If you’ve ever picked up the bar tab for a wedding reception, you know it can be a significant commitment. But I bet no one here has had to pay for 180 gallons of very good wine – that’s 75 cases or 900 bottles. For common wine usually served at big parties, that would be eleven thousand dollars. For good wine, the kind of wine that would impress the headwaiter, we’re looking at fifty thousand dollars’ worth of wine.
Christ is obviously not getting married at the wedding today, but St. John still presents Him as the Bridegroom. He provides the wine for the celebration, the duty of the groom, just as it remains in many cultures the responsibility of the family of the groom to provide the “refreshments” for a wedding celebration.
Why all this very expensive wine? For obvious reasons, in the Scriptures, wine is a symbol of joy. The psalmist says that the Lord brings forth “wine to gladden the hearts of men” (Ps 104:15). The celebration provided by the bridegroom shows the world the joy that he takes in his bride. A man who marries a woman reluctantly, perhaps begrudgingly accepting the wishes of his family who have arranged a suitable marriage-as-business-deal (as was common in the ancient world), does not spend fifty thousand dollars on the wine for his marriage feast. Only the spouse who is overcome with joy at marrying the best woman in the world, a woman far better than he rightly deserves, foolishly lavishes expensive wine upon his already inebriated guests.
Clearly, St. John does not intend to present the Lord of Lords as a foolish but endearing young man who has had a bit too much to drink on his wedding night. The point is much deeper – Christ is the bridegroom who delights in His bride. And His bride is the Church, which is to say, all of us.
Now this seems far crazier still. Whether we think of the Church as an institution, or whether we honestly look at our own lives, we don’t see the bride that Christ should be crazy about. We see scandals, we see the breakup of marriages and families, we see our own sins and those of our brothers and sisters.
And yet, this is the Bride that Christ is crazy for, not just for what She appears to be, but for what She is called to be and can be, Her real and deeper identity. He loves His Bride so much that He desires to purify Her and restore the splendor of holiness for which She was made.
The jars that Christ filled with wine were “for Jewish ceremonial washings.” They were made of stone, rather than the normal jars of clay. To make a jar out of stone that can hold 20 to 30 gallons is a difficult and expensive process. But because stone, unlike clay, is an impenetrable surface, Jewish law held that a stone jar whose contents had become impure could be cleansed and used again. Clay jars, though, once they had held something impure, had to be broken and discarded. Wine gives joy to the heart, the inner core of the person. This wine, this joy, is poured, then, not into vessels that once made impure can only be broken up and discarded, but into vessels that are capable of being made pure once more.
If we do not appear to be the sort of bride Christ ought to be crazy about, then Christ’s good news today is that we are stone jars, not clay. We can be purified and made ready to receive the new wine of joy once again. This happens in the Sacrament of Baptism, where sinners receive rebirth and new life; in the Sacrament of Confession, where those sins we have committed since our baptism can be forgiven and the divine physician can heal our wounds; and in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, where that healing continues and is strengthened and we can begin to thrive once again.
Let’s go back, though, to the fact that this all takes place at a wedding. Christ doesn’t just use marriage as a convenient or coincidental setting. Marriage is the place where He wants to manifest His glory (that is, where the Epiphany takes place). Throughout salvation history, marriage is God’s chosen means to communicate life and grace to the people He loves – as we particularly saw last summer as we read His Bread of Life discourse alongside St. Paul’s teaching on marriage – the mystery of His Body and Blood and the mystery of the true meaning of the human body enlightening one another.
We need to recognize that for many people, though, it can be hard to hear that marriage is the place where Christ wants to manifest His glory. It could be because their own experience of marriage – your own marriage, your parents’, other marriages you witnessed around you – were the furthest thing from a manifestation of God’s glory. Marriage, for many people, can mean pain and suffering, to put it lightly.
Or, marriage can mean fear – fear of what I might be getting myself into, fear of the pressure to get married from my family, or fear and disappointment that I’ll never find the person I’m supposed to marry.
Or, marriage might have at one point in your life been that manifestation of God’s glory, but now it’s drudgery, putting up with the same person complaining about the same thing, nagging about the same chores, or making the same mistakes they’ve been making for 50 years.
