You Have Kept the Good Wine Until Now
By Phillip Garside
According to our demoralizing cultural narrative, young couples fall in passionate love, get married and have kids. Their love is tempered by the stress of family life. Then, after pouring all of their energy into raising kids, they are abandoned by them and left cohabitating as cantankerous strangers in an empty nest.
A primary effect of this narrative is a general avoidance of children in order to maintain nuptial passion. It also instills a general subconscious dread of long-term married life where passions will certainly dim.
Our society sees marriage as the beginning of the end of a loving relationship, but John’s Gospel points out how the introduction of Christ as the foundation of the sacrament of marriage is the catalyst for a deeper richer love life.
“Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now.”
Christ himself calls us to flip the script when it comes to our perception of the joy of marriage. At the wedding of Cana, Jesus transforms the water, a symbol of sustenance and life, into wine, a symbol of joy and exstasis (ecstasy).
As we know, wine continues to improve with age, and so a marriage that orders itself to Christ’s love continues to grow. The experience of true nuptial love develops from passion to intimacy. And, the longer the couple explores their marriage in Christ, the more profoundly intimate they grow together as a couple.
Society tells you that the superior love comes first and when people have loved a little while, lesser love follows. But Christ offers an ever deeper and richer experience of love as time passes, a love aged like fine wine.
