All the readings for this Sunday deal with transformation in one way or another, and specifically the transformation God desires to bring about in his people and in all humanity. The dominant image is that of marriage, of authentic spousal love. In today’s world, the claim that “God loves us” can often seem like a pious cliché, or an empty tautology. Yet most in the ancient world would likely find the idea that God loves human beings either ridiculous or downright scandalous. “It seems almost blasphemous to say that God can love his creature,” writes Dominique Barthélemy in his book God and His Image. “How could such a crazy idea ever come forth from a human brain – that God loves his creature? We can imagine that his mercy should be poured out without limit, but that he loves…?”
Genesis seems to depict God as exhibiting a kind of parental or lordly love toward human beings, one capable of heartbreak and delight, but certainly nothing like passionate desire. Exodus, however, introduces the notion that Israel’s God is a jealous God, alongside the related comparison of idolatry to prostitution. This comparison of idolatry to prostitution is carried through the rest of the Torah and appears occasionally in the subsequent historical books, but it is left to the prophets of the kingdom period to fully develop the positive side of this negative image, and to flesh out its shocking implications for the nature of God’s covenantal relationship with Israel.
If infidelity to the covenant is like a form of prostitution, then fidelity must correlate to another form of erotic relationship, namely that of marriage. Marriage has certain similarities to the ancient “suzerain-vassal” covenant to which the Sinai covenant is most often compared by biblical scholars: they are both permanent, and establish an ongoing relationship that affects each party’s whole identity and self-understanding. Yet it is curious that at Sinai, the Lord characterizes the breaking of the covenant not as treason, but as prostitution. Taken in isolation, one could perhaps write off the choice of metaphor as merely a mode of expression, but prophets such as Jeremiah, Hosea, and Isaiah take it much more seriously than that, and so make it clear that it is much more than a literary device. Indeed, the erotic analogy points to the central mystery of the covenant, and for Christians to the very nature of who God is in himself: that while “God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being… this universal principle of creation—the Logos, primordial reason—is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love” (Deus Caritas Est 10).
And not only is this Being who encompasses all being a lover, but he seeks to become the spouse of the people he created. This metaphysical mystery begins to emerge with the prophet’s realization that the Lord is not content to let Israel prostitute itself to other gods and thereby settle for transactional, self-serving, and ultimately objectifying relationships to false gods. “For Zion’s sake I will not be silent,” we hear the Lord say in the first reading from Isaiah, “for Jerusalem’s sake I will not be quiet, until her vindication shines forth like the dawn.” The Lord seeks to save Israel from the self-destructive consequences of abandoning the true source of life-giving love, pursuing her in the desert as a spurned husband searches for his unfaithful bride, with a love he can neither forget nor renounce. He sees her wasting away in the impoverished and exploitative hovels of prostitution, and yet assures her she shall one day be “a glorious crown in the hand of the Lord, a royal diadem held by your God.” She who is now called “Forsaken” and “Desolate” will be called “My Delight” and “Espoused.” “For the Lord delights in you and makes your land his spouse. As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride so shall your God rejoice in you.”
The spousal motif only intensifies throughout salvation history, culminating in the marriage of heaven and earth at the end of time. It is no coincidence, then, that Jesus begins his public ministry in John at a wedding. The public inauguration of the Kingdom of God in John is not the unveiling of a campaign slogan or political platform, but the facilitation of a wedding feast. And while it is all too easy to portray the transformation of the water into wine at Cana as simply an awe-inspiring miracle performed as a favor to help some friends who were at risk of social embarrassment, its character as a “sign” in John reminds us that it is meant to point beyond itself to a much greater reality. Just as the Lord sought to transform Israel from a desolate prostitute into a royal bride, so now he appears in human form to transform the water meant for ceremonial washing into the wine that can truly purify us from within and enable us to enter into the cosmic wedding feast God intended from the beginning. At this ordinary Jewish wedding between two human beings – whose names we are never told – Jesus begins to reveal himself as the true bridegroom of all humanity. And just as he provides the couple with the wine that will allow the celebration of their nuptial union to continue, so also will he provide the wine that points to – and indeed becomes – the self-offering of his body and blood consummating his spousal love for the human race.
The transformation of the water into wine thus points to our own transformation in baptism into creatures who, through being conformed to Christ by participation in his death and resurrection, are made capable of receiving and sharing God’s own life – and not as mere vessels, but as spouses. Without effacing or distorting our humanity, the grace opened up to us through the opening of Christ’s body on the cross makes us into fundamentally different creatures, creatures with the capacity to be united to God in a way infinitely surpassing our material nature alone. In receiving this grace, we receive God’s own Spirit, and with this Spirit come “spiritual gifts” we could have never anticipated nor secured by our own efforts. The transformation of water into wine at Cana is therefore the first glimmer of that far more stark and marvelous transformation which occurs in us in the life of grace. That the first faint sign of this new way of life should involve wine at a wedding feast recalls us to the ultimate point and purpose of God’s work in us: to transform us into spouses, into creatures who can enter in to that nuptial friendship which was God’s intention from the beginning and which remains creation’s ultimate goal.