Second Sunday of Ordinary Time-Cycle C

My Dear Friends in Christ,

This year the Church follows the “C” cycle of readings for its Sunday Eucharistic Liturgies. Accordingly, we have the special grace this year of being presented in three consecutive Sunday liturgies with the complete triptych of epiphanic events in the life of Our Lord. ‘Now, wait a minute,’ you say, ‘didn’t we celebrate Epiphany two Sundays ago?’ While we do, indeed, normally think of the celebration of Epiphany as centering around the visit of the Magi to the crib of Our Lord, thinkers of the Great Tradition have thought of the celebration of the Epiphany as the simultaneous commemoration of three discrete events in the life of Christ: the visit of the Magi, the Baptism of Our Lord in the Jordan, and the miracle of the wedding at Cana. It is the last of these three which the Church places before our consideration today. 

Thus, in beginning, we do well to consider what the term “epiphany” means. Etymologically, the term epiphany is derived from the Greek ephiphaneia, which simply means manifestation. In our context, of course, it is a very unique manifestation that we speak of. In preaching on the epiphanic events, the fifth century Bishop of Ravenna and Doctor of the Church, St. Peter Chrysologus, put it succinctly by saying that these three events “disclose and reveal in different ways the fact that God himself took a human body” (Sermon 160 as found in Christian Prayer, 1965). What has been manifested to us, therefore, over the course of the past few Sundays are clear indications that the One born in Bethlehem is the very same One eternally begotten by the Father. And, while we do not normally associate the miracle of the wedding at Cana with epiphany, a form of the term is used at the very end of our Gospel passage for today where John tells us that “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed (ephanerōsen) his glory; and his disciples believed in him” (John 2:11).

So, what does all this have to do with us? Everything. For in manifesting Himself to us by becoming incarnate in human nature, God not only reveals something of Who He Is, but also who we have been created to be. St. John Paul II puts it this way:

In Christ and through Christ God has revealed himself fully to mankind and has definitively drawn close to it; at the same time, in Christ and through Christ man has acquired full awareness of his dignity, of the heights to which he is raised, of the surpassing worth of his own humanity, and of the meaning of his existence (Redemptor Hominis, 11).

The tension being described here by the late pontiff is the central tension of Christianity. In the Incarnation of the Son, God reveals himself to us precisely so as to bring us the knowledge of who we have been created to be in relation to Him and one another and avail us of the grace to live out that relationship faithfully. Accordingly, as part of the epiphanic triptych, the miracle of the wedding at Cana uniquely speaks to this tension.

In order to unpack the great depth of meaning this scene holds for us I think it fruitful to attend closely to the dynamic between the Incarnate Son and His Mother, Mary. Approaching the Gospel for today in this way makes it all the more striking. This is one of the few episodes of all Scripture where we find Mary playing a prominent role. However, she is never mentioned by name. Instead, in the opening lines of today’s Gospel reading John refers to Mary simply as “the mother of Jesus” (John 2:1 & 3). And, in a perhaps off-putting way, when Mary alerts Jesus of the embarrassing situation the newly married couple find themselves in of having run out of wine for their guests, Jesus refers to her not as “mother” or even by her name, “Mary,” but simply as “woman.” And as for her concern, Jesus says, “how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come” (John 2:4). This is decidedly not the way we would think of a loving son speaking to his mother. To us the language seems cool at best and disrespectful at worst. So what gives?

Some misguided attempts at reading this passage suggest that Jesus is actually being taught a lesson by Mary here. That somehow Mary is alerting Jesus of His need to engage in public ministry in service to the human family. Such readings are facile attempts to humanize Jesus, to make Him more relatable to us by saying, ‘see,’ He needed to be taught and corrected by His mother too.’ However, the Son of God Incarnate needs no humanizing. He is fully God and fully human and, as such, we could look to no more perfect human than He. There is therefore absolutely no need to humanize that which is perfectly human. Did Jesus need Mary to teach Him things? Absolutely, He was human (cf. Luke 2:40 & 52). He needed to learn language, how and what to eat, how and when to pray, etc. However, as the Just and Sinless One He had no need of being coaxed into humble and loving service of His fellow man, much less of being ordered to act in an appropriate and timely manner. Perfectly possessed of all virtue, He had prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude in their plenitude and exercised them with the greatest of ease and inerrancy.  

