Vol.5 No.19 DoM Gospel Reflection
17 January 2016—2nd Sunday Ordinary Time
John 2:1-11
By Cindy Warner
At the Wedding Feast in Cana, Christ turned water into wine and opened the hearts of the disciples to faith through the intervention of His mother, Mary, the first among believers. May Mary’s words, “Do whatever He tells you to do.” also resonate in our hearts as we strive to obey his teachings.
I’m sure many of you recognize our meditation song. If you have been to a wedding recently you may have heard it. Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire is appropriately named for a wedding where joy is the predominant emotion. Joy unlike mere contentment, delights in the others being. If you remember our Fruit of the Month, joy, it’s symbol was the grape.
Several of us had weddings in our families last year, me included. My god-daughter, Allison Busbee, was married in October and my daughter, Melissa, married in November. Both occasions were truly joyful times for us.
I’m sure the weddings of today are a lot different than the Wedding Feast at Cana.
The Wedding at Cana
.1* On the third day there was a wedding* in Cana* in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.
Weddings of this time could last anywhere from two to seven days. Cana was in the wine country and most likely the host had provided an abundant supply. Weddings were a time of great rejoicing as noted in Isaiah 62:5,
“For as a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you;
And as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride so shall your God rejoice in you.
Mary was partaking in the joys of others.
Note that in the Gospel of John, Mary is never called by her personal name.
.a2Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.
3When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”
To run out of wine would have been a great embarrassment to the newly wedded couple. Mary’s concern may indicate she was a relative of the couple. Or, according to Fr. Jim Kee’s theory, Mary may have been the wedding coordinator.
Jesus and his numerous disciples had been traveling for three days prior to their arrival at the wedding, possibly causing an increased burden on the host’s supply of wine.
4* [And] Jesus said to her, “Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.”
Jesus’s words here may seem disrespectful to His mother, however, “Woman” was a title of respect and endearment at this time. Fr. Anthony Wieck noted on our Day of Prayer during his discussion of the Wedding at Cana that Mary was the “woman” of the prophecy in Genesis who would crush Satan. When Jesus said, “My hour”, he was referring to His Own Passion & Death. At Cana Jesus was saying His hour had not yet come according to His Father’s appointment.
b5His mother said to the servers, “Do whatever he tells you.”
The following is taken from “The World’s First Love” by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen in 1952. “And yet, implicit in Mary’s statement was a request that He actually begin it (That is the hour in which He was to reveal Himself). In our own language, Our Lord was saying to His Blessed Mother: “My dear Mother, do you realize that you are asking me to proclaim my Divinity-to appear before the world as the Son of God, and to prove my Divinity by my works and my miracles? The moment that I do this, I begin the royal road to the Cross. When I am no longer known among men as the son of the carpenter, but as the Son of God, that will be my first step toward Calvary. My hour is not yet come; but would you have me anticipate it? Is it your will that I go to the Cross?”
As Fr. Anthony noted, this was the beginning of Jesus’s prophetic journey and death that Mary must also bear. The Holy Spirit drove her to make this request. It hurt her to lead Jesus to His death.
The notion of Mary as our intercessor with Jesus begins with the miracle of wine at the wedding of Cana. “Do whatever he tells you.”, are Mary’s last spoken words in the Gospel. She becomes a direct route to Jesus. And three years later when from the Cross Jesus said to Mary, “Woman behold your son” and to John, “Behold your mother” we became her spiritual children. Fr. Michael Gaitley in his book, “33 Days to Morning Glory” tells us, “Mary’s task is to give spiritual birth to Christians, to feed and nurture them with grace, and to help us grow in holiness. It’s her mission to form us into saints.”
We don’t always know our needs, however Mary intercedes for us to gain what we need. Her maternal heart cannot remain indifferent to the material and spiritual distress of her children.
”c6* Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings,deach holding twenty to thirty gallons.
7Jesus told them, “Fill the jars with water.” So they filled them to the brim.
If I have done my math correctly, this would be the equivalent of approximately 600-900 bottles of wine. Is this an indication of the graces we receive when we receive the Body & Blood of Christ?
8Then he told them, “Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.”* So they took it.
9And 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), Remember it was Mary who noticed the wine shortage, not the wine steward, just as she notes our needs before we do.
Then, “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.”
“Good wine” can have several associations according to the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. In this context it could refer to the joys of marital love, that the transformation of water into wine anticipates the transubstantiation of wine into blood when Jesus gives himself to the world in the Eucharistic liturgy or that the wine of the marital celebration looks beyond this life to the marriage supper of the Lamb in heaven.
”11Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs* in Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him.e Jesus’s signs or mighty works are the miracles that unveil the glory and power of God working through Jesus. Jesus revealed his glory in unlikely places, first in a stable in Bethlehem, in the River Jordan and then at a wedding feast in Cana.
