TEXT: Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, January 19, 2025
January 19, 2025 Father De Celles Homily
2nd Sunday Ordinary Time
January 19, 2025
Homily by Fr. John De Celles
St. Raymond of Peñafort Catholic Church
Springfield, VA
Reading the Word of God is always an enlightening experience,
but that’s especially true of reading the Gospel of St. John.
That’s because John doesn’t waste a single word
–every word and detail seems to be filled with rich and profound meaning.
Today’s reading about the marriage feast of Cana is a perfect example of this.
It seems at first to be a simple story of Jesus’ first public miracle,
but it’s actually so much more that
we couldn’t even begin to scratch the surface in this short homily.
Still, we get a flavor of this richness by concentrating on the main theme
of the importance of marriage in God’s plan for man
and the gifts Jesus gives to marriage to fulfill that plan.
Now, a theme underlying everything in John’s Gospel is his deliberate parallels
to the first chapters of the Bible in Genesis;
in fact the first words of his Gospel
are identical to the first words of Genesis: “In the Beginning.”
“In the beginning,” Genesis tells us, God created man for marriage:
“Male and female He created them,” it says, and “The two become one flesh.”
Genesis makes it clear that
God showered literally every good thing on the first married couple.
But we also find that eventually the married couple
freely chose to mix a little evil with the good—they sinned.
And from then on, marriage, and through marriage all mankind,
has suffered the consequences of sins.
But, again, this is not what God intended.
This is exactly what Jesus taught.
St. Matthew tells us in his 19th chapter
that when the Pharisees tried to defend the practice of divorce,
Jesus rejected their arguments, saying that
Moses allowed them to divorce
only because their hearts were corrupted by sin.
And then He says, quoting the first words of Genesis,
“It was not so in the beginning,”
and then goes on to quote further from Genesis 1 and 2.
And when the apostles protest that He demands too much,
He simply responds with the sublime words,
“[For] men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
Now, of course, the gospel of St. Matthew, as well those of Mark and Luke,
was written probably thirty years before St. John wrote his.
So John had most certainly read what they had written
before he wrote his Gospel.
So, inspired by the Holy Spirit,
and having decades to meditate and pray on his life with Jesus,
in his Gospel John not only tries to fill in some of the blanks the others left out,
but he also shows how some of the seemingly little things
they passed over were actually critical to understanding Jesus
and His missions to recreate and restore all good things to man.
For example, John says, okay remember what Matthew wrote about marriage?
Now look back at what happened at Cana,
and see the rich meaning of that seemingly insignificant wedding.
First of all, it was a clearly Jewish wedding.
This reminds us that in the Old Testament
God used marriage to symbolize and explain
the loving relationship that was supposed to exist between Israel and God.
For example, as Isaiah, the great prophet of the Messiah,
writes in today’s 1st reading:
“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.”
And what happens at this Jewish wedding?
The wine runs out.
In scripture, wine is symbolic of many things,
but particularly the joy and deliciousness of God’s gifts and
the intoxicating power of abiding in God’s love.
In Jesus’ time, Israel’s love had sort of run dry.
And the wine seemed to have run out of the marriage.
The joy was replaced by the oppression of foreign rulers,
and the delight and intoxication of God’s love
had been cut off by the Israelites’ own sins and infidelity.
All that was left was tasteless water–life sustaining, but joyless.
Israel was sustained by the law of God, but thirsted for the love of God.
It seemed hopeless and impossible—like many troubled marriages.
But as St. Matthew reminds us when he speaks about troubled marriages,
what is impossible for man is not impossible for God.
And so Jesus, God the Son, comes to this marriage in Cana
and does what is impossible for man: He turns the water into wine,
transforming what is merely tasteless sustenance into delicious joyful love.
He changes Israel from being a people brought together merely by God’s law.
For those who follow Him, He now joins them to Himself by grace
so that they become one body in Christ—and the two become one flesh.
And so, St. John calls this body “The New Jerusalem,” “The New Israel”, or simply—
“The Church.”
But Jesus also does something tremendous for marriage itself:
He not only restores it to the way it was in the beginning,
but also lifts it up even higher,
fulfilling all it was meant to be as a sign of God’s love.
St. John understands this very clearly
as in the Book of Revelation he describes heaven as
the “wedding feast of the lamb”:
Marriage becomes a sign of the fullness of love God has in store for us,
not only in this world, but in the perfection of heaven as well.
So, St. John writes,
“Jesus did this as the beginning of His signs…and so revealed His glory.”
And the Church sees the wedding in Cana
as Jesus making a new beginning for marriage and
establishing it as a sacrament.
In other words, it is “an outward sign, instituted by Christ, to give grace.”
