First Reading
Isaiah 62:1–5
For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not be quiet,
until her righteousness goes forth as brightness,
and her salvation as a burning torch.
The nations shall see your righteousness,
and all the kings your glory,
and you shall be called by a new name
that the mouth of the LORD will give.
You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD,
and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.
You shall no more be termed Forsaken,
and your land shall no more be termed Desolate,
but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her,
and your land Married;
for the LORD delights in you,
and your land shall be married.
For as a young man marries a young woman,
so shall your sons marry you,
and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you. (ESV)
Second Reading
1 Corinthians 12:1–11
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says “Jesus is accursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit.
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills. (ESV)
Gospel Text
John 2:1–11
On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him. (ESV)
Comments, questions for discussion
First Reading
Many of you will hear words read aloud on Sunday from Isaiah 62 rather different from what I have here. Instead of what I have, “so shall your sons marry you,” you’ll hear, “so shall your builder marry you.” If you think about it, that’s a much less offensive translation of the text. It gets around the rather disturbing image of a mother marrying not one but several of her sons.
The trouble is, there is absolutely no textual evidence to support this translation. A scholar who was similarly scandalized, Bishop Robert Lowth, first proposed this alternative reading in the early 19th century. He suggested that it might have been a copying error and that the omission of one tiny yod (looks like an apostrophe) had been added to the word for “builder,” changing it into “sons.” This change from an uncommon word to a common one by a scribe in distant history is reasonable, and there is evidence that it had occurred elsewhere.
I might opt for that explanation if there were just one manuscript somewhere that had the suggested text. Or if there were one ancient interpretation of the text that didn’t interpret “sons” rather than “builder.” But neither exists.
Fortunately, Paul Niskanen, in his article “Who Is Going to Marry You? The Text of Isaiah 62:5” has provided an explanation of this text that is less troublesome. I won’t try to make his argument for you in this short format, but his conclusion is this. The first text about sons marrying their mother refers to the first part of a three part marriage ceremony when the groom and bride proceed together to their new home. There is no image of consummation here, just entering a new home. So the children of Israel and God enter their new home together.
The next line does suggest the consummation phase of the marriage of this text’s time. “And as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.”This echoes the groom’s blessings over the bride, wherein he declares that he will “rejoice” over her, a metaphor for marital consummation. So in the end, Niskanen’s translation, while he admits it lacks elegance, reads,
For as a young man goes forth in a wedding procession to take up residence
with his future bride,
So shall your children come in a festive procession to dwell in you,
And then as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride on their wedding night,
So shall your God rejoice over you.
The members of St. David’s in Laurinburg, for whom I started writing these weekly studies some three years ago used to cringe when I said of God that God is “crazy in love with us.” I can understand that. It’s as difficult for us to accept as the image of “sons” marrying their mother. And yet it’s right there in our text from Isaiah for this week, and I can’t help but wonder what the Church would look like if we could begin to live as those over whom God rejoices as Bridegroom does over his Bride. How different might we look to the world? How much more readily might the world be to hear our Good News?
Second Reading
My studies for this text from First Corinthians brought me to a bit of a head scratcher. I had taken for granted that the opening sentence was translated correctly. It’s translated pretty much the same way in the vast majority of Bibles. But it turns out that this is probably not what Paul meant to say. We are fortunate that at least some translations now include footnotes to indicate the alternate translation, but it’s likely the alternate translation should be the primary one.
That is to say, it should read, “Now brothers, concerning ‘spiritual persons’…” Not spiritual gifts. The phrase in the Greek is just ton pneumatikon, no word for gifts. Or persons. But because in verse four Paul begins to talk about gifts, translators generally assume that the “spiritual things” refers to the gifts. But Paul tends to use pneumatikon rhetorically, and in this case, because he’s introducing a section (chapters 12-14) that is concerned with persons (and in this moment their use of gifts), I now think that Paul is using a word (pneumatikon) about people that at least some of the Corinthians use to describe themselves. It is really clear that in verses 1-3, Paul is talking about persons, and it makes sense that pneumatikon, “spirituals,” would be more closely related to that than the gifts to which he shifts in verse 4. I learned this from an article by John D. Ekem. Here’s a LINK if you’d like to read it.
