God as Bridegroom: Sermon for Epiphany 3

 The readings this week are Isaiah 62:1-5 and John 2:1-11. You can read them here.

This is a slightly edited version of my sermon for this week.

Marriage is a very common metaphor in the Bible for the relationship between God and God’s people. In the Old Testament, a metaphor for the covenant between God and Israel; in the New, reimagined as a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the Church. The Biblical texts in various places speak of the Church as the Bride of Christ, or as we have in today’s reading from Isaiah, that God rejoices over God’s people as a bridegroom rejoices over the bride.

In the current atmosphere surrounding debates about marriage in the Anglican communion today, this can be a rather uncomfortable metaphor to contemplate. The Biblical texts were written in times and places which had certain cultural customs around marriage, and then use those as an image for God’s love for and commitment to God’s people. It’s understandable that for some people its very hard, or seems inappropriate, to attempt to disentangle what’s a cultural custom which informed a metaphor, and what’s a universal statement about the nature of God. I don't, for example, think that the image of God as bridegroom means we are meant to think primarily of God as male; I think that in a society where the man tended to be the one expected to take the initiative in marriage offers, this image is offered to us as a picture of how we are chosen by God, who didn't have to choose us but delights in doing so. And I don't think that in reaching for the imagery of bride and bridegroom, writers such as Isaiah mean us to read back that only male/female marriage is acceptable.

But marriage – that gift of lifelong commitment to another human being, come what may - is an incredibly beautiful thing, and what a beautiful metaphor it is for God’s love for and commitment to us. Let’s not let stress and anxiety around our current debates stop us from contemplating the joy and delight, the celebration and excitement, that this metaphor tells us is at the heart of how God sees and relates to us.

We can be so used nowadays to the image of God as bridegroom that we forget how strange an image it is. It’s meant to be strange of course; much of Jewish spirituality involves puzzling over, even arguing over, strange non-sequiters and paradoxes in the Biblical texts. They’re not meant to be simple; they’re meant to be endlessly fascinating.

So notice the strange incongruity of who is taking the place of the bride in one part of this passage. ‘You – that is the people of God – shall be called ‘My Delight is in Her’, - and your land shall be called Married. For the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.’

There’s a literal earthiness to this image. This isn’t just about a group of people, the People of God, whether we hear and read that as ancient Israel, or as metaphorically applying to the universal Church. It makes sense to talk about people being married, people making promises to one another – but a piece of land?

The people are being invited to contemplate God’s relationship not just with themselves as individual people, or even themselves collectively, but God’s relationship with the very earth on which they stand. The earth that they farm to give them sustenance, the earth that they dig up to build foundations for their houses, drainage ditches for their fields, or to yield clay for their pots, water jars and drinking vessels.

There’s what we would now recognise as an ecological message for us here, about our faith not simply being about what we believe or say, not even being just about our relationship with God, but about the whole complex of relationships that we are part of in this world, with our fellow human beings, with God, and with the earth itself. God cares about and is involved in and delights in all of this, and we are invited to share in God’s passion for and delight in the earth we stand on too.

But what shines out for me more than anything from Isaiah’s use of this imagery is the theme of delight and rejoicing. We don’t perhaps talk very much about joy in sermons. And when we do, we are often thinking about what we should rejoice in, or how we might, like Paul, find ourselves able to rejoice even in difficult circumstances. But here there is such a strong emphasis on God’s delight in us – mentioned twice in verse 4 – and in God rejoicing over us, in verse 5.

I’m reminded of what we heard last week in our reading about the baptism of Christ: that voice from heaven as Jesus came up out of the water, ‘This is my son, in whom I am well pleased’, or ‘in whom I delight’.

How does it feel to sit with the idea that you, we, the Church, are God’s delight?

I don’t think that depends on how we’re doing, that’s the radical thing. Isaiah doesn’t describe God delighting in you because of anything the people are doing – in fact for much of Isaiah, what the people is doing is very roundly criticised! The bride is delighted in simply because of who she is, not because of her good qualities or achievements.

So, with all that in mind, lets turn to the much more familiar story of Jesus at the wedding in Cana, at which, we’re told, he performs his first miracle.

‘On the third day there was a wedding’. A normal, natural, social event in the life of a village community. Weddings speak of families and generations; they anchor this event in the very real life of a community and in the natural cycle of life, with people marrying, being born, dying.

And we are told this is happening ‘on the third day’. As Christians, its hard for us to hear those words without hearing an echo of the Easter story. And the fact that Jesus’ first sign is to turn water into wine can’t help but also be charged for us with memories of his words at the Last Supper. Wine for us is inextricably linked in our worship with remembering and participating in Christ’s blood, shed for us on the cross in the ultimate act of love.

And throughout the gospels imagery of a wedding feast, a wedding banquet, is used repeatedly to speak of the coming Kingdom of God.

So here we have Jesus’ first miracle and Jesus’ coming Passion and resurrection framing John’s gospel, with the imagery of the wine of the wedding feast at the heart of both.

I suspect this means that the master of ceremonies comment about the good wine isn’t just a detail to emphasise the reality of the miracle.  ‘Everyone serves the good wine first,’ he says, ‘and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine, the best wine, until now.’ Given the cosmic timescale that is such a feature of John’s gospel, with that amazing opening passage – ‘in the beginning’ – it seems to me that there is an echo here of the long timescale of the Biblical narratives, of the generations upon generations of births, marriages and deaths that the people of Israel have witnessed. All this has gone on – all the amazing Old Testament stories that everyone at that wedding would have heard at their mothers’ knees – and yet even better wine is suddenly being tasted now.

There’s only the gap between one page and another in our Bibles, between the end of the Old Testament and the start of the New. But in historical terms, that single page turn represents a gap in the historical record of about 400 years or so. It was a live question at the time – why did God seem to have stopped speaking? Why was God no longer raising up prophets? Was it all a thing of the past, God revealing himself to people, performing amazing signs, inspiring people to great acts of faith?

I think we are often in a very similar place in our communal faith today. Jesus’s life and death 2000 years ago, in such a different culture to our own, can seem a million miles away. Miracles don’t seem to happen very much anymore. Life can be tough, and hope can be in short supply. Like the people of Israel at so many points down the centuries, we might find ourselves asking why God isn’t doing something about all that’s wrong in the world.

 We might even find ourself feeling, like Mary at Cana, that Jesus is rather abruptly dismissing our concerns. I always find myself taking a sharp intake of breath when I hear ‘Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what concern is that to me and you?’. It sounds really rude and dismissive, and I don’t like to think of Jesus being rude and dismissive!  

 But Mary here models for us what we’re invited to do when we feel as if God is ignoring or dismissing our concerns. She doesn’t let hurt or anger become her focus. Instead she simply continues on with her quiet expectation that Jesus will act. And in her confidence, she gives instructions to others – do whatever he tells you – and they act on her word. Only then does the miracle happen. The water is turned into the best wine, in almost ridiculous quantities – the wedding feast can go on long into the night.

 And that wine hasn’t run out yet. Today, here, we are invited to continue to drink the wine that Jesus transforms for us, and which transforms us, into his very being. However hard life is, however impossible the global situation might seem – God loves us, now. God delights in us, here.

 ‘Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him’. Jesus still does this, the countless millions of signs later, here in this place, and reveals his glory; and his disciples still believe in him, and join with him in the feast of his delight.