2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time C – January 19, 2025
Fr Daniel Ribeiro, SCJ
The Church traditionally uses three celebrations after Christmas to emphasize the manifestation of Jesus’ divinity. First, on the Feast of the Epiphany, the Child Jesus is recognized as God by the three wise men. Then, as we saw last Sunday, at His baptism performed by John the Baptist, a voice from heaven reveals that Jesus is the beloved Son of the Father and a dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, descends upon Him. This trilogy concludes in today’s celebration with the Gospel of the wedding at Cana, where Jesus during a wedding and after His mother’s request, turns water into wine and begins His messianic signs that would be completed with the sign of greater love through His sacrifice on the cross.
Jesus begins His miracles (signs” for the evangelist John) at a wedding feast. Marriage in Sacred Scripture can be seen as a metaphor for God’s Covenant with the people, where God is the bridegroom and the people are the bride (cf. Song of Solomon, Eph 5:21-16). This covenant reaches a crucial moment when God reveals the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai and asks him to make known to the people, through the Tablets of the Law (cf. Ex 20:1-17), what they should do to remain faithful.
Another meaningful message in the Gospel, worthy of theological reflection, is the lack of wine. Wine is a sign of joy, celebration (cf. Sir 40:20; Cor 10:19) and love that unites husband and wife (cf. Song 1:2; 7:10; 8:2). At a certain point in God’s relationship with his people, there was a lack of wine: the people did not remain faithful to God, and they stopped loving him as they should have. Most of the Old Testament presents this infidelity and distance. Despite the clear laws of the Covenant Code visible in ritual celebrations and countless laws of behavior that should have been followed, these people lived immersed in sadness and had the feeling that something was missing, a lack of joy. The relationship with God had become something extremely formal, ritualistic that did not touch daily life in a concrete way. Joy was needed, that is, there was a lack of wine in this marriage (Covenant) between God and the People.
When Jesus turns water into wine, He revives the joy that was no longer found in the Old Covenant. This wine, when tasted by the servants, was classified as better than the old one. This demonstrates how solely with Jesus do we find the fullness of God’s revelation. This missing joy brought by the Messiah is evident in the lives of people who begin to read the Holy Scriptures. In our Bible study group where we try to read the entire Bible. When participants started reflecting in the Old Testament, they immediately begin to identify the differences between the Old and New Covenants: in the past, one could not touch a leper, but Jesus lovingly began to touch them; The adult woman should be stoned, but Jesus says that he who has not sinned should cast the first stone and asked her not to return to a life of sin. The people in the desert were fed with manna from heaven, which was like bread that satisfied physical hunger, but with Jesus, humanity is given the very body of the Lord, in each Eucharist becoming food for eternal life. By turning water into wine, Jesus shows His divinity, revealing that He is beginning a new time in the marriage between God and humanity. When the servants say that it was the best wine, we can see how the expected time of greater joy had arrived, realized with the New Covenant.
I remember, when I had the opportunity to go to Canaan of Galilee and celebrated the wedding of a couple of friends in the Church of the Miracle, one of the things that most caught my attention was the size of the jars used by Jesus. The guide who accompanied us told us that each of those jars could fill around 100 liters of wine. Naturally it was very heavy. So, I asked the couples how many jars of water Jesus had turned into wine that day. They quickly said six. The answer is not wrong, because in fact that is what is in the Holy Scripture, but Jesus basically transformed all the water that was presented to him. Despite the symbolism of the number six as an imperfection of the Old Covenant before Jesus, He always transforms everything we present to Him with faith into something much better. The measure of divine providence depends on the size of our trust in it (Saint Francis de Sales). Therefore, let us not be afraid to offer our lives and everything we have to the Lord, because, through the intercession of Our Lady, He will give us the joy of the new wine that we seek.
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