Opening Remarks

The day's lections raise the theme of marriage: the First Lesson with the metaphor of God's People as married to the land, and the Gospel Lesson with its setting at a marriage festival, "The Wedding of Cana." Marriage, as the most basic of covenant relationships, points beyond itself to the more general theme of covenant as what God offers us for true freedom.

We might ask: what is the purpose of marriage? Is it solely for the benefit of the couple? Girardian anthropology teaches us that, in the context of social relations which are dominated by scapegoating tendencies, covenant relationships seem to benefit the covenanting parties over against other groups. St. Paul talks about the Law corrupted by the power of sin. Law is a covenantal relationship that becomes corrupted by the power of sin, i.e., the victimage mechanism, so that it becomes yet another way to divide among peoples. Marriage is similarly corrupted.

But that's not what covenant relationship is intended to be. The way in which I might most simply ask about this is: Is marriage more of an "us against the world" relationship, or an "us for the world" relationship? The power of sin pushes us more toward the former, and God is persistently inviting us to live the latter. In Jesus Christ, we come to know that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. In covenant relation with God through Jesus Christ, we are for the world.

Link to the outline of a sermon on the theme of what makes for "Celebrating Holy Communion."

Isaiah 62:1-5

Resources

1. James Alison, Raising Abel, p. 189. In a section entitled "Images that Run Together," Alison notes the coming together of two major images, the risen victim, or Lamb of God, and the wedding banquet. He writes:

Throughout these pages there have been two imaginative poles, two principal images, which have given us hints for the understanding of something of the things that are above on which we are to fix our minds: the vision of the open heaven with the risen victim -- the slaughtered lamb standing or seated at the right hand of God -- and the wedding banquet. In fact these two images permeate the whole apostolic witness: shortly after John the Baptist points Jesus out as the Lamb of God, and shortly after Nathanael is promised that he will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man, Jesus works his first sign, in Cana of Galilee. The sign is that the bridegroom of Israel has arrived, and the one who was an abandoned and repudiated woman is beginning to be able to enjoy a wedding banquet where flow a wine and a rejoicing quite unthinkably greater than that imagined by those who had made the wedding preparations. (Cf., Isaiah 62:1-5; that this interpretation is according to the mind of the Church can be seen by looking at the readings for the second Sunday of the year in cycle C, where the Isaiah passage and the wedding at Cana are juxtaposed.) I do not need to mention the number of times that Jesus speaks of the kingdom in terms of a wedding banquet in the synoptic Gospels, for we have looked at several of those passages.

What is indeed interesting is the running together of these images in the book of Revelation, the book where all is centered around the heavenly vision of the slaughtered lamb. Let us look at the passage:

And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord our God, the omnipotent, has begun to reign! Let us rejoice and leap for joy and give God the glory! For the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride is made ready for him, it has been given her to dress in resplendent pure linen (and the linen is the works of justice of the saints). Then [the angel] said to me: "Write: blessed are those who are invited to the wedding banquet of the lamb." And he said "These are true words of God." (Rev. 19:6-9)

The two images flow into one alone: the wedding banquet of the lamb. And this confluence of images has as its effect precisely that we should learn to imagine the things that are above, that we should allow ourselves to be nurtured by this imagination which will empower us to re-create that wedding banquet. On the one hand we have the gratuity of the invitation made to good and bad alike, allowing us to stand loose from concern about how appropriate our participation might be, because the invitation, and it is insistent, comes from One who delights in us just as we are. On the other hand this same standing loose, this same unconcern, gets through to us in the degree to which we allow ourselves to be possessed by the news that God is entirely without violence, is utterly vivacious, creative, effervescent, that we are empowered for the construction of a story of life in flexible imitation of the risen victim. This is a story which we construct in hope, and by which we construct hope, creating belief, in the midst of the crushing darkness of the dominion of death. That is, the apostolic witness itself shows clearly that the inner dynamic which runs through it reaches maturity precisely in this fusion of images which come together to form a single vision of heaven.

