Homily for 2d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
2d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Jan. 16, 2022
John 2: 1-11
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

“His disciples began to believe in him” (John 2: 11).

An ancient fragment depicting the Cana "sign."

According to John’s Gospel, Jesus has started to assemble his disciples.  At this point they include Andrew and Simon, Philip and Nathanael, the 4 whom St. John identifies in his 1st chapter.  They’ve joined him because John the Baptist pointed him out as the Lamb of God (1:36), because they’ve spent time in deep conversation with him (1:39), and because he’s read their souls somehow (1:47-48).

But accompanying Jesus isn’t the same thing as being committed to him, just as coming to church isn’t the same thing as being committed to him.  (Of course, if we are committed to him, we do come to church unless there’s a serious reason why we can’t.)

So when the disciples witness this 1st of his “signs”—the term that John uses instead of miracles because we’re meant to look beyond external appearances to what’s being signified—John says they “began to believe in him.”  Their belief, their commitment, is just beginning.  As we see thruout the 4 gospels, the faith of the apostles will have a lot of growing to do.

The apostles will bicker among themselves constantly about their own importance (they’re like kids in the back seat of the car).  They’ll marvel at what he does without grasping who he is.  They won’t understand him when he talks about the cross.  Many of his followers will leave him when he speaks of his body and blood—the Eucharist—as food and drink for eternal life (John 6).  Judas, keeper of their common funds, will steal from them (John 12:6) and then sell Jesus for money.  When Jesus is arrested, most of them will flee, and Peter will deny him.  After his resurrection, they’ll be very slow to believe.

So, yes, after he changed water into wine at Cana, his disciples were barely beginning to believe in him and to commit their lives to him.

Brothers and sisters, we’re pretty much the same as those 1st disciples.  For most of us, our faith in Jesus and our commitment to him is a long, slow process.  It begins with our Baptism, progresses thru 1st Communion and Confirmation and religious instruction, and is challenged often by temptations and falls, by unhappy events in our lives, by experiences of the cross, by the scandalous behavior of other Christians (even priests), and by the skepticism of the world.  Our faith has ups and downs.  As some penitents have confessed to me, “Father, sometimes I have doubts.”

Doubting is not a sin.  Only refusing to seek truth and goodness and to follow where they lead us is sinful.  In the 11th century the great theologian St. Anselm defined theology as “faith seeking understanding.”  So we ought to be asking questions about God and God’s doings, and seeking answers, seeking deeper knowledge, beginning to believe.

What might we try to understand and to believe about what Jesus does in today’s gospel of the wedding at Cana?  We can see that Jesus values a wedding celebration; he thinks it’s important enuf to rescue from a social disaster.  Behind the celebration is a marriage.  Marriage is sacred.  In Catholicism, we call it a sacrament, a sign with a deep meaning.  In today’s 1st reading, the prophet Isaiah compares the relationship between Israel and God to marriage:  “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” (62:5).  St. Paul also speaks of Christ as the bridegroom of the Church, the Church as the Lord’s spouse (Eph 5:21-33).  Therefore, marriage is specifically and only between a man and woman, and it’s an unbreakable bond, like the union between Christ and his Church.  As Jesus salvaged the wedding feast at Cana, he salvages us, his beloved people, from the wreckage of our sins.

We can see more in this 1st of Jesus’ signs worked at Cana.  The steward of the celebration tells the bridegroom, “You have kept the good wine until now” (2:10).  Jesus is saving a good wine for us.  In this life we enjoy many good things, and sometimes we suffer some things not at all good.  These are the ordinary wine or the bad wine of life.  But God is preparing for us a much better celebration:  the banquet of eternal life.  At the Last Supper, Jesus told the apostles, “I shall not drink again the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God” (Mark 14:25).  In God’s kingdom, in eternal life, we’ll savor the best that God has to offer, everything to rejoice our hearts, everything to nourish our deepest longings and desires.  God’s keeping good wine for us.  When we celebrate the Eucharist, the Lord turns bread and wine into his own body and blood, and we signify our belief in the future feast where the best wine, Jesus himself, is waiting for us.