In Cana of Galilee
Yesterday for Catholics the Gospel at Mass was John 2:1-11 , the Wedding at Cana. This is one of my favorite parts of the Gospel.
This story is so beautiful and so rich with symbolism that I feel compelled to write a little about it here. Even though we have some deep religious thinkers here at the Scene I find we don’t too often write about theology, which is a shame. (I’ve put this in the “Culture” category, but don’t we need a “Theology” one?)
The first import of the story, obviously, is that Jesus’ first miracle is to make booze for a party, and that, my friends, is awesome. I could never find that austerity fits religious life, and apparently neither did the Lord.
Another superficial-but-important layer is another proof that, as I tend to say (in my role as provocateur, as Friend of the Scene Freddie writes), the New Testament is the world’s first feminist work. The Gospels often show how, in the context of a patriarchal society, women played a very important role in the early Church. It is Mary who initiates Jesus’ miracle, and when she brings it up he dismisses her, calling her “woman”. Throughout the Gospels, whenever the men dismiss the women, it is later found out that the women were, in fact, right. After Jesus is resurrected, it is women who first find the empty tomb and, when they report this to the Apostles, they are first dismissed. In a matter of days, the Apostles, the leaders of the Church, have forgotten Jesus’ words about rebuilding the Temple, but the women remember, and accept the revelation. And it is the women, of course, who are right.
Jesus’ public life thus begins and ends with women who, better than the men, understand His Revelation. Furthermore, at Cana, Mary does more than just suggest and initiate: she takes charge, asking for the servants to bring him the jars of water. In the Church, women are not bystanders, they are very much leaders.
(I could also rhapsodize about the significance of the fact that, while the attendees think nothing of the appearance of this wine, it is the servants who witness, and remember the miracle. Beati pauperes indeed.)
But where the depth and significance of the miracle of Cana really shows is where it intersects with Catholic theology (sorry, Protestants).
This initiation of the miracle by Mary is not just an illustration of the importance of women. It also parallels another story, from the Old Testament: that of Eve, who drives Adam to eat the apple. The miracle of Cana shows that, just as Jesus is the New Adam, Mary the Immaculate is the New Eve. Just as Eve had to push Adam to act, Mary pushes Jesus into the world, not simply by giving birth, but also by initiating his public life. What a powerful symbol, that the Redemption of humanity should begin with this mirror, righted image of the Fall. Imagine it for a second: at this stage, Mary knows that pushing him to perform a miracle and start his public life will lead to the humiliation, torture and death of her only son, and yet she is the one who does it. While Jesus is having fun at a party, how serious, how weighty her “They have no wine“ must have been.
And finally, of course, that we had no wine was oh so incredibly true then. The transformation of water into wine presages the transubstantiation of wine into the Blood of Christ. Jesus is wedded to the Church, and the Eucharist here is presaged as a nuptial mystery. Jesus gives himself to the Church, as Paul wrote , like a husband must give himself to his wife: entirely.
The Wedding at Cana is the reading of the Gospel my wife and I chose for our wedding, because of the depth of meaning of this apparently simple story. What it says about women, the dedication of marriage and the Redemption is what we want to keep in mind for the rest of our lives.
Well, that, and booze.
(Since I am a Catholic this is very much a Catholic take on this piece of the Gospel but I would be very curious to learn about other takes on Cana from different religious perspectives.)
First of all, theology is culture, numbnuts; and it’s a shocking, but telling bit of hubris that you think it needs a category of it’s own.
Second, it’s no accident that the Romans called Christianity the religion of women and slaves.
Third, it’s no surprise that a movement devoted to the powerless was co-opted into a tool of the strong to oppress the weak.
Fourth, if people actually read the New Testament and made even a half-assed effort to follow its teachings, there’s no doubt the world would be a better place.
— Tony Comstock · Jan 18, 01:09 PM · #
Don’t you think it takes away from the timeless Gospel to reinterpret it according to modern cultural norms?
Imagine the year 3000, when men have been subjugated under matriarchy. When women say, “God sent his only Son – the weaker sex! Of course, even in Jesus’ time, men needed women to push them along – you can see that men’s weakness is part of God’s revelation. All of the important parts were left to the actual greater gender, as is God’s plan.”