But there is more: the banquet is not only a banquet, but it is a wedding banquet, and the guests also constitute the bride. That is, the rejoicing is not only that of guests, but of one being married, and here is where the image of heaven is, without any shame, marital. The wedding which is celebrated includes the completely loving interpenetration of bride and groom, in a relationship which makes of them one thing, a relation of infinitely creative fecundity, freed, of course, from all the tensions, rivalries and complications which surround and diminish our experience and living-out of things erotic. Paul points this out when he explains marriage in Ephesians 5, comparing the conjugal relationship to that between Christ and the Church, but please notice that he doesn't start from the conjugal relationship in order to explain heaven, but it is the heavenly relationship, that of heavenly self-giving and interpenetration in love, which is his starting point so as to understand the earthly reality of marriage. It seems to me that this image is also to nourish our hope-fired imaginations: it is the story of the ugly duckling, of Cinderella, made, much to her surprise, capable and worthy of a relationship of loving exchange with her swan, her prince, quite beyond her expectations. When Paul says that, at the end, everything will be subdued to Christ, who will be submitted to God, "so that God may be all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28), it is to be understood within this interpenetrative vision. Since we are formed from within entirely by the Other who has called us into existence, since "the other is consubstantial with the consciousness of the 'self,'" ⁽¹⁾ at the end we will be entirely possessed by the God who possesses pacifically in an interchange that is ever more fecund and creative. We will be married participants, all our desires fulfilled, in that effervescent creative vitality. (pp. 189-191)

1 Corinthians 12:1-11

Resources

1. Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, p. 216. We cited this section last week on "The Revelation of the Holy Spirit and the Trinity" (pp. 209-217). The climax of this argument is the notion of a reciprocal bestowal of love between the Father and Son such that it is constitutive of another person, the Holy Spirit, whose mission is "to unite people with Christ and with one another" -- which is the point at which Schwager cites 1 Cor. 12:4-13 as illustrative. Here is a larger context for that citation:

Thanks to the clear perception of several distinctions within God himself, the question about the one origin (unica spiratio) of the Holy Spirit from the reciprocal love between Father and Son can be more easily approached. Since what the Son gives back to the Father is distinct from the principle by which he is a person, he can distinguish his love from himself and let go of it. It is not identical with him in an undifferentiated way; it is in fact not even the fruit of his own person alone, for it is attracted by the other side, by the generous goodness of the Father. The Father too distinguishes his love for the Son from the principle by which he generates and constitutes him. He too, then, can let go of his love as his own. Here again, it is not merely the fruit of his own working, for it is related to the Son, insofar as he is already constituted and it is attracted by his thankfulness. The reciprocal love is therefore not put together from the Father's own love and the Son's own love, but both let go of their love as their own, so that it becomes one common love. The Father loves the Son on account of his thankfulness, but the Son is thankful because he sees the love of the Father. Thus the Holy Spirit is the free-moving love itself. ⁽²⁾ The reciprocal love between Father and Son can therefore be freely active and become its own person, because both let go of it as their own.

In the history of salvation, something common and moving freely between Father and Son is seen first of all in the message of the kingdom of God at hand. Jesus announces it entirely as the kingdom of his Father and at the same time speaks completely in his own name ("Amen, I say to you"). The word of proclamation belongs entirely to both and at the same time is detached from both: "Everything is given over to me by my Father; no one knows the Father, only the Son and that one to whom the Son wants to reveal him" (Matt. 11:27). This word, which arises completely from the reciprocity of the Father and Son and speaks of it, originates from within their intimacy and is addressed to other, human hearers. The word of proclamation shows itself thus as the first figure in salvation history by which reciprocal love (Holy Spirit) becomes manifest.

