Welcome to our parish

20 January 2019            Second Sunday of the Year C

WHOSE WEDDING?

Strange, isn’t it, how we don’t know the names of the couple who were getting married at Cana? In fact, we hear nothing about them at all, not even when the chief steward compliments the groom on the quality of the wine.

St John’s emphasis is on the presence of Jesus at the wedding. All throughout the Old Testament the prophets had spoken about God’s relationship with his people as that of a bride and groom. God speaks about taking Israel as his bride in a wedding feast that would outshine all others and in a love that was everlasting and unparalleled.

So when St John gives his account of Jesus’s first miracle (or “signs” as he calls them) he is trying to tell us that the marriage between God and us has now begun. The changing of water into wine is a “sign” that the kingdom of God is now among us.

Sometimes people have used Mary’s request to Jesus as an indication of her power with her Son. But there is really something deeper going on in the story. Mary represents the Jewish people or humanity that is about to learn of the explosion of the kingdom upon the earth. She is about to learn that the real groom is Jesus, whose wedding with humanity is just beginning and will be consummated in his death and resurrection. In Jesus God has visited his people to take it as his spouse and lead it definitively into a life of everlasting love.

At Cana, Jesus of Nazareth reveals himself for the first time in John’s gospel as the Son of God with all the creative power that was needed to fashion heaven and earth. And the changing of water into wine is a “sign” of this revelation.

What about today? Whose wedding is Jesus at? Well, he’s at yours and mine. By coming among us, as one of us, Jesus invites the Church to be his bride. It’s our wedding that he wants to celebrate daily, our wedding with him, with the Father and the Spirit. It’s to us that he proposes marriage; it’s our water that he promises to turn into wine. And each time we eat and drink the bread of his body and the wine of his blood we renew our marriage vows with him.

Like a young man marrying a virgin, so will the one who built you wed you, and as the bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so will your God rejoice in you.   (Isaiah 62:5)