Travels with John

I am reading straight back through the Gospel of John early in the morning these days. It's my second time this summer. I finished it once and paged right back to the start and savored the opening again: in the beginning was the Word. There are some books of Scripture  I want to learn as I would the mind and soul of a beloved friend; with concentrated and affectionate attention.I want their narrative to shape the story of my own days, their words to form my sight of the world. Isaiah is one of those. The Psalms. And definitely John. John's Gospel is a luminous book. The other Gospel writers seem to tell the story more from the outside in, relating the miracles, the teaching, those high and holy days of Jesus' life from the viewpoint of what was seen. John tells it from this inside. He tells what it means. At least that's the sense I get as I read. I feel often that he had an interior room within himself, a place where the Beloved spoke with him. From there he looked out on the spectacle and brilliance of what happened in Jesus' life and perceived, not just the events, but the meaning of each, the great Reality unveiling itself in each action, word, and miracle. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us...

The first time through this book I became aware of a certain theme in John's storytelling; the way that Jesus invaded sacred or traditional spaces and retold their meaning with his words. He walked straight into days and spaces like the temple, the Sabbath, a Samaritan well, and by his words, his narration you could say, cleansed them of the fear and false law that had obscured the living presence of God within them. Take, for instance, the cleansing of the temple, the significance of the statement, "don't make my Father's house a place of business," as if grace could be bought and sold, as if God's favor were an object for which we could barter. Clean out, not just the doves and coins and dirt, but the assumptions that attend their presence, the consumer idea of salvation. In the cleansing of the temple, Jesus was renewing not just the physical spaces, but the ideas of the people who inhabited them.

Because of this realization, on my second read-through of John, I encountered the story of the wedding at Cana in a whole new way. And it rather stole my breath. I had always assumed this first miracle ought to be special in some way. This was the first flung challenge in the darkness, a sword of light unsheathed as Messiah began his unconventional conquest of men's hearts. But the whole thing, if simply read straight through, is somewhat underwhelming. What's more, I've rarely heard this story taught with any sense of excitement. Maybe its simply my own perception, but I feel that we often view this first miracle as a practice run, the flexing of Jesus' miraculous fingers on insignificant wine before the real work of healing began. A divine token to mark the first try.

But early the other morning as I read this story for the second time in a month, read it with a mind not hurried, but willing to savor, I saw anew. I saw, I think, as John meant me to see, the way in which this story is is the prelude to the epic of the gospel, an embodied poem that told the tragedy of the world and hinted at a coming eucatastrophe. There is meaning, I think, in each word and action of this almost peripheral miracle. For it is the story of the very world told within the tale of a rural wedding feast. A feast that Messiah was about to save.

For in the beginning, not just of Jesus' ministry, but in the making of the very world he had come to save, there was a wedding. Body and soul, God and man, a joyous joining that was a feast of existence put on by God himself and called life. Joy was the order of existence. Laughter the beat of heart and gladness the thrum of the very earth. The wedding that was creation was meant to inaugurate a world of love, of harmony, of continuous new creation. But the feast was shattered by sin and the marriage  brought to the very brink of collapse. The wine of life ran short, and it was us, God's beloved who spilled it out, wasted his gift so that our own lives ran suddenly short. And the wedding feast of the world brought into being a whole human race of broken hearts.

But God was not a husband to be so easily defeated. No lover He, to be so quickly cast aside. The ages of the earth marched on and it seemed that the feast was  ended, the joy forever disrupted, the wine run short. But God never abandoned his Beloved. The feast was delayed, but by his own love it would be renewed, for even as we wept, he was planning the great gift that would save the wedding and cause the wine to freely flow again. The gift was himself, bundled up in flesh and blood, invading the earth so that he could take the hands and hold the heart of his beloved again. And when he came, the event he chose to announce his arrival?

A wedding feast. There was Jesus, the answer to the broken heart of the world. Just one more young man at a rural wedding party, he sat amidst a broken people and knew that he was the answer to every yearning of their hearts. The host and maker of the universe, if they but knew it, was the unassuming guest at a marriage that would become the event to announce the reconciliation of the world. All was set. The story was about to be renewed, the miracle announced.

I love it that Mary set the story in motion. She saw the lack of wine and she knew the shame at stake. But I think her insight carries a larger understanding. Perhaps in Mary's remarkable heart was a sense of the symbolism of that moment. She was the human mother of God, more aware than any other human on earth of what had come, what dwelt so silently among the fallen and was about to be revealed. Perhaps when she confronted her Son with the disaster, she knew she was speaking of a larger lack, speaking to the deepest void in the human heart when she said, "the wine has run short."

Jesus, in a voice I fully believe was playful and grave at once, says, "what is it to me?" A lively challenge. A parry and thrust, a question that could be our devastation if she really had to answer. For in the end, what ought it be to God? God gave humankind the world and we, the Beloved, cast it away. We flung his love back in his face and by our own choice squandered life itself. We are a band of impossible ingrates forever choosing against the one lover in all the world whose great affection gave us our being. What is it to God? Why should he stoop to save us from disaster?

But the mother of God knows, and I can almost see her steady eyes in that face shaped by a lifetime of "pondering these things." This woman who has known the Holy Spirit and borne the baby God into the world knows that this is everything to God. For Jesus stands before her. Messiah came. If this weren't everything to God her Son would never have been born. She smiles and turns.