I can’t help but think that reinterpreting it and calling reinterpretation part of the mystery of the Gospel, or whatever, is a failing in our part, not in the Gospel – our failing for needing a reinterpretation. “What it says about women” strikes me as an incredibly trite message. “How dare you call female equality trite!” – but I really do see, under the perspective the Gospels seem to be providing, equality of the sexes as a trite message in comparison to humanity’s need for spiritual redemption in the face of sin.
“I could never find that austerity fits religious life, and neither did the Lord” – because, at a wedding (a very small percentage of religious life), Jesus procured wine – I don’t see this as a renunciation of austerity in all religious life.
Honestly, this whole thing strikes me as “Buddy Jesus” from Dogma.
— bcg · Jan 18, 01:36 PM · #
Tony:
I will leave the commentary about my nuts’ numbness, or lack thereof, to more informed parties.
As for whether theology is culture, what you’re saying makes sense only if you see theology as a purely social-historical construct, which I do not. And you know I do not. Culture is by definition immanent and transient. Theology — again, by definition — is the study of the transcendent and the eternal. One can influence the other (if theology can’t influence culture I need to become a hermit), but they are very much different things.
Absolutely.
The first step in corrupting a religion is to label it a movement.
That much is true. And the New Testament doesn’t just talk about brotherly love, it also talks about metaphysics. So I suggest you try it some time.
bcg:
I take your point re: interpreting the Gospel according to modern norms.
My comment about the New-Testament-as-feminist-tract was obviously made with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek.
That being said, I don’t believe that saying that the New Testament tells us things about women’s role in society is interpreting it according to modern cultural norms. Clearly Saint Paul and others thought the Gospels had things to say about that.
It is not interpreting the Gospel according to modern cultural norms to point out that women had an important role in the early Church and a powerfully symbolic one in the Gospels, especially compared to the cultural norms of the times in which the Gospels occurred, and to infer from that fact teachings that are relevant today.
You’re right — and isn’t it great that a short piece of the Gospels manages to tell us about both? The miracle of Cana is both a powerful reminder of the nuptial mystery of the Eucharist and of the saintly role of women. And many other things besides. Ain’t that beautiful? Why, it’s almost as if it was divinely inspired!
Well then, I guess that’s sad for you.
It’s not that Jesus procured wine at a wedding. It’s that He (miraculously) procured wine in a heavily symbolic way as the first step into his public life. It’s that, while He never indulged excesses, the Gospel shows that Jesus knew to eat, drink and be merry. It’s that, if the central mystery of the Christian Revelation is the Incarnation (and it is), then it must follow that the material world, and not just the spiritual world, is full of blessings in which it is holy to partake. No one is going to convince me that a fine cheese isn’t a proof of the existence of God.
And I’m sorry for that, because that’s not what I wanted to convey. The miracle at Cana is a joyous story and it brings to light the more joyous aspects of the faith. Of course, as I tried to point out, it includes a tragic facet, in that it prefigures Jesus’ gift of His life for the Redemption of all humanity. But I highlighted the joyous parts because, hey, joy is nice, and also because it is forever associated in my mind with my marriage, and I would like that to be relatively joyous.
And while I have little patience for the theological weightlessness of “Buddy Jesus”, I don’t have more patience for the “to be holy is to have a proverbial stick up your ass” crowd. There have been ascetic saints, but never austere saints.
— PEG · Jan 18, 02:32 PM · #
I think the Protestant take on this story is not too different from Mr. Gobry’s, but with a less Mariolatry and a little more stress on how the story valorizes marriage, thus demonstrating that celibacy is a vain, popish conceit.
(In truth, I doubt that many Protestants today use the phrase “vain, popish conceit.” You have to spend a lot of time reading Colonial history in order for such phrases to come naturally.)
— y81 · Jan 18, 04:06 PM · #
“Vain, popish conceit” needs to see a resurgence.
— bcg · Jan 18, 04:33 PM · #
It’s hard to know how to respond to this. At first glance it reads like a “my truth” testimonial, which is cool and all, but you can’t criticize a my truth testimonial. Fighting absurdity with absurdity is absurd, as one of your austere and fellow Frenchman might say.
But you also seem to don a propositional attitude with your characterizations, which is less a soul-report and more like an appeal for intersubjectivity. Which would in turn allow me to argue that I think your reading is deeply shallow — culturally, historically, and theologically.
