Mary, Jesus, and his disciples taking up a whole table at a wedding reception. Wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall for that? I bet Andrew came back to the table with a little bit of pork chop hidden under some lettuce. Jesus just looks at him and shakes his head. And how did all of them get in? Did invitees get a “plus twelve”? I wonder if Jesus is looking around at how guests are dressed and thinking, “This might make an excellent parable one day.”
And can you imagine what’s going through the disciples’ heads? They just gave up everything, and the first thing the Messiah does is take them to a party? The whole situation must have been pretty great considering many of them had just been hanging out with John the Baptist — not known for kicking back and celebrating.
For her part, Mary is an almost stereotypical image of a Jewish mother. She drags her son to a party where there will be plenty of potential marrying material, sticks her nose into the business of the “steward of the feast,” tells her son what he should do, shrugs off his objections, and commands the wait-staff to do whatever he tells them. (I’d like to pause for just a moment and lament the fact that the modern world does not use such manly titles as “Steward of the Feast” anymore. Presumably, that title is too long for a name tag. I bet that’s why.)
(I want to be careful here because you, gentle reader, are brand new to this book. Mary, the mother of Our Lord, is about to use a funny voice.) I can just see Mary, in a good mood because they’re all at a party together, realizing there’s no more wine and urging Jesus (in a New Yorker Jewish lady voice, of course), “Ooh, ooh, Jesus — you should do that thing; you know, that thing you’re so good at; everybody will love that!”
In my mind’s eye, Jesus rolls his eyes, glances embarrassed over at his (brand new) disciples, and says to his mom (kind of out the corner of his mouth), “Not now, mom; I’m not ready.”
She will have none of it. She doesn’t even argue with him. She just tells the staff to do whatever he says.
Still not onboard with the stereotypical Jewish lady idea? How about this as evidence. The staff did what she said! And not just one dude. The Bible says there were six jars, each holding twenty to thirty gallons of water! You think one servant filled those? No way. Now keep in mind, Mary wasn’t in a position of honor. She wasn’t paying for the feast. She was clearly a very persuasive lady.
Jesus obviously performed the miracle, the wine was delicious, and ministers for the rest of time get to reference Jesus’ presence at the wedding feast as a sign that God approves of parties after weddings.
The Takeaway
I grew up Protestant. The only time we talked about Mary was at Christmas, when she obviously played an important role. Catholics place much more emphasis on Mary’s part in salvation history. The wedding at Cana is a scriptural (hugely important when making a case to Protestants) example of Mary’s purpose: to point to her son and say, “Do what he says.”
It’s also a great story about how wine cannot be intrinsically evil because Jesus made some. (However, he did not make it in a box. Box wine is in fact intrinsically evil.)
In all my years, there is one point in this story that I have never heard spoken about: Jesus deserves credit for doing more than just his first miracle. If you have a mom, then at some point you have had a problem and your mom has told you what to do. You, obviously smarter (and grown), want with every fiber of your being to do anything besides what Mom says you ought to do. The fact that you are alive to read this is probably evidence that you eventually got your head out of your own backside and did what Mom suggested. And Jesus gives us the prime example of doing what Mom says. He, grown man that he was, was obedient. So, maybe, the first act of Jesus’ public ministry was not pretending to be too cool to love his mom at a party. I bet he grabbed Andrew’s pork chop when nobody was looking.
For the Sake of the Dullards
Matthew 15:1–9
Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat.” He answered them, “And why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him surely die.’ But you say, ‘If any one tells his father or his mother, What you would have gained from me is given to God, he need not honor his father.’ So, for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said:
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’”
The Setup
The Pharisees are trying to humiliate Jesus and prove to the crowd that he’s just a charlatan. So they accuse the disciples of breaking the law because they (the disciples) don’t wash their hands before they eat.
What Went Down
Despite the apparent lack of proper parenting in his disciples, Jesus is having none of this. He points out a loophole in Jewish law that would make Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman blush, and then quotes Isaiah at them. In other words, someone does get humiliated in this scenario — and it’s not Jesus.
Jesus then turns to the crowd and uses the Pharisees’ complaint as a teachable moment about what’s in a man’s heart. I can only imagine the disciples standing behind Jesus, wisely nodding their heads. (Of course, later we find out that they don’t have any idea what he’s talking about.)
Then the disciples worry that some of the Pharisees are offended. Jesus tells them not to worry about it and makes a joke about blind people falling into pits. Seriously. Read it yourself.
Peter (who, you might recall, will be the first pope one day) takes everything way too seriously and, in classic android fashion, asks Jesus to explain the parable. My copy of the Bible doesn’t have a footnote stating that Our Lord rolled his eyes, but the NIV translation says he literally called the disciples “dull” (Mt 15:16).
As one reads about Jesus breaking down his lesson for the disciples (Peter was probably asking about the blind person joke, but Christ goes back to the lesson for the crowd), one can almost imagine Jesus grabbing a whiteboard from just out of frame and drawing a diagram of human anatomy, emphasizing every word as he goes, like you do with children: “Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and so passes on?” (You know James elbowed John and pointed at the drawing’s butt.)
Jesus goes on: “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man” (Mt 15:17-18).
Now, in the disciples’ defense, Jesus is shifting willy-nilly between the literal (what goes into the mouth) and figurative (what comes out of the mouth). At least four of the disciples are fishermen. Fish don’t do this kind of shifting. They are either real fish or … well, they’re pretty much all real fish.
The Takeaway
Don’t get hung up on the letter of the law. Actions
