The Second Sunday after the Epiphany – January 19, 2025Psalm 66; Amos 9:11-15; Romans 12:6-16aSt. John 2:1-11
In the Name of the Father, and of the +
Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The first of our Lord’s active miracles
was enacted at a wedding in Cana. It was no accident that our Lord chose a
wedding as the occasion for this first and chief miracle. In the beginning,
creation was not deemed ‘very good’ until Eve had been given to Adam in the
first Holy Marriage. From that moment on, God has blessed the world through the
union of man and woman, the one flesh union through which children are created.
Precisely through this one flesh union, the Promised Seed, the Savior, was to
be born. The entirety of the Old Testament can be viewed as a genealogy,
tracing the lineage of the Promised Seed, and as such, it is a story bound to
Holy Marriage.
What’s more, is that God has described
His relationship to His people in terms of Holy Marriage. Through the prophet
Hosea, He said, “I will betroth you to Me forever; Yes I will betroth you to Me
in righteousness and justice, in lovingkindness and mercy; I will betroth you
to Me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord.”[1]
In the New Testament, we not only have the parables of the wedding feast and
the virgins attending the wedding feast of Christ, but such explicit statements
as “For I have betrothed you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste
virgin to Christ,” and “We are members of His body, of His flesh and of His
bones.”[2]
That is to say, the Church has been betrothed to Christ, presented to Him as a
chaste and righteous virgin, in purity and holiness, and we are members of His
body, flesh of His flesh and bone of His bones, united in a one flesh union
with Christ.
It is for these reasons that Christ
highly values Holy Marriage. Our earthly marriages are a picture, an image, of
this marriage between Christ and the Church. From the marriage of Adam and Eve
to the last union joined before the Last Day, Holy Marriage is a depiction of
Christ and the Church.
Since it is God Himself who has created
marriage and has declared, “What God has joined together, let not man
separate,”[3] divorce
must be of the devil. Divorce is a rending of the one flesh union, a tearing
apart by man of something which has been joined together by God. Divorce must
of the devil if it is a tearing apart of that which God has created.
Christ makes no exceptions where divorce is acceptable in the eyes of God. Rather, when He speaks of cases of adultery, the one who has committed adultery has already broken the one flesh union. The divorce has occurred in God’s eyes. The question is not if a signed document makes the divorce but if the spouse who committed adultery will repent and the spouse sinned against is willing to enter once again into the one flesh union with the repentant sinner.
It is also for these reasons that our
marriages should be blessed by Christ and conducted in the House of God, the
church. A wedding in a courthouse, presided over by a judge is just as valid as
a “church wedding” because marriage has been built into creation by God. It is
a part of natural law. But we, being sons and daughters of God and citizens of
the Kingdom of Heaven, ought to seek to have our marriages blessed by Christ,
attended by the true Bridegroom. The Church is the most fitting setting for a wedding
because it is the setting for the marriage between Christ and His Church.
When the wine at the wedding feast in
Cana began to run dry, the Blessed Virgin said to our Lord, “They have no
wine.”[4]
Built into this statement is the request that He do something about it. St.
Mary is motivated by a sincere sympathy for the bridegroom and the guests. If
the feast ran out of wine, the bridegroom would be embarrassed and put to
shame. It would indicate that he was incapable of providing for the feast to
which he had invited all these guests. On behalf of the guests, if there was no
wine, the feast would end. The joy and merriment would come to an early end. Wine
elevates a meal into a feast. The Blessed Virgin is sincerely concerned for all
involved and she looks to her Son to alleviate the potential disaster.
However, she is met with a hard
response. “Woman, what does your concern have to do with Me? My hour has not
yet come.” From this response, we learn a few things about Mary’s request. First,
she is asking her Son to do something as the Word of God, through whom all
creation was made but she is making her request from her position as His
mother. That is, she is leveraging her authority as mother to make a request of
her Lord. This is a misuse of her maternal authority. She has no right, as His
mother, to request the Christ to make divine acts. Certainly, as a Christian,
she has every right to make requests of her Lord, but in this case, she is
misusing her office as mother to press Christ into acting.
Ask almost any Roman Catholic about
praying to Mary and they will say something like, “We don’t pray that she would
do anything but that she would ask Jesus to do it. It helps to have His mother
on your side.” That is exactly the error that Mary is making in telling Jesus
to do something about the wine at Cana. She is truly blessed among all women
and full of grace, but she has no special access or sway with God than any
other Christian. Calling her, “woman,” is not derogatory in any way, but it is
our Lord’s way of reminding His dear mother that in divine matters, she holds
no special office to request His actions.