But I don’t want to get into it if your purpose is testimony. If you want open-bar saviors and proto-feminist texts, who am I to say no?
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 18, 04:44 PM · #
y81: Heh.
The story does valorize marriage, and you’re right to point it out. (Perhaps I don’t do enough in my post.)
As for the vanity of celibacy, unless you’re part of the Jesus-married-Mary-Magdalene, I’m going to keep thinking us Papists are on the right side of the issue. ;)
— PEG · Jan 18, 04:48 PM · #
Kristoffer: The purpose of this is not testimony (except for the bits where I explain the personal reasons why this Gospel is significant to me). It is to explain why the Wedding at Cana is a deep, significant and beautiful story.
— PEG · Jan 18, 04:56 PM · #
PEG:
Have you read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov? You probably have…
One of my favorite scenes from that book (there are so many) is in fact about this very part of the Gospel. At the edge of despair, Alyosha hears it and is strengthened. I was going to try and quote it, but instead I’ll just say everyone should read the book if they haven’t.
— Derrick · Jan 18, 05:33 PM · #
Glad to hear it! Re world’s first feminist work, I think you are using a misguided definition of ‘feminist’. Feminism is not the belief that women are swell creatures capable of manly virtue, of great deeds etc etc. If that were so, then Esther and Penelope would be the first feminist figures in art.
Properly, a feminist pursues the familial, social and political equality (or superiority) of women. They would never be content with your minimal definition: the acknowledgment that women can indeed be strong, cunning, smart, inspiring, and right about certain things.
re: wine, that has been a sticking point for zillions of Christians, and I’ll happily embrace your reading on the subject. Strategically if not theologically and historically. A more fine-grained analysis would explore the significance of oinos in Jewish and Pagan culture, how people of those days viewed its procurement and consumption, how old the tradition was, how it arose, etc. It would also ask about Pasteur, germ theory, and what we know about the water supply in those days. They body is thy temple, is alcohol necessary now, etc.
A proper analysis would also explore the possibility that Jesus wanted to be more user friendly than his predecessor The Baptist, that he was defining himself against his fiery and ascetic competitors in general, and how all of this plays into Jesus’s strategy of general principles rather than strict restrictions and anti-social denunciations.
But overall, I’d say you have the right, if liberal, read on the wine question. And again, strategically I’m with you all the way. A humanity that says, “Light ‘em up and knock ‘em back” is the best of all possible worlds.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 18, 05:58 PM · #
Well, so, you’re Catholic. Does that mean that Protestant “theology” doesn’t actually exist, because unlike your religion, Protestantism is a purely social construct, not the actual decree of the Divine? If not Protestant theology than surely Muslim theology must be, because if theology “by definition” isn’t culture then any mistaken religion – and, again, you’re Catholic, so you must view all other faiths as fundamentally mistaken – “by definition” can have no theology. Right?
Then you’ve made theology into the study of nothing, because nothing is “transcendent” or “eternal.”
What an amazing creature “theology” is. If I were to declare a major in unicorn science or dragonology, I’d be forced to defend my studies by first proving that those mythical beasts really existed. But study a God every bit as mythical, and people are immediately convinced you’re doing something real, and that you can just skip all the inconvenient “prove it actually exists” stuff.
— Chet · Jan 18, 06:08 PM · #
One more thing. If we’re allowed to emulate Jesus’s actions, what do you think about the divine activity of vandalism?
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 18, 06:25 PM · #
Chet: This except apply it to atheism.
— bcg · Jan 18, 06:26 PM · #
I, too, was disappointed that you failed to address oinos. Reference to an ancient Greek term is a fine way to give your insights the affectation they are missing.
— turnbuckle · Jan 18, 07:31 PM · #
Thanks for the exegesis, Pascal! This has always been one of my favorite gospel stories, too. I like the fact that Jesus first miracle is so completely superfluous.
I’m a newish convert to Catholicism, though, and had never considered the story in terms of Mary and her parallels with Eve.
— Andy · Jan 18, 10:31 PM · #
bcg –
By all means, then, let this refutation be brought forth. Personally I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask PEG to address the most immediate contradictions of his positions. If he’s willing to state that the difference between culture and theology is that theology is “real”, then it begs the question about the status of the theology of all the religions he must believe to be false. Is “Jewish theology” by definition an oxymoron?
