The Battered Bride

Second Sunday after the Epiphany, Angela Tilbury

Isaiah 62.1-5; John 2.1-11

On the third day there was a wedding….. The opening words of today’s Gospel. Jesus and his mother Mary are guests at a wedding at Cana in Galilee. What Jesus did at that wedding is described by John the Evangelist as the first of his signs, where Jesus manifested his glory, by changing water into wine. I’m not going to discuss the miracle itself this morning, but more what it signifies about our lives and how the presence of Jesus transforms them. But first, a point about the story itself. The responsibility for providing enough wine would have been the bridegroom’s. This is why the steward compliments the bridegroom on the quality of the wine after the miracle has taken place. Christ’s has slipped unnoticed into the bridegroom’s role.

Imagery about marriage plays a big part in scripture and in the Christian spiritual tradition. We need to remember that all this comes from a patriarchal society, where gender roles are pretty fixed. But recognizing this should not blind us to the daringness of the language, or what it says about God’s closeness to us and his power to transform.

In our reading from Isaiah God marries the land of Israel, a land forsaken because her people are in exile. God marries a landless land; an absent bride. But the prophet’s message is that she is being called back from exile, renamed by the Bridegroom, no longer forsaken and desolate.

Thanks to texts like this Jewish tradition hands on the idea of a marriage relationship between God and Israel. In early Christianity the marriage relationship is transferred from God and Israel to Christ and the Church. The Church’s task on earth is to await the coming of her heavenly bridegroom. Then comes another layer of interpretation. The marriage is not only between God and Israel, and Christ and the Church but also between Christ and the individual Christian. This theme is taken up by medieval mystics, both male and female. It was also much loved by the English Puritans. And you can find it today, in some charismatic worship songs. The Dominican theologian Gerald Vann summed this all up years ago by writing that ‘the soul is feminine to God’. Not very ‘correct’ today, but you can see his point.

And this is all very unnerving, because it suggests a merging across barriers which is both shocking and delighful. Sometimes we get a hint of this blend of shock and delight when people who appear to have nothing at all in common unexpectedly fall in love. I remember when two members of my congregation in Cambridge suddenly announced their engagement. One was an Archbishop’s daughter, the other was a bit of a nerd who worked for Google. Who would ever have guessed? And yet at their wedding suddenly we caught a privileged glimpse of what they saw in one another. They were transformed in our eyes as they had been in one another’s. And you could tell that if all went well (which I am pleased to say it has) and with the grace of God they could be for one another a ‘helpmeet’ – equal, but oh so different. Genuine partners.

But the way marriage imagery is used in the Bible does not suggest a marriage of equals. God is not our equal partner. He is our Lord. If we read our particular concern for equality back into the Gospel story we end up thinking that God becomes human in Jesus Christ because we are really rather lovely and he rather fancies us. But no, the marriage between God and Israel, God and the Church, God and the soul – is not equal. And yet having said that we find that God is indeed our helpmeet, the one who, in spite of his greatness and our littleness, chooses to humbly meet our needs and serve us.

Look at Isaiah. God’s bride is anything but lovely. She is desolate, forsaken, ugly, unwanted. God pursues his bride not because she is fanciable but because he is God. God is free to choose how he chooses, and he chooses to value things which have no value, to give beauty to things which are broken and discarded.

If you are going to survive in the Church you really do have to believe in this stuff. You have to believe that God finds value where you see only rubbish, that God pours love on the unlovely and the unloving. The Church, (as the journalist David Winter said years ago), is a battered bride, battered not by the Lord but by her ministers, her people, herself. This is a Church of abuse, of lies, of cover-ups and silence. There is plenty of dishonour, and sometimes gross dishonesty and shame.

Yet, ‘You did not choose me, but I chose you’. Why? Not because you were beautiful, but because you were rotten to the core, short on self-esteem, miserable as sin itself. Not because you were special, but because you weren’t, and deep down at the core of your humanity God waits like shy lover for a response from the least special of his creatures. If you can respond, anyone can. If I can respond, anyone can. And that’s the point. The wine at the wedding feast is filled to the brim. It is magic, it is miracle. There’s enough for all but they have to want it, to like the taste of being wanted, or at least to tolerate it until it becomes familiar enough to bear. All of us, in different ways, yearn to be known, to be seen and received through the eyes of Love.

In ministry or in any kind of caring role you find yourself with people who are rogues and charlatans, and terribly, unbelievably sad, the betrayed and the over-dutiful, the sick in body and mind, the lazy, the bitter, the deluded and the complaining. And you are asked to see them as the Bridegroom sees them, as they are in the eyes of Christ. ‘Beauty for brokenness, hope for despair’ as a contemporary worship song puts it. You are asked to see them in the stark poverty of their human nature; just as Christ sees you in the stark poverty of your human nature; but at the same time to see how desirable they are, how infinitely precious; how the grace of Christ is poured over them as a wedding garment which makes them beautiful.

‘We have seen his glory’, says St John, in the Prologue to his Gospel, and then, in the second chapter he shows what it means for the glory to come down and dwell among us. On the third day there was a wedding. When the glory comes it is indeed the third day, resurrection day, when all things begin again for the first time. Let me remind you of today’s Collect:

Almighty God

in Christ you make all things new:

transform the poverty of our nature by the riches of your grace,

and in the renewal of our lives make known your heavenly glory;

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.