Just as Christ is present and helps the couple at Cana,
He also remains with the sacramentally married couple all their lives,
so that what was once impossible for man, becomes possible with Jesus.
This is the essential story John tells us today.
But he also, very subtly yet clearly,
points to three other sacraments that are additional sources of grace
for Christian marriages.
First, there’s the sacrament of baptism.
Just five verses after the last line of today’s reading,
John records Jesus saying to Nicodemus:
“Unless one is born of water and the Spirit,
he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”
While on the one hand water represents the mere sustaining of life without love,
in the context of the new beginning in Christ,
water now represents the re-creation in the new life in Christ
which opens us up to His love.
So, while any male and female can enter into natural marriage,
only the baptized can enter into the sacrament of marriage;
baptism prepares the way for marriage
like the water in the jars at Cana
prepares the way for the miracle of the wine.
This leads us to the third sacrament John refers to,
the sacrament of Confirmation.
The Acts of the Apostles tells us that St. John himself
used to administer this sacrament:
“The apostles…sent…Peter and John [to Samaria]…
for…they had only been baptized…
[Peter and John] laid their hands on them
and they received the Holy Spirit.”
Notice how at Cana, John points out that the jars were “filled to the brim,”
pointing to the fact that in the sacrament of Confirmation,
Jesus sends His Holy Spirit to fill the Christian to the brim
with all of the gifts of the Holy Spirit,
traditionally called the “Seven gifts of the Holy Spirit,”–
seven being a symbol for perfection or fullness.
This is why all Catholic spouses should be confirmed before marriage,
so that they may have every gift possible
to live as adult married Christians.
And this leaves us with the fourth sacrament John points to: the Eucharist.
The actual miracle at Cana is Christ changing the water into wine,
which to John is a powerful foreshadowing of
the changing of wine into the blood of Christ at the Last Supper,
the Eucharist.
This in turn points us to the Cross, which the Eucharist makes present to us,
and so reminds us that the grace of the sacrament of marriage is
strengthened and sweetened by grace poured out in
the Eucharistic sacrifice:
The love of Christ is poured out like blood from His body on the Cross.
This is what Jesus means when he tells Mary,
“Woman…My hour has not yet come.”
In John’s Gospel, whenever Christ refers to “My hour,”
He means the hour of His death.
And the next time John records Christ calling Mary “woman”
is from the Cross when Jesus looked down on Mary and John
and said, “Woman, behold, your son!”
At Cana, Jesus was saying to Mary that
the real help to this married couple comes from the Cross!
So when He changes water into wine,
the water and wine point to the wine and the blood of the Eucharist,
and the Eucharist points to the Cross.
Now, besides the gifts of these four sacraments,
this text also reveals that Jesus gives us, especially married couples,
one last magnificent gift: His Mother, Mary.
Did you notice how John begins,
“There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee,
and the mother of Jesus was there.
Jesus…[was] also invited”?
Mary comes first; Jesus is only “also invited.”
Now some say that when Jesus calls Mary “woman,”
it’s a sign that she’s just another woman like all other women.
No, no, no.
Jesus is going back to Genesis,
where God continually calls Adam’s wife, not Eve, but “woman,”
particularly when He reveals the coming of the messiah by telling the devil,
“I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
He shall crush your head.”
When Jesus calls Mary “woman,” He’s pointing to the unique role
He gave her in the beginning: to be the key instrument
of man’s salvation by bringing us her “offspring,” Jesus.
Now again, some say Christ’s response to her is a rebuke:
“How does your concern affect Me?”
But Mary sees it as an invitation to have faith and trust in Him.
And, absolutely certain that her boy is concerned about “her concern,”
she simply turns and says to the servers, “Do whatever He tells you.”
This is what Mary does for the Church, especially for married couples:
She seeks out our needs, takes them to her son, asks for His help,
trusts in His love for her and us,
and then backs away, simply saying, “Do whatever HE says.”
And Christ in turn says to us, and to married couples,
as He did to St. John standing at the foot of the Cross,
“Behold your mother.”
___
The Gospel of St. John is a rich treasure of insight into the gifts
Jesus promises to all who believe and follow Him.
As John makes very clear,
the sacrament of Marriage is not only one of these gifts,
but one of Jesus’ most fundamental gifts–
a sign and source of His love for His Bride, the Church,
and for all mankind.
Today, let us pray that all Christian married and engaged couples
may open their hearts to this gift and the gift of all the sacraments.
And let us pray that they, and all the Church, may turn to Mother of Christ, our Mother,
that she may intercede for us with her Son,
and teach us by her perfect example how to “do whatever He tells us.”