— Chet · Jan 18, 10:45 PM · #
Chet:
From the fact that I’m not Protestant it does not follow that Protestant theology doesn’t exist, any more than it does not follow from the fact that Cosette was a fictional character that Les Misérables doesn’t exist.
My, what a statement of faith.
Your aggressive boorishness is made all the more vain by the fact that I stated no such thing. I stated that the difference between culture and theology is that culture is one thing, and theology is another. Theology is the study of the divine or, for the nonbeliever, of religious faith and practice. There are many definitions of “culture”, but I think few people would claim that the definition of culture is “the study of religious faith and practice.”
Also, if there was no theology save for Catholic theology, it would have been a little bit absurd for me to ask, in my post (you have read it, right?), for insights into different religions’ perspectives on the Wedding at Cana.
But the incurious and smug have never been deterred by facts and simple logic, have they?
Kristoffer:
Thanks for your kind comments. I’m not sure what you mean by divine vandalism. The Temple merchants?
Andy:
Thank you! I’m glad you appreciated it. Yes, the “Mary angle” is one of the things that makes this story one of the ones I feel most fondly about.
— PEG · Jan 19, 02:25 PM · #
I’ve not insulted you; it doesn’t speak well of your convictions nor of your ability to defend them that you can’t extend me the same courtesy.
Moreover you appear to have forgotten your own words. Allow me to repeat them:
FWIW, I was unable to find these definitions in any dictionary. Regardless – it follows from this that theology is only theology if the subject of its study is transcendent and eternal (and exists). So does Hindu theology exist? Can such a thing be possible to a Catholic? I don’t see how it could be. To say that Hindu theology is real is to affirm the transcendent-ness and eternal-ness of the subjects of its study – the gods Ganesh, Lakshmi, and the rest – because, if they are not transcendent and eternal, but instead transient artifacts of a cultural misunderstanding of the divine, how can they “by definition” be the subject of theology?
But you as a Catholic surely cannot affirm that they are eternal and transcendent, because to do so would make you a Hindu, and you are not. So you appear to be at an impasse, unless you’re willing to admit that, by your construction, no theology but Catholic theology can exist.
Oh, but it does. Very much so. Just as it’s the case that if you defined the field of “non-fiction-ology” as (by definition!) the study of texts that were not fictional, there could be no such thing as “Les Mis nonfictionology”, because Les Mis could not be the subject of such study, being fiction.
— Chet · Jan 19, 04:33 PM · #
Turnankle, ordinarily I would agree. Pedantism sucks might cock and all that. However, I used oinos for the same reason it helps to use Yeshua. It reminds you to check your viewpoint at the door and Vico the subject matter. I assume you have no problem with that.
Surface readings of the bible are boring.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 19, 04:59 PM · #
Not that it really matters, but still, it’s fun to say so:
Chet has the better of this one, so far. I don’t see any remotely convincing answer to his challenge that only one theology exists (assuming PEG’s definition.)
Has anyone been reading the excerpt from “36 Arguments for the Existence of God”?
It’s here and it’s really very good:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/goldstein09/goldstein09_index.html
How about “Pascal’s Wager”?
The author says:
“The problem is that Pascal’s wager offers no guidance as to which prayers, which services, which creed, to live by.”
Catholicism is the One True Theology because, why, exactly??
— Socrates · Jan 19, 05:04 PM · #
PEG: yes, the turning of the tables. If he did that today, he’d get a misdemeanor for vandalism and maybe assault: the decadent’s martyrdom, I suppose.
More seriously, this was a fun post. I’d still like you to admit that your definition of ‘feminism’ is minimalist, periphery, and almost beside the point. But since I can’t figure out a way to make anybody admit to anything — other than simulated drowning, of course — I’ll just say thanks for allowing me to take a break from helping these scum and villainy avoid their just and earthy deserts.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 19, 05:12 PM · #
Chet:
Are you really pursuing this?
That just breaks my heart.
To take another comparison: just because I disagree with a certain economist’s views does not mean he is not an economist, or that the only economics that exists is, say, Chicago School economics.
Hindu theologists do study the transcendent. They just have different beliefs than me as to what the transcendent is.
Do I believe that only one strand of theology is true? Absolutely. Does this mean that every other theology does not exist? That’s just ludicrous.
Socrates:
I really, really don’t want to get into an argument about proofs for the existence of God, but suffice it to say much more can be said about Pascal’s Wager.