Christ wants to heal and purify all of that too. If marriage reminds you of pain and hurt that you carry in your heart, he wants to fill your heart with the new abundant wine of His love and joy. He wants the chance to love you in the way that you have always longed to be loved.
The renewal of marriage is more important than ever as we commemorate this week the 52nd anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. The past two and a half years since Roe’s overturning have shown us just how much work remains to be done in building up an authentic culture of life in our country. Though our Constitution is no longer officially purported to deny the right to life to an unborn child, many states have failed to pass legislation or constitutional amendments protecting unborn children, or even enshrined Roe’s corrupting influence into their state constitutions.
The effort to win hearts to the sanctity of unborn human life will not come without a renewal in marriage. “Four percent of babies conceived in marriage are [at risk], compared to 40 percent of children conceived outside of marriage. Meanwhile, 13 percent of women [making this tragic choice] are married, and 87 percent are unmarried. [Lack of chastity] is the main [threat to pre-born life]. Marriage is the best protector of unborn human life. It wasn’t just the pedagogical impact of Roe … that corrupted our nation; Roe exacerbated multiple generations of a [sexual] culture that incentivizes [threats to unborn life by undermining marriage and chastity].
“There are some people … who genuinely do not know that the entity in the human womb is a human being. But remarkably, one-third of [recent poll] respondents said that their views are described “at least somewhat well” by both of these statements: “Human life begins at conception, so an embryo is a person with rights,” and “[decisions about continuing a pregnancy] should belong solely to the pregnant woman.” Teaching the facts of embryology, though important, won’t make [the] decisive change.”
What will make the decisive change is a renewal in marriage, and a renewal in the virtue of chastity. If it seems like we don’t talk enough about the legal right to life, or if our devotion to the cause has lessened, it could be because we are focused even more on addressing these root causes, on building up a culture of marriage, a culture of chastity – the culture in which all children will be lovingly welcomed. That does not mean that we do not value the work of the pro-life legal movement, or the crisis pregnancy centers, or the shelters, or the sidewalk advocates. It means that we come to grips with the fact that all those things are bandages – extremely important bandages, ones that will always be necessary because of original sin – but not a final cure. They are needed in the context of a renewed appreciation of marriage and chastity. We have a pro-life movement. Do we have a pro-marriage and pro-chastity movement?
If marriage is a place of brokenness for you, Christ wants you to know that He is not afraid of that brokenness. When Christ chose marriage to explain His love for all of us, He knew that people’s experience of marriage was broken. But He came to enter that brokenness and transform it.
The prophet Isaiah told the Israelites that “the Lord delights in you and makes your land his spouse” only after severe rebukes for the Israelites’ wanton abandonment of the Lord and His law. The Lord knows that He has picked an imperfect bride in Israel, but He still delights in in her.
If marriage provokes fear and anxiety in your heart, Christ wants you to know that you are a part of the Bride in whom He takes incredible joy and delight. He will not leave you alone or afraid if you invite Him to be a deeper part of your life and a deeper part of all the loves of your heart.
And if marriage has come to mean the drudgery and boredom of everyday life, He wants you to see that He saved the best wine for last. At every stage in marriage there is something new and beautiful to discover, but you will only find it if your marriage is founded on Him and continues to draw new life in Him. You won’t “reignite the spark” from just the right romantic date or getaway, but rather from getting down on your knees together and asking God to renew and continue to bless the love that He placed in your hearts years ago.
Whoever you are and whatever your circumstances, Christ wants to fill you with the new wine of joy today. That joy will come from the stone jars of purification. It is when our hearts have been purified by the fire of God’s love, a fire that burns away imperfections and anything that could impede the fulfillment of His love, that the new wine of joy can fill our hearts and our understanding of marriage can be purified, healed, and redeemed in Christ. No brokenness is too deep to be penetrated by His healing love and joy.
The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson
Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne
II Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXV
Citations from Ryan Anderson, “The Way Forward After Dobbs,” October 2024 First Things
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/10/the-way-forward-after-dobbs
Father Gregerson 