marriage week

Unintended, this has turned out to be marriage week at the garden blog. Appropriately, this past Sunday, the gospel lesson was about the wedding at Cana, where Jesus performed his first recorded miracle, turning the water into wine.

This miracle, at a metaphorical level, describes for the Christian what God does for us, changing us, bringing value to what did not have value. But at the human level, the Cana wedding story reminds us that Jesus did not carry out his ministry in lordly fashion at some fancy court, nor removed from the lives of the folk of his land, alone and isolated.

What can be more basic than celebrating a wedding? The fact that his mother asked him to do something is in fact something we can all relate to. The word made flesh has a wonderful abstract poetry, but this incarnation, this love, this identification with us, an earthy, hopeful, vain, breathing folk, is indeed a great miracle.