Kristoffer:
Yeah, and back in the day He was crucified for running off his mouth. Not sure that’s better. I have no problem with Jesus kicking the ass of the money changers in the Temple. Righteous anger is righteous.
— PEG · Jan 19, 06:14 PM · #
Seems like it, doesn’t it!
You’re the one who said “by definition” over and over again. Did you not meant it? Or did you mean “by my definition”?
Well, but doesn’t that difference of belief have to indicate that one of you is wrong, and that what one of you believes is not eternal and transcendent, but transient and “immanent”? And, since you’re a Catholic and not a Hindu, doesn’t that mean you have to believe it’s the Hindu that is wrong?
Obviously the Hindu believes in the existence and reality of Hindu theology. The question, which you continue to evade, is why you do. I don’t see any way that you can, logically. But then, as someone recently reminded me, “the incurious and smug have never been deterred by facts and simple logic”. Have they?
It’s the necessary conclusion of your own idiosyncratic definitions. (More like daffynitions.) After all, you didn’t define theology as the study of things believed to be transcendent and eternal, but things that are transcendent and eternal. But as a Catholic you cannot believe that Hinduism is transcendent and eternal. So how can you believe that Hindu “theology” isn’t just culture?
Stop being smug and incurious, and follow your definitions to their inevitable logical conclusions.
— Chet · Jan 19, 06:40 PM · #
Wow, I hope Pascal and Chet don’t turn into another version of the Conor & Matoko show. Although Chet at least has a substantive comment, even if it’s been the same one now five or six times in a row.
— y81 · Jan 19, 07:31 PM · #
As soon as PEG can satisfactorily address it, I’ll stop making it. It’s hardly my fault if his evasions necessitate bringing his focus back to the point at hand.
— Chet · Jan 19, 07:48 PM · #
The burning of cars in les banlieues is the product of righteous anger. In fact, a great many injuries to property and person are motivated by sincerely felt righteous anger. If righteous anger is righteous, how do you avoid the relativism?
You can answer by appealing to radically situated ethics — i.e., if you happen to be Jesus, with all of his qualities and characteristics, and you find yourself in the exact same circumstance in which he found himself 2000 years ago in Jerusalem, only then is the turning over of those particular tables a righteous act. Not sure what that gets you, though.
Same thing with wine. Maybe it’s the case that only that particular act in that particular situation done by that particular guy is okay with God, but all other fermentation, distribution and consumption of alcoholic beverages is wrong.
And yes, I don’t believe any of this. I’m just being a pest. Still want to hear you cry uncle on your bible as proto-feminist text argument, though. :)
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 19, 08:52 PM · #
Kristoffer: I know you are. Good luck with that one though.
Chet:
Clearly, you are playing with forces beyond your comprehension here. Forces called “words” and “concepts.” That you cannot comprehend that “the study of X” that comes to wrong conclusions about X is still “the study of X” just boggles my mind. I don’t know how more simply to put it. Need I use finger puppets? A song and a dance?
But of course your comments have little to do with theology and much to do with vituperation. You’re not interested in theologizing, you’re interested in sneering about the very idea of religious faith. And you know what? Fine. I’m tired.
So I will make this damning admission: you’ve found me out. I am a Catholic, and as a Catholic, I am not a Hindu. Oh, you got me. Man, I’m in a corner now.
Why do I believe in the Catholic religion and not the Hindu religion? In part for the same reason I believe most things: because I’ve thought about it long and hard and it’s what makes most sense to me. In large part too because I have experienced the reality of the existence of God, a fact which will have you no doubt blow another gasket, but which remains.
So there you have it: from my mouth to your ear, Catholics are not Hindu. Now thanks to this Earth-shattering revelation, thanks to you religion is disproven forever, and the world can finally live in peace.
— PEG · Jan 20, 08:17 AM · #
When I provided the link, what I meant was, “Chet, we know you’re not religious, and your comment reads mostly like ‘Just updating you guys: I’m still not religious.’” Chet’s point was a quibble, and wasn’t really addressing the goal of the post. But for some reason PEG engaged and came off like a real ass, because Comstock was right and Chet’s argument was as sturdy as a Euclidian proof.