This also helps to fit this passage more neatly into Paul’s overarching concern with the difficulties he’s having with the Corinthian congregation and their puffed up image of themselves. I won’t get into that here, but if you’d like to read the the Introduction to First Corinthians I wrote last year, here’s a LINK to that.
In spite of that different take on the opening sentence, I’d like to elaborate a little here on the gifts that Paul describes. Because things like “wisdom” and “knowledge” have meanings quite apart from the Spirit in our experience, it is all to easy to think that human wisdom, human knowledge, that these things are all that Paul means.
But who needs the Spirit for these things? I can acquire human wisdom through experience, I can acquire human knowledge through study.
The gift of wisdom as Paul describes it is an ability to see and interpret events and anticipate futures that human experience cannot convey. It is a kind of insight that belies a person’s years or life history, and it is highly to be valued. I think that sometimes we call younger people with this gift “old souls.”
The gift of “knowledge” works and feels more like what we call intuition. Indeed, many who are gifted with “knowledge” are described as having acute intuition. I’ll give you an example. This was from before I knew what these gifts were or how they operated, so I didn’t know what to call it, but there was a young woman who had just come to my congregation. It was only her second Sunday with us, and as people were leaving after service, there was a gap in the line and I had a longer moment to speak with her than I usually did. And I found myself saying, “You know, I don’t know why I’m saying this, but I think you have a calling to the priesthood.” She seemed pretty shocked, but she said that she was struggling with just that thing and she made an appointment to come and speak with me. As it turned out, she did have a calling, but to ministry in another denomination, and we worked that out together. I didn’t know what all that was until my spiritual director explained “words of knowledge” to me. Perhaps you all have had something similar happen?
It seems to me that most of the other gifts that Paul names aren’t as likely to be misunderstood in a secular sort of way as those two, so I’ll let that be for now.
Gospel Text
In this, the “first sign” that Jesus gives in the Fourth Gospel, we have that disturbing moment when Jesus is rather harsh with His mother. “What is that to you and to me?” In other words, “What business is that of mine?” A lot of commentators have spilled a lot of ink trying to explain away how abrupt He is, and even more, why He then turns around and does what He’s been asked so promptly. None of the answers I’ve ever read were satisfying. None of the explanations I’ve tried to give have ever sounded right to me either.
But this week I came across an article by Edward Klink that finally made sense of it for me. (Here’s a LINK.) The trouble, he points out, is the way we try to read this. We try to figure it out historically, to try to figure out what would have provoked Jesus to respond this way in that setting. What we’ve failed to do up to this point is read this passage as literature, influenced by other literature.
When we do that we discover that this narrative of Jesus at the wedding is very neatly fashioned so as to elicit comparisons to Elisha, particularly two stories from 2 Kings 3 and 4. In the first, the king of Israel asks of Elisha water for his parched troops and Elisha’s response is exactly that of Jesus to His mother. Even so, Elisha says that out of his regard for the king, he will work a miracle, and he does.
In the second a widow asks Elisha what will become of her and her sons, as the creditors have come and she has no money to pay them. Elisha tells her to gather as many vessels as she can, and that the one vessel from which she pours will fill them all. She is told to sell the oil to pay the creditors and support her sons.
So our story is not about Jesus’ harshness, but about His prophetic identity. If you choose to read this as accurate to the detail, it speaks to His prophetic self-understanding. If you think that some of these details may have been supplied by the evangelist, it speaks to the evangelist’s desire to portray Jesus in this way.
In either case, what is sure is that the audience for John’s Gospel had these stories of Elisha firmly embedded in their memories, and that they would not hear Jesus speaking harshly, but Jesus speaking as a prophet, as Elisha would have spoken. Where we have seen Matthew portray Jesus as a prophet like Moses and like Jeremiah, it appears that John has a greater interest in building a link between Jesus and the Elijah-Elisha cycle.