Therefore, in reading this particular scene, we do much better to attend adequately to the context of John’s Gospel and what we know of this particular Evangelist’s approach to proclaiming the Good News. The first thing to remember is that John is the Evangelist who uniquely presents salvation to us as a re-creation of sorts. This is seen in the very opening words of his famous prologue: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God” (John 1:1). John is very clearly echoing the opening words of the entirety of Scripture found in Genesis: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Genesis 1:1 & 3). John is telling us that just as at the very beginning God creates all things by uttering His fiat through His Word, so too God accomplishes the salvation or re-creation of all things through His Word. Moreover, as the locus of creation’s beginning now come to give all of creation and, in a special way, the human family, a new beginning, the Son of God become man appears in the flesh alongside a woman, a woman who the Church Fathers recognized as the New Eve together with the New Adam (see 1 Corinthians 15:22 & 45).

Extending the Pauline theology of the New Adam, the second century theologian soon to be declared the Church’s “Doctor of Unity,” St. Irenaeus of Lyons put it this way:

He having been made Himself the beginning of those that live, as Adam became the beginning of those who die. Wherefore also Luke, commencing the genealogy with the Lord, carried it back to Adam, indicating that it was He who regenerated them into the Gospel of life, and not they Him. And thus also it was the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith (Against Heresies, 3.22.4).

Notice the dynamic here. Just as the first Adam and Eve lose relationship with God for the human family and thus fall toward death through disobedience, the New Adam and Eve open the way back to God for the human family through obedience. Obedience, of course, is the counsel given by Mary to the servants in today’s Gospel, more on this in a moment. First it is important to note two things we are told about Eve in Genesis. The first time God presents Eve to Adam, Adam exclaims: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken” (Genesis 2:23). From here, the narrative goes on to describe the relationship between husband and wife: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). John highlights the fact that Jesus refers to His mother as “woman” precisely to highlight the new beginning being brought about through their joint action. And the New Eve’s role in this new beginning is made clearer if we attend to the next name Adam gives his divinely ordained spouse: “The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). When we bring these points together in the social context of today’s Gospel, John’s deep Mariology becomes clear.

The joint work by the Son of God Incarnate and His mother marks a new beginning for the human family, a second chance to reorder what had become disordered through our first parents. Whereas the disobedience of our first parents had driven us away from God, the obedience of Jesus and Mary draws us back into right relationship with God. This relationship, as the setting itself tells us, is analogous to a marriage. The use of marital imagery to describe the relationship between Creator and creature has a twofold result. First, it demonstrates the high dignity and purpose of the sacrament of marriage. Here it is important to recall that it is precisely at a marriage that the Incarnate Son performed “the first of his signs…and revealed his glory” (John 2:11). This is no accident. The message is clear, not only is the action of transforming water into wine revelatory of the divinity of Christ, but the marriage of the couple married at Cana this day is as well. By their life together, the couple will live as a sacramental sign to the world of what union with God is like for the individual and, indeed, for the entire human family: faithful and fruitful. Faithful, in the sense that we are meant for perfect and eternal union with God and, fruitful, in both the sense of bearing biological children (as God commands our first parents, cf. Genesis 1:28), and in the sense that union with God is meant to bring us fully to life, energizing every power of our souls by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul describes in our second reading for today (1 Corinthians 12:4-11), so that we too might become a channel of God’s Life and grace to the world.

This brings us to the second use of the marital imagery used in our readings for today. That just as husband and wife are irrevocably united to one another, so too, the human person has been created to live in perfect and irrevocable unity with our loving Creator. We can find no better example of faithful and fruitful union with God than Our Blessed Mother, Mary. She alone among all believers gives physical life to the Son of God Incarnate, having her womb made fruitful with Divine Life by the power of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35). Here it is of the utmost importance that just as we ought never downplay the humanity of Christ, we must never downplay the humanity of His mother. God will not unite Himself to us and so animate our lives without our consent. He, the most perfect of Lovers, comes to His beloved with an offer of love and waits patiently for a response. Mary reveals what the appropriate response of the human creature is to this offer. It is to imitate the Divine Life revealed to us. We see this in many ways in the life of Mary. The first is at the Annunciation. When encountered by Gabriel and God’s message, Mary responds by saying, “let it be done with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Attending to the Latin rendering here is illuminating. In Latin, Mary’s response reads, “fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum,” her first word spoken the very same as God’s first word spoken at creation, “fiat lux” (“Let there be light”) (Genesis 1:3). We find Mary echo the words of the Father today as well. At the Transfiguration, as Christ and the disciples are overshadowed by a cloud, “from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him’” (Luke 9:35). In her instruction to the servants, Mary echoes this counsel: “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5). Her instruction, St. John Paul II writes, “becomes the great maternal counsel which Mary addresses to the Church of every age” (Rosarium Virginis Mariae, 21).