You can believe in the transcendental and the divine, but even when you define theology as the study of it, theology itself is not transcendental. The definition itself separates it from the transcendental. And the study of something, anything, is eventually locked to the culture the studier comes from.
I mean, it’s the height of absurdity to say Hindu theology is not part of Indian culture, regardless of your take on whether Hinduism is accurate at all or to what degree it is accurate. The same of Catholicism – how can the human study of a subject not be transient and immanent? To say otherwise seems to be elevating theology above the level of “human study,” contradicting its own definition.
Just say, “Chet & Comstock – yes, you caught me, that was wrong. Everyone else (i.e., target audience): I hope you got something out of my take on this Scripture passage, which I found so meaningful.”
— bcg · Jan 20, 10:03 AM · #
bcg: I will gladly concede that theology can be influenced by culture. But it’s another thing to say that it’s a purely cultural construct, and yet another one to say that it is the same thing as culture.
I will also concede that I had a short fuse on this one and maybe even overreacted, precisely because it was so far out of what I was trying to do here. I shouldn’t have fed the troll. That I will apologize for.
— PEG · Jan 20, 10:31 AM · #
You don’t need to put it “more simply”, you need to address the fact that this argument is wrong, as I’ve shown twice now. Your petulant insults are just evasions.
The flaw in your argument is that we’re not talking about two fields that study X; Hindu and Catholic theologies study two different things. Hinduism and Catholicism are two different religions! I would have thought that even you would not need that explained to you.
Catholic and Hindu theology – for that matter, Catholic and Protestant theology – have, as their object of study, two completely different things. You’ve defined theology as the study of things that are transcendent, eternal, and most importantly real. The (believed) eternalness, transcendence, and realness of the subject of Catholic theology cannot give credence to Hindu theology, because the subject of Hindu theology is something completely different.
You’re trying to substantiate unicorn science with the observation that gorillas exist. Sure, and that legitimizes the field of ape anthropology; how could it possibly lend credence to dragonology?
I’m sure that you feel that you have. I know I felt that I had when I was a believer, too. It doesn’t “blow my gasket”, it merely earns you my sympathy.
I’ll simply ask the readers to determine if the person who called me “smug and incurious” simply because I asked a question you didn’t want to answer has a leg to stand on in regards to accusations of “vituperation.”
If you want an argument that gets us back on point, then I would argue that the single biggest failure in your exegesis is that you act like 1 Timothy 2:12 (“I do not permit a woman to teach a man or have authority over him, but to remain silent”) and 1 Corinthians 14:24 (“The women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says.”) don’t exist. Those two passages alone would seem to be ample disproof of the idea of the New Testament as the “first feminist work” (really? The first? As opposed to, say, the Orestia?) but you just pretend like they’re not printed in your Bible. Can you explain?
— Chet · Jan 20, 05:42 PM · #
PEG,
Great post. You just got me excited about moving onto John once I get done with Luke in my Bible study class. Luke seems particularly relevant to your broader theological point about women in the NT. It is clear that one of the central messages in Luke is that the poor and weak are especially important to God (and therefore should be especially important to us). Beginning with the angles announcing Christ’s birth to the shepherds, which my Bible Commentary describes as “among the poorest people in the society. A group composed mostly of women and young children, they did not own land or sheep, and they mostly worked for hire.”
Later in Luke, we have the story of the sinful woman at Simon the Pharisee’s house (7:37-50), the woman with the hemorrhage that is cured through her faith and bears witness to the crowd (8:43-48), the woman who finds the lost coin and rejoices with her friends (15:8-10), the women who weep for Jesus on the way to his crucifixtion (23:27-28), etc. In short, “the least among all of you is the one who is the greatest” — once we accept that eternal truth it makes sense to think of women (and children) as having a special Christian role in mankind’s salvation. Whether or not that is a feminist message, I’ll leave to those who care about the concept of feminism.
— Arminius · Jan 21, 06:14 AM · #
An interesting piece and discussion. I would only caution you against proclaiming the New Testament the “world’s first feminist work.” First, there’s no way of proving that, considering the amount of writing lost from the ancient world. Second, that which does survive hints at earlier feminist work. Certainly, Euripides’ plays “Women of Troy” and “Medea” could be considered feminist. There are also many plays of Euripedes that have been lost, but which we know were widely condemned by his contemporaries and near contemporaries (Aristotle being one) for their far too sympathetic focus on women, particularly in the conveniently mislaid Melanippe plays.
