The Best Wine
Homily for Second Sunday of the Year – 19 January 2025
Most of us will have vivid memories of wedding celebrations that we have attended. Many of you will remember your own wedding day. Weddings are such joyous occasions of laughter, hope and new beginnings. If you ever can visit Cana in Galilee in the Holy Land, you can visit the little Franciscan chapel there, built over the place of the marriage feast we mark today, and renew your marriage vows. Archaeological excavations there have uncovered a stone jar like the one mentioned in today’s Gospel.
Remember how over the past few weeks we have seen that God seeks us out. God desires to be in relationship with us; and so, he shows himself to us. The first few weeks after Christmas are a season of epiphanies. These epiphanies each show God’s presence among us in the person of Jesus. Remember how last week when we celebrated the Baptism of the Lord, we saw that it contained a revelation of Jesus as the Son of God, and at the same time a showing of the Trinity. The sign at Cana, at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, which we hear about this Sunday, shows us who Jesus is and what he reveals about our relationship with God.
In the turning of the water into wine, we have another epiphany. The Gospel author says that this was the first sign of Jesus, in which he manifested his glory. In John’s Gospel, these signs or mighty deeds of divine power point to spiritual truths about Jesus - they are signs of his divinity and mission. There will be seven such ‘signs’ altogether in John’s gospel.
What then is the deeper meaning of this first sign at Cana? The first reading gives us the key for understanding the meaning of the wedding feast sign. Right throughout the Old Testament, the image of a wedding is used to describe the relationship between God and his people. Marriage is the image used for the covenant relationship that God desires with his chosen people. God is the bridegroom; humanity is his beloved and sought-after bride. We see this in the reading from the Prophet Isaiah, in which it is said that the people of Israel who had been in exile, will become the beloved spouse of God. God will rejoice over his people as a bridegroom rejoices over a bride. So, when Jesus performs his first public “sign” at a wedding feast, he is giving a sign of the new marriage-like covenant that he has come to establish between God and us.
To understand today’s story, we need to be aware that, as is the case with much of John’s writing, it is full of symbolic language. We would miss so much if we were to see here only a ‘miracle’ by which Jesus helps a young bridegroom who finds himself in a difficult position on his wedding day. This story of the wedding feast is full of references to the death and resurrection of Jesus, the culmination of Jesus’ mission.
We see this in the reference to the third day on which the wedding feast took place. This links with the third day on which the crucified Jesus rose to new life, a new life which is shared with all of us. Remember too that blood and water flowed from Jesus’ side as he hung on the Cross. The first Christians understood this blood and water to be a sign of the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. At the wedding feast at Cana, these sacraments are already prefigured in the references to water and wine.
The hour that Jesus refers to when he replies to his mother, Mary, is the hour of his death and resurrection, when he fully reveals the Father’s love and accomplishes his saving work. In this sign at Cana, this ‘hour’ is already prefigured.
In the story, John says that they ran out of wine, since the wine provided for the feast had all been used. Imagine the embarrassment for the hosts! Something like this would have pretty much ground the marriage feast to a halt. This would have been a social disaster because wine would have been such an important element of wedding celebrations of the time.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, became aware of this difficult situation. “They have no wine”, she tells Jesus. Jesus responds to her with the title, ‘Woman’, a title that is meant to remind us of Eve, the first woman in the first creation, whom we read about in the Book of Genesis. So, the mother of Jesus is presented here as the New Eve of the second creation. From the cross Jesus will once more address Mary as “Woman” when he presents John to her as her son, and through John, all of us as her sons and daughters. Once again, in Mary, Cana prefigures the new creation brought about by Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross.
Mary’s instruction to the servants is the same as her motherly instruction to us. She says: “Do whatever he tells you.” Significantly, these are the last words we will hear from Mary as recorded in the Gospels. This is an instruction that rings through all of time, including here and now to us. We must do whatever Jesus tells us. Mary continually points us to Jesus and calls on us to obey him.
In the Gospel text we hear that there were six stone jars standing there, meant for the Jewish rites of washing or purification. Each could hold twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus asked the servants to fill the empty jars with water, and after filling the jars to the brim, they drew some out and offered it to the steward of the feast who tasted the water, and it had turned into the best wine.
We could attempt to estimate the amount of wine that was there in the six jars at the wedding in Cana. We are told that there were six jars each with the capacity to carry thirty gallons. One gallon is 3.8 litres. That means that altogether there were 684 litres of the best wine. A standard bottle of wine is 750ml. So, in contemporary rendering, that would add up to about 912 bottles of wine! There is no doubt that there was plenty of wine. This abundance of wine is a symbol of the extravagance and generosity of God in his dealings with us.
Stories like this sign at Cana, will remain just that, a story, unless we are able to recognise that these stories are not only about something Jesus did once and never again; rather they are stories of what Jesus is still doing, things that he still does in our lives today. And like Jesus turned jars of water into wine, whenever he comes into a person’s life, there is a change which is like water turning into wine.
Similarly, this story will fail to move us, or it will be at best entertaining, unless it is understood in the context of the marriage image running right through the Scriptures. God is not some distant, far-removed force. The God of the Bible is personal. He is a personal God who speaks and acts. God wants to be in a marriage-like relationship with us, his people, and he goes to extraordinary lengths to be part of our lives, to show himself to us and enable us to know him and love him. Our faith is one of intense intimacy and relationship with God. God loves us like a bride. He “rejoices” in us, takes delight in each one of us individually.
The personal God of the Old Testament becomes living and visible in Jesus Christ. It is not surprising that weddings and marriage come up so often in Jesus’ ministry and preaching, and that this first sign of Jesus as God is in the context of a wedding feast. We speak of Jesus being the bridegroom, and we, the Church, as the bride of Christ. That is why the sacrament of marriage is a sacrament of the marriage relationship of Christ to his Church.
The presence of Jesus makes all the difference: at the wedding in Cana, at the shores of Galilee, in our own lives today! At the beginning of this new year, we are invited to recognise the presence of Jesus in our lives. We are invited to recognise him as the Son of God and to allow him to change the water of our lives into wine. We are called to enter into a marriage covenant with him.
