“Beloved Community”: Not the Wine but the Wedding

Growing up in Evangelical America, the “Wedding at Cana” story (John 2:1-11) was almost always about the wine (we were convinced it was only grape juice) and hardly ever about the wedding (which always had erotic stuff lurking around the edges). Thanks to “queer theologians” and brave biblical scholars, I began reading that story differently, and found ways for it to shape a religiously Christian way to argue for same-sex marriage and—more broadly—to banish God’s angry dad reputation in favor of a Lover pining for the Beloved.

How to preach about all that when the lectionary takes us to Cana only once every three years, and then especially when that occasion falls on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend?

The key has to be that word beloved—and how divine love must be passionate enough to inspire risking everything for a world of justice and thriving for all.

Honestly, that’s too much for a single sermon. But here’s how I constructed at least an invitation to follow that particular path.

I began with something not in the lectionary at all, a tiny little book tucked away in the latter third the Hebrew Bible, a collection of erotic love poetry. It’s called “The Song of Solomon,” sometimes “The Song of Songs.”

While some of the imagery of that book gets lost in cultural translation, other portions still soar with rapturous delight:

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, …
   for love is strong as death,
   passion fierce as the grave. …
Many waters cannot quench love,
   neither can floods drown it” (8:6-7).

God is not mentioned in this biblical book, not even once, and yet these romantic passages steeped in desire have played an outsized role in both Jewish and Christian spirituality. One of the leading figures in ancient rabbinic Judaism even referred to this book as the very heart of Scripture, the “holy of holies.”

I was astonished some years ago to discover that this one biblical book was the one most often chosen for commentaries in ancient Christian communities, and the one text most often selected by preachers in the Middle Ages, and for many centuries the Song of Songs was considered just as important as the four accounts of the Gospel.

What modern Christians so often miss is precisely what drew ancient rabbis and Medieval Christians alike to this little collection of eccentric love poems: the enduring conviction that the best and only language suitable for talking about God is the language of desire, of deep and all-consuming love.

This is not merely “tolerance” or even genuine “kindness” but passionate love in a truly remarkable religious vision: our longing for God and God’s longing for us, together, is the energy animating the entire Universe.

The lectionary yesterday morning offered just a trace of that remarkable vision from the prophet Isaiah, who refers quite directly to God as the “bridegroom” and God’s people as the “bride” (62:5)—an image that appears in various ways in many of the prophets, all of them looping back to the Garden of Eden in Genesis, a story not only about God’s creative work but also of how love itself can fall into guilt and shame.

The image and significance of a garden shows up again, and is actually featured in the Song of Solomon, and is woven throughout Isaiah, and also the Gospel writers, as if to frame the whole Bible as a love story between God and God’s creation. (I’m indebted to David M. Carr’s work on these topics, especially his 2002 book The Erotic Word.)

That long history and those compelling images are all percolating in the classic story from John’s account of the Gospel about Jesus turning water into wine. That’s where most readers focus their attention in this story—on the wine—often forgetting that this miraculous transformation happens at a wedding.

The long religious history of divine love urges us to switch the emphasis: the transformation of water into wine is actually meant to draw our attention to what really does matter most in this story—the wedding.

John says that this moment, this miracle of transformation, was the first of the signs Jesus offered and with it he revealed his glory—but a sign of what, exactly? The wedding.

Thanks to Gerard Loughlin’s work, I started reading John’s gospel differently, especially this familiar story that early Christian communities actually read as a parable—not a parable told by Jesus but a parable about Jesus, a parable that is best read at the Eucharistic Table, just as it most likely was in that first-century community.

John’s purpose in telling this parable is rooted in that rich history of supposing that the word “God” can stand only for love, for the Lover longing for the Beloved. Not only this story of a wedding at Cana but every encounter in John’s account of the Gospel emerges from that singular conviction: the whole story of Jesus and the Spirit points toward the consummation of all things, that heavenly banquet prepared from the foundation of the world, when Creator God is fully in communion with God’s creation—a communion that can only be described with the language of passionate desire and romantic love.

In the very next chapter John the Baptist declares himself glad at hearing the voice of the bridegroom—and he’s referring to Jesus! Over the centuries since then, icons of the wedding in Cana seem to depict Jesus himself as the groom; a fifteenth-century image shows John the Baptist in flowered bridal garlands at the head of a wedding table with Jesus at his side, as his bridegroom. 

Wait. What? How did gender-bending hippie nonsense creep into the Bible? The gloriously shocking truth of course is that Christian traditions are indeed wild, peculiar, and wonderful; they are full of extraordinary images and outlandish stories that short-circuit our brains for the sake of pointing us toward what we cannot fully grasp.

And that is precisely as it should be. After all, we’re dealing with the infinite mystery of the living God, who is from first to last, without any caveats or exceptions, pure and passionate love—the love that was praised by an ancient Hebrew song, which cannot be quenched by many waters, and is stronger than death and as fierce as the grave.

So, if we are made by love, and we dwell only in love, and we are ultimately destined for love alone, how then should we live? What kind of relationships should we cultivate and nurture? Can love make any real difference in a world constantly crushed by institutions of greed and woven together with hateful bigotries? The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would say yes, and do so vigorously with a vision for what King called the Beloved Community.

Any community worthy of that moniker must devote itself wholeheartedly to the strategies of non-violence. This was paramount for Dr. King’s vision. “The aftermath of nonviolence,” he wrote, “is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle’s over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.” We must not remain silent nor merely observe and certainly not “acquiesce” in the face of injustice—to do so, King, pointedly noted,“leads to moral and spiritual suicide.”

“The way of violence”—which King himself experienced throughout his life—“leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But, the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.” Love is the key to that entire transformation.

If we can weave a thread from an ancient collection of love poems to a wedding in Cana and into this present day, we might do so with the reminder frequently offered by Cornel West: justice is what love looks like in public.

May that world of justice become the wine that gladdens our hearts.