Full reciprocity and commonality is revealed even more clearly in the last three acts of the drama. The Son gives himself to the Father in dying, the latter answers in the resurrection, and both together send out the Spirit. Thus the three different forms of bestowal are already repeated within each act, even if in a differing way. The Son can only entrust himself completely in dying because he is already gripped in his depths by the God who is not a God of the dead but of the living (Mark 12:26ff. and parallels). It is precisely in the act of surrender to the Father, which includes the Father's communication to him, that the Spirit springs up for humankind ("streams of living water" [John 7:37-39; 19:34-37]). Even the resurrection is not a one-sided deed of the Father, for by it he answers the Son who "with loud cries and tears offered up prayers and supplications to him who was able to save him from death" (Heb. 5:7). The immediate common fruit of the request on the part of his Son become man and of the heeding of the heavenly Father is the pneumatic body of the risen one as "life-giving spirit" (1 Cor. 15:44ff.), which is communicated to humankind (Acts 1:2; 2:33).

The model of reciprocal bestowal proves, then, well suited to bringing out the innermost dimensions of the dramatic salvation event. At the same time it becomes clear how reciprocal love flows into such an event of release that we can no longer speak of two acts in opposing directions, from Father to Son and from Son to Father. Each one lets go of his love as his own in favor of the other, so that this love can be constituted as the one common love and can become a person.

Because the Son himself is, at one and the same time, receiving and actively letting go and because the Holy Spirit is pure letting go, the Father is able to communicate himself through them to creatures without the distinction between creator and creature being abolished. Communication takes place at the level of these persons and their free existence and not at the level of the one essential being. Since, further, the Holy Spirit according to his entire personal character is reciprocal love, letting go of itself, it is to him that the mission in salvation history falls: to unite people with Christ and with one another. This throws light on the statement that he creates the one body with many members (1 Cor. 12:4-13). His particular nature makes it also comprehensible that Christ can live as the most inner being in the faithful: "I have been crucified with Christ; no longer do I live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:19ff.).

We next ask, in whom does the Spirit work? Here there arises a problem which can show up again the consequences of the two complementary trinitarian models. If one thinks in a linear way from the viewpoint of the procession and mission model, then it is natural to suppose that the Holy Spirit only unites those people with Christ who have already heard of the crucified and risen one and believe in him (for the Son precedes the Father). That axiom with such difficult consequences, "outside the church no salvation," seems to go together with this view. In distinction to this, we have seen that one must speak of Christ already on the cross identifying with all humans. This is essentially brought about by the Spirit. (Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, pp. 214-216.)

2. James Alison, "On learning to say 'Jesus is Lord': a 'Girardian' confession"; based on his address to the 2000 COV&R meeting in Boston, this essay is now chapter seven in his book Faith Beyond Resentment. I share the opening section that uses 1 Cor. 12:1-3 as a point of departure:

Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were heathen, you were led astray to dumb idols, however you may have been moved. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says 'Jesus be cursed!' and no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit. (1 Cor. 12:1-3)

The whole of what I want to say is in this passage. Many of us are used to a cheap reading of these words. All we need to do is avoid saying 'Jesus is cursed,' which it wouldn't occur to most of us to want to say anyhow, and instead to say, or to sing, repetitively and maybe obsessively, 'Jesus is Lord.' This would be a way of proving to ourselves that we have the Holy Spirit, and are on the right side.

Now of course, this is nonsense. The devil can quote Scripture, and Paul is proposing for us something much more dense than a merely verbal test of our orthodoxy. This passage suggests that there are two forms of cultural life at work. In one of these, people are moved by spirits which incline us to dumb idols, and which issue forth in someone being cursed. This is the cultural world in which social belonging and religion lead people to maintain their group unity by fixing on someone or some group who can be thrown out, anathematised, cursed. The semi-conscious group dynamic of ganging up against someone -- the 'however you may have been moved,' with Paul's implication that there are evil spirits at work here -- leads to a sense of unity. And the unity needs 'the cursed one' to be able to maintain itself.

Paul is suggesting that there are some people who have been trapped into understanding Christ's death and resurrection from within that cultural mentality, making of Jesus the 'cursed one' which the group needs to maintain its unity and its sense of goodness.