Yet Mary’s imitation of the Divine Life and the counsel she accordingly gives to us is not simply spoken, it is lived. Just as Eve was the mother of the living, as the New Eve, Mary is the Mother of all the newly living in Christ. And, as Mother of the newly living, she teaches us, her children, through word and example. And we find her exemplifying what it means to live in imitation of the Divine Life at this scene in Cana as well. Here, the apparently cool or harsh response of Christ to Mary comes into play in another, yet complimentary, way. By addressing her as “Woman,” we have seen how Christ is indicating that Mary is, indeed, to become Mother of all the newly living in Him. Now, in addition, we can say that by using this generic name instead of an intimate relational name, such as “mother,” Jesus is reminding and even instructing Mary just what being the Mother of all the newly living entails. It entails imitating Him who, as St. Paul says,

though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8).

The Only Son of God, the Creator and King of the universe, Who alone rightly claims the allegiance and service of all creation, in His Incarnation, far from asserting this prerogative and demanding this subservience, empties Himself of this claim and instead, in humility assumes the stance of complete loving self-sacrifice. Thus, to live as the Mother of the Son, the Mother of all the newly living is to empty oneself of all the prerogatives such a position might entail. It is not to demand respect or assert authority, as Queen Mothers have done throughout the ages, but to empty oneself completely in love in imitation of Divine Humility. Mary alone among all the members of the human family without even the slightest hint of hypocrisy, can tell us today to “listen to Him” because she first listened to Him, and followed Him most perfectly, revealing to us that the Mother of God is also the first and foremost of His disciples. This is affirmed elsewhere in the Gospels, in another apparently difficult text portraying the Son’s interaction with His Mother and ours. Matthew tells us that once someone came to Jesus and said, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, waiting to speak with you.” To this Jesus responds, again, in an apparently cool and harsh way, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Then, pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:47-50). Again, far from maligning His Mother, Jesus indicates precisely what it was that made Mary His Mother, the Mother of God, her willingness to carry out the will of the Father, which she freely did in uttering her fiat in imitation of that same Father. Consequently, Jesus simultaneously instructs us in what it means to live as sons and daughters of the Father and sons and daughter of our Mother, Mary, to live in obedience to God’s will. Thus, the words of creation reverberate through the drama of salvation or recreation. God the Father calls us to listen to the Son, and Mary our Mother does the same. For His part, the Son refers back to the Father, and the cycle of perfect self-giving Love perpetuates Itself, drawing all who humbly come into proximity into the exchange.

To be sure, this is not an easy thing to do. And here again, marital imagery is appropriate. The married life is filled with difficulties. Yet, over time, through the struggles, trials, and temptations, faithful love slowly transfigures the spouses such that they not only come to view reality in a unified and harmonious way, but come to resemble one another in certain ways, taking on some of the same mannerisms and instinctual responses. Here again, our Blessed Mother’s life testifies to the difficulty, the pain, the anguish, the suffering and transfiguration which takes place in a life that strives to imitate the Trinity’s complete self-giving love entails. Over the course of their life together, Jesus invited His Mother further into His Life. His summons to her was the same as it is to us: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).

We are never told that Jesus addressed these words explicitly to His Mother, but the devotion of her seven sorrows testifies to the experience, and we have seen the outcome of a life lived in unity with God, it comes to take on the same language, the same response as the Divine. This is no more fully revealed than at the foot of the cross, where the Mother having followed her Son up Calvary, now offers to the Father the Son’s sacrifice and hers for the salvation of the world. It is precisely in this moment, where the Son now fully revealing what true love looks like and the suffering it demands, affirms that His mother too has participated in this life-giving act of self-sacrificing love by looking at her and giving her to us through the beloved disciple: “Here is your mother” (John 19:27). Today, at Cana, Mary both exemplifies what it means to live out the human vocation and articulates it through her maternal counsel. That even amidst the trials and temptations that life will undoubtedly visit upon us, we must do whatever the Son tells us. By living in this way, we simultaneously move further down that road to perfect happiness of eternal communion with our God, and echo the counsel of the Heavenly Father and Mary, our Mother, to all who witness our actions, to do whatever Christ tells you.   

Your servant in Christ,

Tony