C Cycle – 2^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time 25

Jn.2:1-11

During the Liturgy of the Word, we listen to the readings of the day, sing a psalm response, and hear a homily.  But it does not end there because we continue by professing the Creed and responding to the prayers of the Faithful.  Often the readings are so familiar we internally shut down and do not allow the Word of God to penetrate our hearts because the story is a familiar one, we have heard before.  Today’s gospel story about the wedding feast at Cana is one of those stories. 

We know it well but since God is speaking to us through this story, how do respond to the story.  What can we learn to increase our own relationship with God?  It seems it is a story about the relationship of Jesus and Mary so is this story intended to motivate us to grow closer to God and to grow in our ability to trust God. It is my belief that this story is much more complex than it seems.

If you connect this story with other scriptures, you will discover it is about our inability to believe we can overcome our deficiencies.  We are rigid and fixed in our approach to faith and cannot move beyond our well defined beliefs.  This is where the apostle Paul who struggled with his own inability to embrace Christ can help us embrace Christ and to receive what He offers each of us. The stone jars are more than containers of water and wine. Their part in the story is often unnoticed, just as we feel unnoticed by God.     

Jesus at the prompting of His mother, tells the servers to “fill the six stone jars with water.”  Ordinary objects with ordinary water.  The servants reluctantly do this, and we know the result when they take a cup of it to the head waiter.  The water became wine but not just ordinary wine, it became the finest of all wines.  Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians: “But we hold this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves” (2Cor. 4:7).  Paul, it is telling us a spiritual truth about our own sanctification.  We are destined to be as transformed from sinners into saints by the twin gifts of God – Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.  

That is what God has offered us from the beginning of creation of man and woman.  God desired then and continues to desire an intimate relationship with us as daughters and sons.  Unblemished by our sinful past because of Christ’s death and resurrection and the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.  We are ordinary men and women who cannot transform ourselves, but we can become disciplined believers. Transformation can only come from Christ.  He promised to give us a living water that would change us and that water He says is the Holy Spirit (Jn.737-38).  Jesus changes us. Be cleansed Christ told the leper.  Be healed he tells the lame.  Your sins are forgiven He told the paralytic.  I do not condemn you He told the woman caught in adultery.  He invites us to respond to Him for in Him is all we seek.   

 Like Mary, we need to realize a disaster is right around the corner unless we address it.  We have no wine inside these earthen vessels for we have filled ourselves up with less than what God offers us.  We have enjoyed the party; we have danced and sung in the presence of Christ.  All this time we have been in His presence and have enjoyed what is going on all around us without entering a conversation with Him. We can and must hold this treasure inside these earthen vessels of ours and allow it to flow from us to others. 

What is missing is our acknowledging that we need to do what He says and that is to believe.  Have faith in God and faith in Christ’s desire to change us. Stop trying to be pleasing to God and allow Christ to change us like He did Saul of Tarsus. Paul understood the transforming power of God at work within him and in all who believe in His name.   

What is missing is our understanding that what is inside us is pleasing to God.  We have depended on self to be holy and not on what God has provide for us to be holy.  We need to drain these vessels of all that is of self and ask Christ to fill that void with the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. We need to be like the widow of Zarephath (1 Ki 17:12) whom Elijah encountered and give God all she had and depend on God to keep her and her son from dying of starvation. Complete trust and faith in God not self.  

We can allow the vessels we are to be changed by allowing Christ to fill us with the grace of His sacrifice.  We can enlarge the vessels we are by trusting in God’s promises to make us holy instead of depending on ourselves to become pleasing to God by our works of mercy and charity.  What do you have Elijah asked that widow and that is the same question we should ask ourselves today. We have nothing but the vessel we are, and God says, “give it to me.” 

In a few minutes, we are going to encounter Christ as we enter the Liturgy of the Eucharist.  What will you bring to the altar of sacrifice?  We should at a minimum acknowledge we have something inside us that needs to be changed and give it to Christ.