January is the month of new beginnings. We just recently started a new year. Today, we may be beginning a new era without Tik Tok.Tomorrow, the United States will inaugurate a new (even if already very familiar) President.
In her liturgy today, the Church seems to want us to recall the inauguration, so to speak, of Jesus’ public mission. The Gospel tells us that Jesus performed a miracle (changing plain water into high quality wine) as the beginning of his signs in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him. It’s a very familiar story, noteworthy for taking place at a wedding.
While marriage imagery and symbolism permeate the scriptures, this is the only wedding specifically mentioned in the New Testament, the only one we know for sure that Jesus attended. Of course, the account is not about the wedding per se, much less is it about marriage, despite its popular use at wedding ceremonies. It is about the beginning of his signs, about Jesus revealing his glory, and his disciples believing in him.
In the words of one 5th-century Bishop: “To those who see only with the outward eye, all these events at Cana are strange and wonderful; to those who understand, they are also signs.” [Faustus of Riez, Sermon 5 of Epiphany 2].
That said, it all happened at a wedding.
Weddings have always been big events, perhaps the biggest events in most communities as two families form an alliance to create a new family. For most of human history, weddings have been celebrations not just of a couple’s union and of family alliances, but of the continuation of the human race. In the face of the inevitably limited lifespan of everyone there, a wedding defiantly declares that the human story will continue generation after generation (which is why declining marriage rates in a society are seen as so precarious!).
As for this particular wedding, the 20th-century Catholic TV Bishop Fulton Sheen suggested that perhaps it was the wedding of one of Mary’s and Jesus’ relatives, which was what gave Mary a family reason to ask Jesus to intervene. Sheen also suggested that, since Jesus had brought his disciples, they may have contributed to the wine running out!
Who knows? But, again, it did all happen at a wedding.
We today may tend to think of weddings as very fancy, special events. But, in one sense, certainly a wedding is a very ordinary event. Human beings have been doing this on a regular basis in every known society for thousands of years. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer famously describes marriage as instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency – meaning that it goes back to God’s original plan for human beings even before sin entered the world. By choosing a wedding for the first of his signs, Jesus not only honored and sanctified the institution of marriage, he also honored and sanctified ordinary human life, the way we live in the world day-in day-out, as human beings and in society, the things that make us who we are. Jesus here bumps our ordinary daily work and play up a grade, from water to wine, from our ordinary day-to-day activities to our highest hopes and aspirations, which can only be fulfilled through him, with him, and in him.
There is challenge as well as opportunity here – a challenge to take seriously what we do day-in and day-out, what we make of this new year, this new era without Tik Tok, this new political era, etc.
I suspect that this was what the second Vatican Council had in mind when it said that nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in the hearts of those who follow Christ. Like the disciples at Cana, we are being invited to experience the water of our ordinary lives upgraded to the wine of following Christ.
Homily for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, January 19, 2025.
Photo: Saint Paul the Apostle Church in Ordinary Time 2025.