Sunday Gospel Reflection: Moderation in Most Things

The Wedding at Cana: Russian icon

There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee,
and the mother of Jesus was there.
Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.
When the wine ran short,
the mother of Jesus said to him,
“They have no wine.”
And Jesus said to her,
“Woman, how does your concern affect me?
My hour has not yet come.”
His mother said to the servers,
“Do whatever he tells you.”
Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings,
each holding twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus told the them,
“Fill the jars with water.”
So they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them,
“Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.”
So they took it.
And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine,
without knowing where it came from
— although the servers who had drawn the water knew —,
the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him,
“Everyone serves good wine first,
and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one;
but you have kept the good wine until now.”
Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee
and so revealed his glory,
and his disciples began to believe in him.

Gandolfi: Cana

I often wonder how prohibitionists got around this passage. Jesus’s first miracle was making wine. And note the circumstance: “Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now.” In other words, Jesus turns water into wine at the point when the wedding guests are already drunk, too drunk to know or care the quality of the wine they are drinking. And does he make just a little bit more for them? No; six thirty-gallon containers, 180 gallons of fine wine. We don’t know how large the wedding party was, but we do know that less water than this was considered adequate for them to bathe and wash up. We are talking epic bender.

For millennia, the idea that moderation is a virtue has been popular. The Greeks called it “the Golden Mean,” and made it the mainspring of their morality. Confucius believed in something similar. “Nothing in excess.” “Moderation in all things.” The same concept fuelled the prohibition movement: “temperance,” after all, means “moderation.”

De Vos: Cana

Yet Christianity actually seems to pull against this. Temperance would have suggested Jesus take a wife; that he not drive the moneylenders out of the temple; that he hold his tongue and avoid criticizing established authority. Instead, he provoked them into killing him.

And this seems to me to be the main point of the present story, the story of the wedding at Cana; since a marriage is by its nature a celebration of balance and moderation, the union of the ying with the yang. Jesus is celebrating this--reluctantly--yet also subverting it. As he does by not, himself, marrying.

Bloch: Cana

Temperance is the path to success in this world, no doubt. Temperance is a good idea if you want to remain healthy and become wealthy. But, as St. Paul says, the wisdom of the world is foolishness to God.

There is, in fact, an innate contradiction in the doctrine of the mean. If we must have moderation in all things, mustn’t that also include moderation? Otherwise, aren’t we being immoderate?

Ergo, “moderation” or “balance” is not an eternal virtue, but something advisable in some situations, and not at others.

And I'll drink to that.