The other form of cultural life, which moves beyond being trapped, knows that no form of social and cultic belonging can survive the perception that our victim was in fact God himself, present in Jesus.

When our expulsion of him was revealed for what it was, at the resurrection, far from our being given a superior crutch by which to keep our world of moral and social order intact, what we received turned out to be the explosion of our cultural order, a major question mark over any of our attempts to shore up social unity, and the beginning of an entirely new way of human being-together, gradually constructed without the need for a sacrificial victim.

Now it would be easy enough to demonstrate that for far too long, Christianity in both its Protestant and Catholic 'orthodoxies' has relied on an explanation of salvation which does in fact fall straight back into saying, with many a polite circumlocution: 'Jesus is cursed.' All the bastardised Anselmian substitution theories which tend to underlie seemingly attractive presentations of the Christian faith in fact turn on God cursing Jesus so that we can be 'saved.' Jesus as cursed comes to be the necessary bit of the formula which allows the sleight of hand by which salvation is proclaimed without making any real difference to the social and moral enclosure within which we live. Cursed Jesus is simply the guarantor of an independent and pre-understood definition of good and evil into which we are required to fit as best we may.

I mention this en passant, rather than trying to argue with it. It is one of those things which cannot really be argued against. For those who hold it, it has a dangerously sacred status. For those who have moved beyond it, it needs no arguing against.

What I am interested in is something different. I am interested in sharing with you what I hope you will agree to call an experience of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit which allows the words 'Jesus is Lord' to become not a slogan, but a gasp at the three-dimensional wonder of Yahweh in our midst as one of us, with all the mystery of the Lord's vulnerable revelatory power intact. (pp. 147-149)

John 2:1-11

Resources

1. Gil Bailie, "The Gospel of John," tape #2. Link to my notes and transcription of this lecture on John 2; here are the notes specifically about the Wedding at Cana (2:1-12):

Jesus responds to his mother's request in what appears to be a cold an aloof way. His hour has not come. Nevertheless, the stewards are instructed to what he asks them.

The six stone jars used for the Jewish rites of purification are of a size more suitable to the temple than for a home in Cana. In any event, they refer to a very prominent part of Jewish life in the first century. They were pre-occupied with the problem of impurity.

This story, then, is really about the collision between the ministry of Jesus and the conventional religion of his time. We could say, lest we think this has something to do with the Jewishness of this religion, that there is always a collision between the ministry of Jesus, or the spirit of the Paraclete that Jesus left us, and the conventional religions of the time. This is paradigmatic collision.

The stone jars are not for wine, but for ritual washing. And note they need filling; they are depleted. Jesus is not rejecting the jars and what they stood for; he is filling them. You could say that he is filling the rituals with meaning and then transforming them.

Three notes in passing: (1) the gentleness of this transition from one dispensation to another. Not a rejection, but filling it and transforming it. A continuity and a discontinuity at the same time. (2) The devout Jews of the time were habituated to these rituals and clung to them, not only because they order life but also because it gave them an identity. So when Jesus begins to offer an alternative, he runs into the fundamental human phenomenon of our clinging to such rituals. (3) This all takes place in furtherance of a marriage. That is to say, the daring boldness of permanent, life-long commitment. The root of the word "troth" is the root of the word "truth." We discover truth in troth.

Return to Year C Index

Return to "Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary" Home Page

Link to another Resource for Preaching from the Perspective of Mimetic Theory: PreachingPeace.org

Link to "The Text This Week" -- the Most Comprehensive Lectionary Site on the Internet

1. J-M Oughourlian, Un mime nommé désir (Paris: Grasset 1982), p 58.

2. "Its substance can be stated quite simply: the Holy Spirit is the mutual love of the Father and the Son. Notice that it is not said that the Holy Spirit is the result or term of this mutual love. He is the love itself" (Coffee [1984], 471).