Revelation, light, and mystery. At our celebration of the Epiphany two weeks ago we saw that these three realities are at the heart of the identity and mission of the Lord Jesus Christ, who revealed to the entire human race by the uncreated light of God’s glory that he is the mystery or sacrament of salvation for all people of every time and place. And today we see those same three realities of revelation, light, and mystery at a wedding feast in Cana of Galilee.
The first thing to note about this luminous and very human moment is that Mary attended the wedding and that, as John puts it, Jesus was also invited with his disciples. We can savor the delicate complexity of this situation, because anyone who has ever planned a wedding knows how awkward it can be to get the guest list just right, and perhaps we can imagine the unwritten backstory.
Mary was at least a friend and maybe a relative of the family of either the bride or groom, and they invited her to the wedding. But since by that time Joseph had apparently died, the hosts knew that to invite Mary was to also invite her son. And that would have been fine, but by then Jesus was traveling with a posse of twelve men who had all recently quit their jobs to follow him everywhere on an itinerant preaching mission.
It isn’t difficult to imagine that the hosts had to think hard before inviting Jesus to the wedding, because then they would have to provide food and drink for twelve extra guests. But to get Mary they had to invite Jesus, and he came as a package deal with the Twelve. And so they were all there that day in the tiny town of Cana to attend the wedding of a couple whose names we will not know until we are gathered to the Throne of Grace.
Then came the predictable embarrassment at the dinner party of the newlyweds, probably caused by the swollen guest list that now included twelve seminarians: the wine ran short. The Mother of God noticed this problem and then did what she always does; she interceded with her Son. And here we must remember that this event in Cana came at the very beginning of the public ministry of the Lord Jesus.
Last week we celebrated the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, and in the sacred liturgy, the Feast of the Lord’s Baptism is the end of the Christmas season and the beginning of the ordinary Sundays of the Year precisely because Christ’s Baptism was the dividing line between the thirty years of his hidden life with his mother and adoptive father and the three years of his public ministry with the Twelve.
And now only one week after the close of Christmastide, the Gospel describes the first event recorded by Scripture after the Lord’s Baptism and his calling of the Twelve: namely, the wedding feast at Cana, a small town about five miles from Nazareth. There Mary said simply to her son “They have no wine,” and the reply of Jesus to his mother’s intervention reflects the newness of this moment.
“Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.” His hour, of course, refers to his suffering and death, and from the moment Jesus begins to reveal himself to the Twelve, to the Children of Israel, and to all the nations of the earth, he will be on the journey to his hour. In other words, he will be on the Way of the Cross.
So even at Cana, Mary knew exactly what was at stake. She had known from the moment of Gabriel’s Annunciation. Mary had known since the angels sang and the shepherds adored at Christ’s birth, since Simeon and Anna gave thanks in the Temple, since the Magi visited and the boys of Bethlehem were slaughtered, and since Joseph had to flee with them to Egypt to save the life of Jesus.
Mary had known for three decades what her son’s hour would require. She had understood since she was told that a sword of sorrow would pierce her own heart, and she had kept all these mysteries in her heart, the heart which contemplated what the salvation of the human race would cost.
So Mary knew exactly what it would cost them both when she said to her son “they have no wine” just as she knew what it would bring to all the children of Eve when she said to the waiters: “Do whatever he tells you.” These are the last words of Mary recorded in the New Testament, words that will echo in the hearts of all her son’s disciples until the Last Day.
So, there in Cana and moved by his mother’s intercession, the Lord Jesus took the first step on the Way of the Cross. He instructed the waiters to fill six large stone jars with nearly 180 gallons of water, and he changed that water into more than 900 bottles of premium wine. Then the Lord instructed that the chief steward be given the first taste.
When the steward of the feast discovered that the newly available wine was the finest vintage of the day, he was astounded and praised the newlyweds for their generosity. And such is the superabundant love of God in Christ for the human race. No need of ours is too small for his providence, the loving-kindness of him who came to suffer and die for us and to rise from the dead that we may have life and have it in abundance.
The Twelve were witnesses of these events. They heard Mary intercede with her son and instruct us to do whatever he tells us. They saw Jesus demonstrate his mastery over nature and attend to simple human needs from love. And they understood that the itinerant rabbi whom they now followed was much more than the son of Mary.
Jesus was and is, as John the Baptist had told them, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Three more years of Christ’s public preaching and private teaching would be needed for the apostles to understand and accept the full implications of what they glimpsed that day at a wedding feast, but the Twelve had now encountered the revelation, light, and mystery of the divine Redeemer.
Saint John tells us that Jesus changed the water into wine “as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee, and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him.” But that was just the beginning, and three years of missionary training awaited them. Only after Christ’s Resurrection and his Ascension to the glory which was his before he made the universe would the Twelve grasp and then proclaim to all the world that the whole human race is called to rejoice forever at a wedding feast.
And more than that, at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb we will not be guests; we will be the bride! This is so because all who are joined to the Children of Israel in the Church are made the spouse of Christ the bridegroom. Thus is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which we read in our first lesson: “For the Lord delights in you and makes your land his spouse. 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.”
Friends, the destiny of all who are made a new creation in Christ is to rejoice forever in the perfect love of God at a wedding feast that never ends, a celebration foreshadowed two thousand years ago in a tiny, dusty town of Galilee where a young couple ran short of wine and where the water of human desire was transformed into the wine of divine love by the eternal Word made flesh.
And at every Mass we receive another foretaste of that eternal wedding feast when bread and wine become the flesh and blood of God the Son. The Most Holy Eucharist is the medicine of immortality and the food for our journey on the Way of the Cross, which is none other than a pilgrim path to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb once slain who lives forever: the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the text of my homily for 19 January 2025, the Second Sunday of the Year.
Fr Jay Scott Newman