From the Sunday Note, with additional thoughts:
There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee,
and the mother of Jesus was there.
Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.
When the wine ran short,
the mother of Jesus said to him,
“They have no wine.”
And Jesus said to her,
“Woman, how does your concern affect me?
My hour has not yet come.”
His mother said to the servers,
“Do whatever he tells you.”
Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings,
each holding twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus told them,
“Fill the jars with water.”
So they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them,
“Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.”
So they took it.
And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine,
without knowing where it came from
— although the servers who had drawn the water knew —,
the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him,
“Everyone serves good wine first,
and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one;
but you have kept the good wine until now.”
Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee
and so revealed his glory,
and his disciples began to believe in him.
John 2:1-11, Sunday’s Gospel reading
“Mother knew. And, therefore, she hoped. She knew, so she hoped and trusted long before any of the rest of us could imagine it.”
Imagine the Apostle John explaining to his disciples about the wedding feast at Cana, sometime before his Gospel was written down. John refers to Mary as “Mother” here because of what Jesus said to her and to John from the cross.
“From the beginning, even during her betrothal to Joseph, Mother “knew” but of course she did not fully understand. Yet, since encountering Simeon in the Temple with the babe in her arms, and years later, finding the boy confounding the teachers around the Temple, she had been “pondering these things in her heart” as Luke puts it so well. She had 30 years and more to ponder by the time we were invited to that wedding, all those years to watch him, listen to him, question him—and by the time of the wedding, she basically understood what she knew to be true about Him. To us younger guys, he was unusual, determined, attractive, fascinating, but we did not understand him yet, not at all.
So, there we were in Cana, with most of the little town, and family and friends from all around, a crowd set on the usual week’s-worth of wedding celebration. You know real celebrations are rare enough in little places like Cana, so no expense was spared. Then they ran out of wine! Disaster! An awful humiliation to the family, likely to be taken as an insult by townsmen and relatives.
Now, Jesus had just begun gathering some of us together—early on it was—John the Baptist not arrested yet and no crowd-gathering proclamations and healings so far. We talked among ourselves about where this might all be going, but we really understood nothing.
Not so with Mother. Somehow, she knew it was time to act. She went to him, asking for nothing, but simply making him aware of the perilous situation of the couple and their families. The implication that she expected him to do something was plain enough. He smiled (did he not know her, through and through?) Certainly his “hour” had not yet come, as he said (the “hour” as we now call it, of his glorification, first on the Cross and then the Resurrection). But she felt no rebuff. She was sure he would respond, though she did not know how. Mother knew because after 30 years, her heart and his were perfectly aligned. She spoke to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you” (How many times has Mother said that to all of us since then!) and then she left it all up to him.
In what followed next? We “beheld His glory.” By that I mean he showed us the ultimate result of everything—everything—that was yet to come, if we had had the wit to see it at the time.
Oh, I see it clearly enough now: a wedding without wine—how like us all, who were supposed to be children of the King of the Universe. Instead of rejoicing, we found ourselves wounded, scattered, oppressed, sad, lost, standing on the rubble of the covenants we had broken so many times. Empty ceremonial water jars. And Jesus responds with this prodigious feat. From no wine at all to more than 150 gallons of the best vintage anyone ever tasted!
I was as amazed as everyone else, but I did not realize what it really meant until much later, not until I found the empty tomb with Peter. An empty rock burial place like those empty carved rock jars for ceremonial washing water. That dawning was when I finally caught up with Mother. Then I knew, too, with understanding: the time had come when “the mountains shall drip with the juice of grapes and the hills shall run with it!” as the prophet Amos said. At Cana Jesus gave us a foretaste from his own wedding banquet, the King’s wedding banquet!
James’s little witticism “they are still talking about that wedding back in Cana today” is true. Cana will be in my book, too, and we will all talk about it until Our Lord returns in the fulness of his glory. Then we shall drink the best vintage of all with Him in His Kingdom!”
For further consideration:
This was not the last thing in the Gospels Mary has a part in: she still must live through the sword piercing her heart at the crucifixion as Simeon had predicted and she will pray with the disciples for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost as we learn in Acts. But her words to the servants are the very last words we ever hear her say directly: “Do whatever he tells you.”
Fellow servants of our Lord, Mary has given us our every day’s marching orders: listen to Jesus, and “do whatever he tells you.”
Today, “do whatever he tells you.” Tomorrow, “do whatever he tells you.” It may seem as useless as filling jars with water when the obvious need is wine, but if we do whatever he tells us, we are doing the right and needful thing.