“Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts.” Zechariah 4:6
We often read the wedding at Cana as a story about abundance or transformation, which is what it is, but in a careful reading today, it also appears as a quiet, radical reflection on the common good: how human joy, communal responsibility, and divine generosity are woven together.
This common good has me thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who spent his life naming a problem many of us feel but struggle to articulate: that modern moral life is deeply disordered. We argue endlessly about justice, freedom, rights, and responsibility, yet our arguments rarely persuade or heal. In After Virtue, MacIntyre suggests why. Our moral language is made up of fragments, words lifted from older moral traditions but detached from any shared understanding of what human life is for. We still talk about “values,” but we no longer agree on the kind of people we are meant to become.
MacIntyre called this condition emotivism: a culture in which moral claims are reduced to expressions of preference, power, or feeling: I want, I feel, I have leverage. In such a world, moral debate becomes performance rather than formation. Institutions are no longer places that shape character; they are stages upon which selves display themselves.
This is why "current" figures like Donald Trump do not appear as moral aberrations but as an exaggerated embodiment of modern assumptions. Trump speaks the languages our culture understands fluently: acquisition, dominance, and self-assertion. He does not seek to be formed by the roles he inhabits, even the presidency, but treats them as personal property. As MacIntyre famously warned, “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.” The deeper tragedy is not simply who governs, but our loss of the moral vocabulary needed to recognize character when we see it.
Recovering from this moral malaise requires more than replacing one leader with another. It requires restoring a shared grammar of the good, learning again how to distinguish a person of character from a person of mere success, and a community of shared purpose from a collection of competing selves. That kind of recovery is slow work. It involves education not only of the mind, but of the heart and will. It asks us, as MacIntyre insisted, to sacrifice some autonomy for the sake of belonging to practices and communities that can actually make us good. The church has played a part in this consciousness and may play more in the future, but as Pastor Steve preached, Christians may need to "walk their talk".
The story of the Wedding at Cana begins not with preaching or command, but with a community celebration. A wedding in first-century Galilee was not a private affair; it was a public, multi-day event that united an entire village. To run out of wine was not merely inconvenient; it threatened communal shame. Joy here is not individual or optional; it is shared, fragile, and socially held.
Mary is the first to notice: “They have no wine.” Her words are not a demand or a strategy. They are an act of moral perception. She sees that the community’s shared joy and dignity is at risk. This is where the common good begins: not in policy, power, or spectacle, but in attention. Someone notices when joy is running out.
Jesus hesitates. “My hour has not yet come.” He resists being drawn into performance or premature revelation. Yet he acts anyway, not because the moment is ideal, but because the need is communal. The common good often calls us to act before conditions are perfect, before we are fully “ready,” because the stakes are relational.
The abundance is extravagant, six stone jars filled to the brim. This is not a rationed charity. Yet the miracle flows through human cooperation. Servants fill the jars, carry the water, and present the wine. Divine generosity does not bypass human participation; it deepens it. Virtue, in MacIntyre’s sense, is learned not through isolated choice but through shared practices ordered toward a common end.
When the steward remarks, “You have kept the good wine until now,” he names a reversal of expectation. In God’s economy, the best is not hoarded by the powerful or consumed early and wasted. It emerges precisely when a community is on the brink of embarrassment and loss. The common good is not secured by scarcity or control, but by trust that shared life can be renewed.
John tells us this was the first of Jesus’ signs, revealing his glory. But the glory revealed is not domination or self-display. It is relational abundance. A community is spared shame. Joy is restored. The celebration continues.
In
a world shaped by emotivism, competition, and fear of running out, Cana
offers a different moral vision, one that MacIntyre would recognize as
thick with purpose. The common good is not something we protect by
withholding or performing. It is something we discover when we notice
one another’s needs, submit ourselves to shared practices, act together,
and trust that God’s abundance is meant not for isolated selves, but
for all of us, together.
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