1/19/2025 - 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time

Wine, Wedding and Divine Romance

We are in year C in our Liturgical cycle, and it began with Advent. It will feature the Gospel according to Luke. The following words will be proclaimed before the Gospel reading each Sunday: “A reading from the holy Gospel according to Luke.” But the readings will change during the season of Lent and Easter. But, to make things more complicated, this Sunday—the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time—does not have a reading from Luke’s Gospel. The Church has used instead a reading from the Gospel of John, one about an event which actually took place before the start of Jesus’ public life, as Jesus says explicitly (“My hour has not yet come”). We have also entered the “Ordinary Season” after the Christmas season, and the focus will be on our spiritual growth and so many references will be made to the kingdom of God.

The metaphor of marriage imaging God’s relationship with the people of God is deep in the Hebrew Bible. Yahweh is to Israel as husband is to wife. Think of Hosea's comparison of his troubled marriage with the story of God's relationship with Israel. Hosea’s Yahweh will “betroth you to myself forever, with tenderness.” Ezekiel spins a marvelous tale of courtship, betrayal, and redemptive pardon to explain the history of God’s commitment to Israel.

But Isaiah goes beyond the other prophets. He presents an outright celebration of nuptials: God’s relation to Israel, to us, is an undying covenant of love and fidelity. “You shall be called ‘My Delight,’ your land, ‘Espoused,’ For the Lord delights in you and makes your land His spouse. As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you. As a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you.”

God’s desire and delight is to be with us intimately sharing our life and destiny through thick or thin. Our idea of separation and distance from God is of our making, through our feelings of inadequacy, sinfulness and even fear. 

Thus, it might be more than happenstance that the first miraculous “sign” of Jesus recounted in the fourth Gospel occurs at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. Not only does His presence bless the covenant of marriage; He personally heightens the celebration. The couple must have been a relative, as His mother is there and she is the first person to realize that there will be a great disaster, as the wine is running out. In the first century, a wedding feast lasted for a week, and running out of wine would subject the host to ridicule. The women’s accommodations were near the storage area for the wine, and so it comes about that Jesus’ mother finds out about the depletion of the wine before the men do. Since guests helped pay for the wedding expenses, it seems that Mary wanted Jesus to do something. Jesus transforms six stone jars of water into wine. And it is good stuff. “People usually serve the choice wine first; then when the guests have been drinking a while, a lesser vintage. What you have done is keep the choice wine until now.” This first sign of Jesus revealed His glory, and thenceforth the disciples believed in Him. 

 By using purification jars to produce wine, Jesus symbolically replaces the old covenant's cleansing rituals with the new covenant's life-giving grace, in great abundance and of superior quality. This event serves as a pivotal moment in revealing Jesus’ divine power and foreshadows His greater work of transformation and redemption, marking the inauguration of a new era in God's relationship with humanity. At Cana, there was a miracle of water becoming wine, and at the Last Supper the wine will be transformed into His blood for our salvation. This wonderful story of wine at a wedding is a means to communicate to us that we, as the people of God, will be united to God through Christ in perfect harmony like a marriage with joy in abundance.  Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O.