A Wedding Celebration - July 24,2010

Good Saturday morning! How are you doing in the face of adversity today? I'll admit that I don't always remember to be grateful during the times when I want to whine and moan about the conditions of the moment. Sometimes we use some unknown or imagined situation in a far country to make ourselves feel better, but that isn't a very good answer. For one thing, we don't know what their situation is truly like from here; for another, the relative conditions could change at any time. What would we compare our situation against then? Today, let us resolve to be grateful to God, no matter how bad our current situation seems at the time.

Today, we change gears in our Bible verse, or a better automotive metaphor might be that we stop and change directions. Yesterday we read a fantastic statement that our little human minds have trouble with. Today, we are back on Earth in a very common situation.

The next day there was a wedding celebration in the village of Cana in Galilee. Jesus' mother was there... (John 2:1)

Not only have we come right back to Earth, but the Bible scholars broke the sentence in the middle again. Verse 2 starts with the conjunction 'and'. Perhaps the Bible scholars back in the day knew that attention spans would shorten in our times and so made every verse short even if it meant dividing sentences in two. However, be that as it may, we go from an image we have trouble visualizing in our minds to one that you might have going on even today. A wedding is something to celebrate in every country and time on the planet. We rejoice when our friends marry and we rejoice even more when it happens to each of us... at least that is what I have heard happens; I'll have to take your word for it. We get the impression as John sets up the next story that this event is important. Mary, the mother of Jesus, would be there and the words 'wedding celebration' give us the impression that she would not be the only one. Certainly a wedding celebration could be small, with only a few close friends present, but when we hear or read it stated that way we tend to think a lot of people and a large celebration.

John in writing the gospel doesn't have to launch into a lengthy description of the number of bridesmaids or how much the bride's father had to spend to convey the size of the wedding. We read about a wedding celebration and we compare it with the large weddings we have attended where we might use the word 'celebration' to describe the event and the rest is ready to go in our minds. A large wedding means more pressure on someone, probably the host, to provide a goodly amount of food, drink, company, and entertainment. We can think of trying to find a large reception hall for the banquet, invitations sent out ahead of time, clothing, catering, relatives coming in from far away, and all sorts of other details to worry over and prepare on time. One little sentence in one little verse to start off chapter 2 and we have a vision in our minds of what is going on.

Why no in depth description of the wedding? As we will read in the next week, the wedding is the setting for the story, but not the main point of it. Jesus is going to do something both compassionate and wonderful... and I'm cheating ahead again. One verse at a time!

Have a great weekend in Christ!

Bucky