’re grieving or worried, anxious or angry.
I wasn’t sure if I would even include this story in our series because I know that many of us don’t have a lot of room for a nice story about a nice wedding miracle right now.
Thankfully, this isn’t that. (To be honest, I have found Jesus to be many things but nice is not really one of them.)
So it might seem counterintuitive to include this particular story at this particular moment in time…and yet, as with most things that surprise me about Jesus, it turns out that this is actually the right story for that exact moment.
If you are parched in the wilderness, well, this wedding has an invitation with your name on it.