Day 33—Thursday, January 1

This is the Lord’s doing;
It is marvelous in our eyes.
This is the day which the Lord has made;
Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Psalm 118:23-24

RICH CELEBRATION
In The Wedding Feast Tintoretto offers us one of his typically dynamic, even chaotic, scenes. His powerful use of perspective pulls this cavernous, opulent room back away from us. Every person in the painting, even if seated at the table, is powerfully animated. In the middle of this ebullient energy, Christ performs his first miracle. Transforming the water into wine in the midst of a wedding feast, Jesus signals that that the bridegroom has come. The feast, which has been going on for some time now, is made full, heightened by his work and by his presence. 

Jesus was responding to a particular need in the moment, as nearly all his miracles did—there was a shortage of wine and more was needed—and he was simultaneously operating in his prophetic power. In the last hours before his death, at the Last Supper, he would identify himself with the wine. Even as his first miracle brought fullness where there was lack, his greatest work would come when he was poured out as a libation. 

Tintoretto seems to relish the premonition of the last supper within the wedding feast. Tintoretto makes clear reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in the construction of this painting. The three arches on the back wall update the three windows in the back of the room in Leonardo’s earlier work. Rather than centering Christ in middle archway, Tintoretto shifts Christ off to the left, but retains the head of Jesus, just as Da Vinci did, as point of convergence for all of the architectural lines in the room. Tintoretto has thus embedded, through pictorial allusion, the Last Supper within the Wedding Feast.

Jesus’ imagistic prophecy at Cana does not stop at the Last Supper, but extends beyond into the great Wedding Feast of the Lamb. After being poured out, he will be miraculously filled again, and so shall we. Perhaps in the opulence of the room depicted by Tintoretto, with its ionic columns and ornate appointments, the artist is reminding us of this greater feast that awaits all of us. At that magnificent wedding feast we will drink wines superior to any we have ever tasted, enjoy food with flavors and textures we never thought possible, have conversations that nourish and bring us deep joy. Think of all of the pleasures you have had in your Christmas celebrations: the delighted laughter of children, the tearing of wrapping paper, dark chocolate melting on your tongue, good drink, delicious food. Do you not know that this is only the hundredth part of secret treasures Christ has laid up for us?

Why do you mourn when the bridegroom is with you?

Jonathan Puls, Art Department