Homily for the
2d Sunday of Ordinary Time
Jan. 17, 2010
John 2: 1-11
Troop 40 B.S.A.
“There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee” (John 2: 1).
Do you wonder why they ran out of wine after Jesus and his disciples showed up at a wedding? Evidently everyone was having a pretty good time!
More seriously, Jesus’ presence at a wedding and his intervention to keep this wedding from becoming a social disaster show that God approves of marriage. You’d be surprised to know that some people, even Christians, at different times in history, haven’t approved of marriage, have even considered it sinful.
In fact, if you were paying attention to the 1st reading, you noticed that Isaiah uses marriage as a sign of the relationship between God and his people: “As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder [or Maker] shall marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you” (Is 62:5). Nor is that the only Old Testament text to use that kind of language. One entire book, the Song of Songs, uses it. And St. Paul uses it in some of his letters in the New Testament, calling the Church the bride of Christ.
Along the same line, before Communion at every Mass, we acclaim, “Happy are those who are called to his supper,” i.e., the supper of the Lamb of God. With one word left out, that’s a quotation from Rev 19:9: “Blessed [or Happy] are those who have been called to the wedding feast [or supper] of the Lamb.” The word omitted in the Mass text is “wedding” or “marriage.” That acclamation reminds us that Holy Communion is a foretaste of heaven, which the Bible often compares to a feast, a banquet—especially a wedding banquet. The wedding, indeed, is the one between God and his people, between Jesus and his Church.
What else can we learn from observing Jesus, and his holy mother Mary, at a wedding? They are interested in and concerned about the important events and the everyday lives of people. What’s more important in the lives of most people than their wedding, their marriage? What’s more “everyday” than married life and family? Jesus and Mary are there in the lives of these friends of theirs. We don’t even know their names; the gospel doesn’t tell us. And that means that they represent all of us. God cares about all of us all the time, even in the most ordinary parts of our lives, and he wants them to turn out well; he wants us to be happy—like the outcome of this wedding feast.
What else do we see in this story of Jesus at Cana? What was the immediate reason why Jesus intervened to head off a big problem? It was his mother’s intercession. Somehow she has become aware of the wine shortage, and she goes to Jesus with an implicit request that he do something about it. Her words to him are simple: “They have no wine” (1:3)—an observation. But he understands the request: Would you do something? For his answer is: “That doesn’t concern me. It’s not yet my time” (1:4), my time to act, my time to transform people’s lives. But she doesn’t accept that answer. She persists—not with Jesus directly but with the household servants, whom she sends to Jesus for instructions (1:5). And he does what she asks; he saves the day. He can’t refuse his mother.
That relationship between Jesus and his mother is the reason for our confidence in her, the reason why we so often invoke her guidance, her help, her protection, the reason why—as 2 of you know well—why Don Bosco and the Salesians call upon her as the Help of Christians. We know that she’ll go to Jesus for us and let him know that we need him and he should do something for us, as he did for the people at Cana. At this time, for instance, we can call on Mary to intercede with Jesus for the people of Haiti.
A final lesson from what happened at Cana: Mary told the servants to go to Jesus and “do whatever he tells you.” On the face of it, filling 6 jars with water (1:6-7) wasn’t going to help the situation, was it? But they did what Jesus told them and got a miracle (1:7-9). Mary would tell us the same thing: Do whatever Jesus tells you if you want to be saved. Follow the teachings of Jesus in the Scriptures. Follow the teachings of those whom Jesus has left us as teachers, viz., the leaders of the Church: the Holy Father and our bishops. More important than having water turned into wine is having us turned into God’s holy people, into saints, by living the way Jesus teaches us. I said earlier that God wants us to be happy; if we listen to Jesus we will be happy, in this life and for all eternity.
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