Obedience and the Wedding at Cana

Epiphany 2 2025 John 2. 1-11

If you’re ever in the Louvre Art Gallery in Paris and you join the crowd taking pictures of the Mona Lisa on their phones turn around and take a look at the painting behind you. It’s the biggest painting in the Louvre. It’s over 6 metres high and almost 10 metres wide. It’s a painting of the story we’ve just heard in the Gospel, The Wedding Feast at Cana by Paolo Veronese.

Veronese imagines the scene in sixteenth century Venice. He paints a banquet for a crowd of some 130 different characters in a blaze of light and colour. In the lower half of the composition, finely dressed guests gesture, and eat at a banqueting table attended by servants and musicians. A black attendant offers a glass of miraculous wine to the bridegroom; behind him, a dwarf is holding a bright green parrot. Among the wedding guests are Veronese’s contemporaries: the King of France, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Queen of England and the Ottoman Emperor Suleiman the Magnificent, and also the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury and Triboulet, the jester of the King of France. The guests are eating dessert, quinces, grapes and figs.

Above them on a second level are the servers, carvers, and cooks who are busily attending to the food and dishes for the meal. Above them all is the blue sky with a few white clouds, between classical columns and architecture. Spectators peer down at all the activity below them. The colours are rich and varied. The clothing, instruments, and serving vessels are elegant and costly. This is a sumptuous work of art.

It’s a painting of people who are devoted to earthly pleasures. It’s about the joy and splendour of life. But set in front of the musicians is an hourglass, a symbol of the transience of earthly pleasures and of human vanity. And the composition is organized around the figures of Jesus and His mother Mary.

Jesus and Mary sit perfectly still. They ignore the worldly excess and bustle around them. Their clothing is austere. They alone have halos. The bearing of Jesus is like saint in a Byzantine icon. Jesus and Mary are models of holiness and silence amidst the worldliness of the wedding feast. And this great work was originally painted for the refectory of a Benedictine monastery in Venice for the monks to contemplate as they themselves ate in silence.

Obedience is the foundation of the Benedictine rule of life. Our word “obedience” comes from the Latin obedire, which means to listen. St Benedict begins his Rule by asking his reader to listen deeply to God, to “Listen with the ear of the heart.”

The story of The Wedding Feast at Cana is all about obedience. St John’s account tells us that after the wine ran out, Mary said to her son, They have no more wine. Jesus answers, My time has not yet come, seems to imply that He was not going to get involved. But perhaps it was her intuition, or maybe it was His look or the inflection in His voice, but Mary said to the servants, Do whatever he tells you. Jesus tells them to fill the vats with water, and the rest is history. When the master of the banquet tasted the new wine, he was amazed, because usually the cheaper wine was served to guests who had drunk enough to lack a discerning palate. In this case, Jesus provided the best wine last, after the servants had obeyed his command. Obedience to Christ and to His commands produces the good wine in our lives! Obedience to the will of God makes us happy. Disobedience makes us miserable. Could this be true? Could it be that the measure of our happiness is in direct proportion to the level of our obedience to our Lord’s commands?

In Veronese’s painting Jesus is almost directly in the centre of the composition. Of all the 130 figures only Jesus looks directly at the viewer. Everyone else is busy, active, and enjoying the party. His gaze at us gives force and emphasis to Mary’s command. She has told us how we are to live. Be obedient. Do whatever he tells you.

Amen.

The Rev’d Dr James Lawson, St Mary Magdalene Enfield, 19/01/2025