"Do exactly what he says," she tells the servants. And her words are an affirmation of faith in the action and grace of her God. He has come and he will save. Despite the stupidity of his Beloved, the fallen hearts, the corrupted loves, he has come to renew the feast, to save the marriage. We will be healed if we do what He commands and believe in the love of the great, redeeming Bridegroom.

Jesus, smiling I feel sure, acts. He points to six great vats set aside for... what? Ritual cleansing. Vats set aside to hold the water that has been our attempt to make ourselves enough before God, to keep the wine of mercy from running short. Throughout the long ages of sorrow, we have struggled toward God, reached for the mercy he still offered. Humankind has always attempted to become enough, to keep life and love and joy alive. But the wine always fails. And now, those symbols of man's struggle and man's failure to ever be clean or enough, the perennial symbol of his "fallen shortness" are what Jesus chooses for his first miracle.

"Fill them with water," he commands. Let them brim afresh at his command. "Then," he says, "take a dipper full to the steward and let him taste."

And the water is turned to wine. Because Jesus has come, the struggle is going to end, the thirst will be slaked, the wedding feast of the world will swing back into being and it will be a revelry such as the world has never seen. Because of the coming of Jesus, the wine of life will never run short again. The sign has been accomplished, the first miracle flung, the first note of celebration sounded. Jesus goes quietly back to his seat, meets the beaming glance of his mother, and knows that his doom, and his glory, have at once begun. With his own life he will stay the shame of the world, save his bride and renew the wedding feast.

"You have saved the best for last," sputters the astonished steward, stumbling up to the wedding party, holding out a wine finer than any he has tasted in his life.

And the best One in the world sits quietly amidst his people. Mary grasps the arm of her son, feels the pulse of his warm, sweet, human blood, touches the skin that houses God himself and knows that the wedding of the world has been restored. Perhaps she aches as well, knowing somehow that the wine required for this restoration is the blood of her son. But its giving is the seal of an eternal love, a marriage that never again will be broken. The feast begins anew, never now to end. The final word of the great lover God, the best word, is Jesus. And the wine of life will never run short again.

See what John is teaching me?

God Gives His Own Words Meaning

Even after all these years of loving God, I still sometimes stumble over His words. Two left spiritual feet and all that. I'm better than I used to be. I went through a phase in my life when I almost dreaded opening my Bible for devotions because I was so afraid of the fear I found in verses about God's anger, or judgment, or some mystery too slippery for my frail thought to grasp. In those days, I thought it was God I stumbled over. Now, I know its just me. I've learned my frailty profoundly in the last few years, and that includes a comprehension of my own flawed understanding, my own limitation when it comes even to words and their meanings. One of the gifts of the literary study I've done this year is the way it has taught me to contemplate language. Words are living things. They gesture to Reality but do not contain it. They change with time and alter with the histories that form them. Learning this has helped me to read the Bible with greater grace . Take, for example, the passage I read in Genesis this morning.

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

I'm admitting my own stubborn-eyed, Jacob-of-heartness when I confess that in the midst of this magnificent commissioning of Adam and Eve, I tripped over the words "rule" and "subdue." While not bad concepts in and of themselves, those terms, in this day and age, often connote harshness, hardness, domination, demand. I am such a golden-eyed idealist that those harsh terms seemed foreign to my image of the new born earth, so ripe and fresh, so delicate. Those words seemed to open up the possibility of an earth exploited, ruled, overworked; it was as if a bar of iron suddenly appeared in Eden, and the iron was a word.

But I drew back. I remembered all that I have learned about language, the way meanings change from generation to generation. I asked myself, what did those words mean when God spoke them, living ideas unmarred by sin, into his new-made Adam and Eve? And I realized something that has profoundly shaped my reading of Scripture.

The only reference point for those words is the action and person of God himself. No human ruling had yet taken place. Submission was a concept we could only taste in reference to our Maker. God's actions in the sight of Adam and Eve were the reference points they were to look to in understanding how to carry out how commands. For in the beginning, we were children, meant to copy our Father. Thus, to subdue and rule is to do what we have just seen God do in the previous chapter. In the image of God we create, we name, we organize or partition for greater beauty, we cultivate the earth into its fullest expression of beauty and growth, we bless. And it is entirely good.

I realized that my contemporary understanding of those two powerful words, rule and subdue, is skewed by millenia of men's actions instead of God's. I bring the negative image of sinful men ruling harshly, breaking, subduing with force instead of cultivation to my reading of the creation story. To how many other words in the Bible do I bring my broken concepts? Perhaps God's actions and emotions?

When I struggled so deeply with a fear of God's anger, I realized one day that my concept of God's anger was modeled on the anger I felt myself. And since my anger is rarely righteous, almost never fully justified, and generally vindictive (even if unexpressed), I considered God's anger to be the same. But of course, it's not. How could it ever be? How could God, a self-giving Trinity whose very being is a circle of ceaselessly-given love be angry in the isolated outrage of a fallen human being?

These days, I seek to read with eyes renewed. To seek for that Spirit-fresehned insight that cleanses God's words of the sin I bring to them and sets them, fresh and free, in my thought. The prophets speak so often of the Messiah opening the eyes of the blind. I think I begin to see.