Speaking of His hour holds special
significance in the Gospel of St. John. It refers to the hour of His
crucifixion. It indicates that the crucifixion is the culminating moment of the
work of Christ. There, His work is finished. It is complete. All the miracles,
all the words of Christ point forward to the hour in which all things are
completed. Our faith rests on the historic event of the crucifixion and
resurrection.
At the same time, because of the
crucifixion, Christ may speak of His hour being present in all His actions. Here,
it indicates that not only was St. Mary requesting that her Son do something
about the wine, but that He do it now. The wine was beginning to run dry, and
she wanted to spare the hosts and the guests the shame of knowing there was no
more wine. She wanted Him to intercede before the problem was made public.
Here we see the Blessed Virgin’s second
folly. She put a specific timeframe on a miracle of God. She as much as told
Him, “They have no wine. Give them wine and do it now before the problem becomes
an embarrassment.” Such temptation is great for all who call on the name of the
Lord. We feel the passing of time. We know that yesterday is gone, and tomorrow
is coming very soon. Because of that, we want what we want, and we want it now.
If this holds true for a party about to run out of wine, it also holds true for
what we deem to be emergencies. Your sister is dying of cancer and may not make
it to tomorrow. You want God to act now, or it will be too late. Patient though
he was, even Job’s patience ran out and he demanded that God act.[5]
“If our prayer to God is to be
acceptable and be heard, then of course we are not to prescribe the time and
manner for help, especially in bodily needs. Here we hear from Christ that He
has a specific hour, that is, He has actually already in His heavenly
counsel decreed when and how He will help us. We should patiently wait for that
hour.”[6]
Having been reminded of the proper use
of her office as mother and Christian, the Blessed Virgin also gives us a
glorious example of faith. She turns to the servants and says, “Whatever He
says to you, do it.”[7]
Hearing the Word of her Lord, she remembers the virtue of patience and trusts
that whatever her Son does, it will be for the good of those gathered at the
feast. With Job, she says in her heart, ‘Your hands have molded me and
made me into everything I am within and without, and even though You hide it in
Your heart, I still know that you remember it.”[8]
Christ our Lord may not do exactly what she wanted or when she wanted it done,
but whatever He does will be better than she could imagine. And “hope does not
disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by
the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”[9]
Hearing a sincere Christian prayer for
those gathered at the wedding feast, our Lord performs the first, and chief, of
His miracles, for the purpose of manifesting His glory.[10]
In the first place, we see by this miracle, and all miracles, that Jesus is
truly the Almighty God, Lord and Creator of the universe. Unlike the prophets,
He does not need to call upon God to act through Him. He is the God through
whom all things are made.
We also see that Christ is revealing Himself as bringing overabundance in joy and grace to those who would receive Him, sympathetic to the needs of man. The stone waterpots formerly held water used to make one ritually clean. Our Lord takes these instruments of the Law and turns them into vessels of joy and gladness, filling them with His Gospel of grace for all in attendance. He makes the understanding of the Law lovely, for that is how the Gospel interprets the Law.
The one who hears and believes the
Gospel of Christ, that He has come and delivered you from your sins by means of
His death and resurrection, has their heart of stone turned to a heart of
flesh.[11]
Hearing that the obedience owed to God, that which we cannot perfectly fulfill,
has been fulfilled by Christ, our hearts are made glad. “Wine makes glad the
heart of man.”[12]
In terms of overabundance of joy and
grace, we hear from the master of the feast that the guests had already been
well drunk and are now provided with almost 200 gallons of good, strong wine. Our
Lord answered St. Mary’s prayer in a greater way than she could’ve imagined.
Not only did this miracle manifest the
glory of Christ but “His disciples also believe in Him. They recognized Him as
the Son of God and the promised Messiah in whom they placed their heartfelt
trust. From this we learn that all miracles of Christ relate to and call for
faith; God’s Word and His miracles are the two pillars and the foundation of
faith. For from the Word and promises we come to know His gracious will; from
the miracles we come to know His divine omnipotence upon which the trusting
heart from now on must found and establish itself. May God the Lord sustain and
uphold us in such a faith through Christ—the Initiator and the completing
Perfector of [our] faith (Hebrews 12:2).”[13]
In + Jesus’
name. Amen.
[1]
Hosea 2:19-20.
[2]
2 Corinthians 11:2; Ephesians 5:30.
[3]
St. Matthew 19:6.
[4]
St. John 2:3.
[5]
Job 31.
[6]
Johann Gerhard, Postilla, Volume 1, translated by Elmer M. Hohle
(Malone, TX: The Center for the Study of Lutheran Orthodoxy, 2001), 161.
[7]
St. John 2:5.
[8]
Job 10:8, 13; paraphrased.
[9]
Romans 5:5.
[10]
St. John 2:11.
[11]
Ezekiel 36:26.
[12]
Psalm 104:15.
[13]
Gerhard, Postilla, 163-164.
