Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, January 15, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
January 15, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in this Sunday’s Gospel, when we will participate liturgically in the most famous wedding of all time, because of who was on the guest list. We meditate on the Wedding Feast of Cana every Thursday as we pray the second Luminous Mystery of the Holy Rosary. Often we pray about what it reveals about the sacrament of marriage and how Jesus takes the “water” of the institution of marriage from the beginning with Adam and Eve and raises it to the “wine” of a sacramental encounter with him: how Christ brings the marriage between a Christian man and woman into the marriage between Christ and the Church in fulfillment of what Isaiah prophesied with words we ponder every Christmas: “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.” The wedding feast of Cana is an implicit revelation not merely of Jesus’ miraculous power, but of his spousal love, the nuptial intention of his incarnation, even though none, except Mary, would have caught it at the time.
• But I’d like to examine the scene under three different angles: what we learn about Mary’s intercession, what we learn about the way Jesus generously exercises his merciful power, and what we learn about the servants’ zealous cooperation. Each of these has much to say about Christian faith and life.
• Let’s begin with what the scene reveals about the Blessed Mother. Ancient Jewish wedding celebrations, like the one taking place in Cana, would last eight straight days. There were three sumptuous meals a day. Wine was served throughout the octave. It was the generally the happiest celebration in the life of Jews, which is why Jesus often returned to the image of a wedding banquet to describe the joys of heaven. Rather than leaving on a honeymoon, the couple would remain, reigning so to speak as king and queen over the celebrations. We can only imagine how embarrassing it would be today if, at a wedding reception, the banquet hall ran out of food or beverages early in the celebration. Even though most people would sympathize with the couple and blame the banquet facility, it would still be terribly embarrassing for the family. In the ancient world, it would have been incalculably more so, because the family itself threw the reception. If they ran out of supplies, especially with days to go during the reception, if they had to serve only water, it would have been an embarrassment that likely would never have been forgotten.
• Mary was at the wedding and noticed the impending catastrophe. Before the wine steward caught on to the predicament, before the couple did, before even the mother of the bride had noticed, Mary saw the problem. The reason why there was no wine left was probably because the others were drinking so much that they just weren’t paying attention. Mary’s love made her notice the details that others were missing. To remedy the problem, she went to her Son. She didn’t twist His arm. She didn’t try to persuade Him that, even though it wasn’t His “hour” for working public miracles (because that would inexorably precipitate the Cross), He should act. She simply said, “They have no wine!,” confident that her Son, even though he didn’t think the timing was appropriate, would out of merciful love miraculously intervene. She knew he loved that couple even more than she did.
• The episode reveals two things about Mary’s merciful intercession. First, Mary seeks to solve problems by bringing them to her divine Son. Some of our Protestant brothers and sisters say that Catholics shouldn’t pray to Mary because, as St. Paul writes, Christ is our sole mediator between God and man (1 Tim 2:5). They say we should eliminate the “middle woman” and bring all our needs directly to the Lord. Well, there’s obviously nothing wrong with praying directly to Jesus, but at the same time, Mary’s intercession is no threat to Christ’s power; in fact, it reveals Christ’s power, because it depends entirely on Christ’s power. When we pray to her, we ask her to bring our needs to her Son, just like she brought the need of the couple in Cana. We also learn that Mary often acts, like she did in Cana, before we even know we have a problem. She recognizes that one of us may have a really tough week in store and she’s already interceding for the help we’ll need to cope. She foresees that some of us will have severe temptations and she has already sprung into action. She sees that some of us are in financial or health difficulties and she’s getting involved before we even ask her. She grasps that several of us will need a good confession, and she’s intervening for a priest to be there. Her maternal love looks out and acts out of love before we’re often aware that we are in need.
• The second thing the miracle at the wedding of Cana also reveals something stunning about the way Christ exercises his merciful power. Christ was and is the creator of the Universe. He formed the oceans with just a word. He could have easily filled those six empty thirty-gallon water jugs with wine through just a thought, or a syllable, or an Arthur Fonzarelli-like snap of his finger. He could have in an instant created thousands of such jugs on the spot filled with cognac or champagne or anything he wanted. But he didn’t act that way. Instead he turned to the servants there and said, “Fill the jars with water.” He wanted to involve them in his miracle. He wants to include us, too, in his saving work. He who created us without our consent, as St. Augustine once said, doesn’t want to save us without our consent, and he doesn’t want to save others without our cooperation.
• That brings us to the third thing this episode teaches us: how we’re called to respond to Jesus’ inclusion of us in his saving work. St. John tells us simply that when the servants had received Mary’s instruction to do whatever Jesus told them and when they had heard Jesus’ imperative to fill the jars with water, “They filled them to the brim.” Those five words conceal an awful lot of effort. In the ancient world, there were no hoses tied to water pipes to fill jars. The only place they could get water to fill them was the central well in Cana. Because the jars were made of stone, they would have been extremely heaven to carry to the well; filled with 30 gallons of water, which would weigh another 250 pounds (one gallon = 8.35 lbs), they would have been impossible to carry back. The only way the jars could have been filled would have been by taking little leather or ceramic water containers back and forth to the well. If we imagine that there were five servants, each with a hefty two gallon container in each hand, it would have meant that they would have had to have made nine trips back and forth to the Cana well to get enough water. That would have been grueling exercise even for those who were fit and strong. Yet they filled the 30-gallon water jars not to 80 percent or 90, but to the point of overflowing. They zealously did their part and Jesus used their efforts as the raw material for his incredible miracle. And what a miracle it was! Jesus converted all 180 gallons of water into wine in a way that made the wine steward himself take notice. How much wine is that? When I take pilgrimage groups to Cana, like I did last month, I always explain that we’re used to looking at wine in 750 milliliter bottles and there are 3.8 liters to a gallon. 180 gallons times 3.8 liters per gallon is 684 liters; poured in 750 milliliter bottles, that would be 912 bottles! Think about that for a moment. That’s the equivalent of 76 cases of wine. No wedding, even for eight days, could ever consume that much. But just like Jesus worked the miracle of the multiplication of five loaves and two fish and left 12 wicker baskets full of fragments, one for each of the apostles, so Jesus worked this miracle as a sign of what he himself does when we cooperate: in response to the servants’ generosity, his generosity is even greater. That’s something that should inspire us to be just as enthusiastic and zealous in our correspondence to the Lord’s including us in his saving plan as they were in Cana.
• As we prepare for Sunday Mass, we know that Mary is praying for us and advising each of us to do whatever her Son tells us. The world lacks in so many places the “new wine” of faith that Jesus gives. True joy is being sucked out of life. So many rituals and ceremonies ring hollow. Jesus wants to incorporate us in his mission to help people to see that there is something far greater than even their great human pleasures, a better wine that they await and for which he’s made us to thirst. And it’s at Mass that Jesus seeks to strengthen us for that mission not by turning water into great wine for an eight-day feast, but turning bread and wine in to his own Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, to strengthen us, and through us others, to come to the eternal Banquet. The miracle at the wedding feast of Cana was a prelude to this greatest miracle of all. We follow Mary’s command to do whatever Christ tells us by doing this in memory of him. And we go to Mass seeking to allow Jesus to fill us to the brim with his grace and love, so that being so transformed by this spousal union with him, we made go out to bring everyone to the feast that will last into eternity.

The Gospel on which this homily was based is: 

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