— Steffen Silvis · Jan 24, 08:05 PM · #
For some unknown reason the Roman Lectionary Reading for the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time gospel omits the opening words “On the third day”, which have a great deal to do with the context of the story that follows. Clearly, we can see that the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel parallels the First Day of Creation (Genesis 1:-5); it’s unmistakable. We may be able to recognize Day Two as parallel to Genesis 1:6-8, with the Dome that God put in place and the separation of one body of water from another and as symbolized by John the Baptist’s declaring, “Behold, the Lamb of God” (his witness of the Spirit having come down and remained upon Jesus, some of John’s disciples leave him and follow Jesus, and Jesus gather other disciples [Note that Nathanael is spoken of as under a fig tree]). Jesus sets his disciples apart from others to teach them (note that the rest of John’s Chapter 2 includes more than one “next day.”) Then the evangelist introduces the Wedding at Cana by saying, “On the third day…”. The Wedding at Cana, parallels the Third Day in Genesis (1:9-13) in which God declares the waters under the sky have been gathered into a single basin so that dry land appears and the earth’s fruits brought forth with the seed of regeneration.
It seems clear then, that the Third Day, the Wedding at Cana that is about the gathering of the waters (into ceremonial water jars) and the seed of regeneration (the wine of gladness along with the other wedding symbols), depicts the arrival of God’s kingdom come to earth with the celebration of the union of bride and Groom. God and his bride have begun a new creation in concert with one another as Jesus and his disciples enjoy the wedding feast.
John’s account of Jesus’ use of six stone-ceremonial water-jars fits perfectly. According to ancient belief, six is the most perfect number, both the sum and the product of its parts. (God completed his work of creation in six days; Jesus was crucified on the 6th day of the week; the crucifixion was completed during the 6th hour of the day. The hexagon was seen in nature, understood symbolically, and applied practically, playing an important role in building the world. Consider the form of the beehive and the snowflake, which have fascinated people throughout time. And science has shown the hexagon to be the ideal building principle in the molecular structure of the benzene ring (C6H6) the foundation of organic chemistry, which was discovered through a dream by the chemist August Kekulé von Stradonitz.)
Jesus’ asking for six ceremonial jars is not merely poetic convenience. We note that after creating humankind God ‘rested’, but creation did not end there. Jesus is demonstrating that creation goes on, continuing where the Genesis Creation Story leaves off, in using the ‘six’ water jars to create the wine of gladness. He is the Light that transforms creation, dispels our darkness, and changes our concept of ourselves. Creation is not a clock ticking toward its end; it is ongoing, World Without End, because we participate in that ongoing creation. We should be mindful that the intention of apocalyptic messages is to provide a warning for us so that we can avert the possibility of bring about our own demise by failing to live in the Spirit. Apocalypses/revelations remind us to do the good right now because this “now” that we are experiencing is the very moment upon which the whole of our future depends.
We are meant to be transformed in the Christ and in turn to participate in his New Creation. Our share in the power of creation is in our hands by the gifts the Holy Spirit has bestowed upon us. All we need do is use them in concert with one another in the Christ. In this we cannot remain aloof. Let us pray to fulfill our purpose as we to learn to use our gifts in concert with one another in fulfilling the Christ’s intentions for us.
— Q Bee · Jan 24, 08:43 PM · #
I was very impressed to read your take on this story. Very interesting points I had not realized until now. It’s like connecting the dots in the Bible with these passages. First point that caught my attention was that this took place at a marriage ceremony, relating the fact that Jesus is the head of the church. His marriage to the church and the beginning of his purpose here on earth. Strange, that I didn’t not relate that until that was said in your story. I share the same as Josh as far as “woman” be a condiscending usage of the word. Example: when the other Mary was brought out by a crowd of people before Jesus so that he could punish her or whatever….Point here, the crowd of people called her a prostitute. Jesus called her “woman”, which of course was not condescending; she was cleaned of sin.
Then there was the wine part of the story. I didn’t relate that either to “The Last Supper” with Jesus when sharing the wine as a rememberance of his blood.
As far as women having important parts in the Bible. At this point in my life, that doesn’t seem to matter because weather you are man or woman, it is more important just to do your part with your life. We all have important parts to do in life.
— Jean Harper · Jan 25, 04:53 PM · #