January 19, 2024 – The Second Sunday in Ordinary Time [YEAR C]

Fr. Matthew Siegman
Isaiah 62:1-5  +  1 Corinthians 12:4-11  +  John 2:1-11

This Sunday, as we move from the Christmas Season into Ordinary Time, we hear the Gospel of the Wedding at Cana. Many things happen in this Gospel passage: Mary intercedes for the wedding party; Christ elevates marriage through his presence; God shows us that he desires to bless us abundantly; and Christ begins the work of the new creation. I’ll briefly reflect on each of these.

In the Gospel, we see Mary approach our Lord with a concern: the wine has run out. Mary knew that Jesus could, somehow, assist the wedding guests avoid embarrassment in their time of need. When she approaches Him, it seems that she is rebuffed, but she places her trust in Him. She responds with, “do whatever He tells you.” At His mother’s prompting, Christ began a new phase in His public by performing this sign. We see two things in this encounter between Mary and Christ. First, we see the power and effectiveness of Mary’s intercession. She asked for something that Christ had not intended to do. It was not a bad thing, just not something He had planned on. Her friends were saved great embarrassment, because she interceded with Christ and trusted him. Second, we hear Mary’s final recorded words, “do whatever He tells you.” They were instructions for servants at the wedding, and they were also instructions for all of us. Mary always desires to bring us closer to Christ, and her statement is a reminder that we should open our ears to hear His will and open our hearts to do His will.

The Church has traditionally taught that Christ blessed marriage in attending this wedding with His disciples. There are other moments in the Gospels where Christ clarifies the meaning of marriage, perhaps most notably in teaching that divorce is due to the hardness of hearts and was never intended; however, this is different. Christ attends and celebrates this wedding and is willing to perform the first of His miracles at it. Later in the Gospels, Christ speaks of Heaven as a wedding banquet. Because of all of these, the Church recognizes that Jesus is trying to teach us that marriage is a good and beautiful gift, created by God and blessed by Christ, and it is a source of grace for those around it. Married couples should be filled with love and grace so much that it overflows into those around them.

In changing so much water into wine, Christ shows us that God desires to bless us abundantly. He does not merely wish for us to have enough. He wishes for us to have what we need in abundance. We see this throughout the Gospels. Every time He fed a crowd, for example, there was more left at the end then there was at the beginning. This should not surprise us, though. God has always shown Himself to be a God of abundance. When we look at creation, we see that He is not content to do the bare minimum. He created the entire universe, with its unbelievable vastness. He filled this earth not just with enough life to sustain it, but so that it was teeming with plants and animals.

The only reason that this inconceivable abundance seems like it is not enough is because of an old foe of humanity: sin. This brings us to the final aspect of the Wedding at Cana: at Cana, Christ begins the work of re-creation. The Son came into this world to recreate man. We had fallen due to our sin and had lost our ability to relate to God. Man had separated himself from God, and man was powerless to repair the relationship. Christ recreates man by taking on our human nature–being born as one of us–and restoring man’s right relationship with the Father. And this work starts at a wedding. St. John tells us that this is what Christ is doing in a subtle way. On the seventh day of creation, God rested. He recreated and delighted in his work. This wedding takes place on the seventh day after the Lord’s Baptism. When we put all this information together, we see that Christ

is telling us something very important about salvation and about the family. Salvation comes through kinship. That is: if we desire salvation, we must be members of Christ’s family.

The prophet Isaiah writes today, “For Zion’s sake I will not be silent, for Jerusalem’s sake I will not be quiet, until her vindication shines forth.” These passages are not about a city, but about the family of God, because the prophet continues, “as a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you.” St. Paul writes, “God has called us through the Gospel to possess the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.” We are called to this glory through the family of God, and the Wedding at Cana reminds us that we should strive to allow God’s glory to shine out through our own families too.