12* After this, he and his mother, [his] brothers, and his disciples went down to Capernaum and stayed there only a few days.*
Jesus went to Capernaum the headquarters of his Galilean ministry with his brothers, not full brothers, his close relatives.
As per the Ignatius Study Bible, traditional interpretation holds that Jesus sanctifies the covenant of marriage by His presence at the Wedding of Cana.
The following excerpts are from Peter Kreeft’s Catholic Christianity regarding marriage.
Marriage is the primary example of a “covenant” – a binding relationship based neither on feeling nor on external human law but on a freely chosen commitment.
God instituted marriage because God is love. Man and woman are complementary, they exist for each other, not for self, thus imaging God’s Trinitarian love.
The Sacrament of Matrimony, like all sacraments, gives to its recipients, the spouses, actual grace – that is the real presence of Christ, in fact the very life of Christ in our souls.
The truest test of love is giving – that is sacrifice. The old marriage rite taught couples this wisdom: “Sacrifice is usually difficult and irksome. Only love can make it easy; only perfect love can make it a joy.”
Christ clearly taught the indissolubility of marriage. In Mt 19:6 God determined it, “what therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”
A common meditation for the Wedding Feast at Cana, the second Luminous Mystery, is, “We ask God for the grace of fidelity, the faithfulness in a relationship. “
1646 in the Catechism states, “By its very nature, conjugal love requires the inviable fidelity of the spouses. This is the consequence of the gift of themselves which they make to each other. Love seeks to be definitive; it cannot be an arrangement “until further notice’”
Peter Kreeft also writes, “The need for fidelity follows from the essence of marriage as ‘mutual self-donation’: that is, spouses give their whole selves to each other, especially their most intimate, sexual, procreative selves (and future children!)- not only a part of that self to one person and a part to someone else.
The two reasons marriage requires fidelity are the same two reasons it requires indissolubility: [a] “The intimate union of marriage, as a mutual giving of two persons” and [b] “the good of children demand total fidelity from the spouses and requires an unbreakable union between them”. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 1646
A third reason is that marriage is an image of the union between Christ and His Bride, the Church (us!) and Christ is not an adulterer. He is faithful forever.
Fidelity is two-fold, to God and to spouse. During the week of Thanksgiving preparing for the first Sunday of Advent, Deborah spoke about Hosea and Gomer.
The following is taken from Deborah’s Spiritual Instruction:
Hosea was commanded by God to marry Gomer. He deeply loved Gomer and was heartbroken to find that she had been unfaithful. She joined in the worship of false gods through her prostitution to the fertility cult of Baal. Her infidelity was against God as well as against her husband. Gomer’s infidelity was twofold.
Hosea’s first reaction is sorrow. His misery then swelled into wrath and anger and he enacted divorce proceedings. In the end however—he realized that his love for his wife had not diminished and he persevered in an attempt to draw her back to him. He moved along the painful path from forgiveness—to faithfulness. The story ends as God commands a reconciliation between Hosea and Gomer.
Hosea’s forgiveness of and fidelity to Gomer is a dramatic sequence. He marries the harlot at God’s command. He forgives her harlotry as God’s communication. Hosea’s expressions of love and anger, grief and hope, forgiveness and fidelity, mirror God’s expressions of love and anger, grief and hope, forgiveness and fidelity. He was faithful to God and to his wife. Hosea’s fidelity was two-fold.
Second chances such as Gomer received following her infidelity to God and Hosea reflect God’s freely given graces. Our loving Father’s nature is that of patience, kindness, grace, compassion, mercy and second chances. Hopefully we will never take these gifts for granted! May the Lord bless all Christian husbands and wives and strengthen their bond of love with all the graces of the
sacrament of Matrimony.
Resources:
Fr. Michael Gaitley: 33 Days to Morning Glory, Kindle Edition (Location 290)
Ignatius Catholic Study Bible/New Testament John, (pages 164-165)
Peter Kreeft: Catholic Christianity/ Matrimony, (pages 348-357)
Don Schwagner: RC.net: http://www.rc.net/wcc/readings/jan17.htm; copyright (c) 2016 Servants of the Word, source: www.dailyscripture.net, author Don Schwager
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen,: 1952 “The Worlds Greatest Love”; http://www.catholictradition.org/Mary/cana.htm
Fr. Anthony Wieck, SJ: Daughters of Mary Day of Prayer, September 12, 201
Mary, by highlighting the human dimension of the Incarnation, helps us better to discern the face of a God who shares the joys and sufferings of humanity, the “God-with-us” whom she conceived as man in her most pure womb, gave birth to, cared for and followed with unspeakable love from his days in Nazareth and Bethlehem to those of the Cross and Resurrection.
In Matthew 23:34-40 the Pharisees wanting to test Jesus ask Him, “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the law?” And he said to him. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”
In the New Testament the 613 laws of the Old Testament are combined into two commandments. Love God and love your neighbor. According to St. Paul in Romans 13:8-10 love is the greatest theological virtue and fulfills God’s moral law.
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