Getting Involved: Cana (2025-01-19, 2nd Sunday)

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[__ver-11__]   Homily – Jan. 19, 2025 /  2^nd Sunday  ● Isaiah 62:1-5 ● Psalm 96  ● 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 ●  + John 2:1-11 ●

Title:   Wedding at Cana: A Call to Involvement and Transformation

 Would You Get Involved?   

A TV production crew once conducted an experiment. They placed child actors, around 7 or 8 years old, on an urban busy city street. The children were “acting” and pretending to be lost. Safeguards were in place to protect these children, but the purpose was to observe how passersby – the average person - would react.

How would you react seeing a child lost? Would I stop to help a child who was lost? Statistically, very few people stopped. Of the hundreds and hundreds of people who walked by, 97% of people did not stop. Only about 3 out of every 100 stopped.

 The reasons varied—some thought the parents must be nearby, others assumed it wasn’t their responsibility, and some felt they lacked the capacity to help. 

 Would you get involved? The question is also: would you feel connected enough to be involved? Of course, if the child were your own or somehow known to you, you would get involved.

 Would you get involved regarding a natural disaster? Right now, we have witnessed the tragic burning of forest fires, wildfires in Los Angeles which invites us to get involved. There will be a 2^nd collection today at all the masses this Sunday for help to people in California.

Would you get involved? It's a constant question. When the Los Angeles wildfires first started, one of the things that predictably came up in the news was this: not the suffering, not the lost, not the homeless, but what caused these fires?

This “causality” is a question to revisit. But maybe we should focus more on the casualty and tragedy rather than the causality. Perhaps this question has been raised too soon. We have to take care of our own, take care of the suffering, the injured, the homeless, before we necessarily have to answer that other question of what caused this.

Is this the reason why people walked by the child on the street, not necessarily helping. Because we might also get caught up in causes and reasons before we try to do what we can to remediate the effects.

Jesus Gets Involved   

The Wedding at Cana reveals Jesus, the Son of God, who gets involved.

The miracle at Cana is about the Son of God getting involved and being invited to be involved. Do you and I invite Jesus to be involved ?

The wedding at Cana is a model of Jesus's ministry and mission, because he knows, and Mary, our Blessed Mother, knows, that we live in scarcity, scarcity in terms of not enough money, not enough good health, not enough time, not enough compassion for the needy, Not enough integrity in my heart or in your heart, whatever it is we're in need.

Regarding Cana and water and wine, do you ever wonder what the big deal is? We may tend to regard Cana as a minor miracle. After all, no one was healed from sickness to health. No one was rescued from famine or starvation, no blind person began to see. No one was raised from the dead. But Cana is a big deal in Jesus's mission, because it reminds us of His connection, his spousal connection, to all of us. Jesus enters as the bridegroom, and we are related to Jesus and related to each other by marriage.

In the words of St Paul (cf. Ephesians 5) husbands are called to love their wives as Christ loved the Church. St Paul writes about husbands and wives laying down their lives for each other. The spousal love is sacrificial and transformative. So for anyone discerning marriage, the question is not -- who will live for me – or who can I live with?

     This question also leads to the temptation and common practice today of a couples living together – cohabitating – before marriage. They want to know – rationally- can I live with this person? That's a good question.

It's good if you can live with each other. It's good if you can have a pet together. But that doesn't really determine the whether your marriage is going to endure. The question is not whether you can live with a person. The question is, am I willing to die for this person? Is he or she willing to die for me? So if you're raising a child for marriage or discerning marriage yourself, keep that question in mind, is my future spouse willing to die for me, not just willing to live for me?

 

 Mary’s Intercession and Our Response   

Mary’s role at Cana teaches us the power of intercession and being involved and praying.  She notices the need and brings it to Jesus, just as she intercedes for us today. Her words to the servants, “Do whatever He tells you,” remain a daily instruction for you and me.

 

The miracle is not simply about God getting the couple out of a catering jam and a supply chain catastrophe. Yes, there is a catering miracle, for which God is responsible. But, also, God is allowed to work a miracle in their marriage from the very beginning.

Do you and I let God in at the very beginning of our lives, or the very beginning of a problem?

Sometimes I have a tendency to do this à I'm try to figure it out on my own, and if I can't figure it out, I will then introduce God as my disaster recovery plan. We are called to turn to God from the very beginning.

    The wedding and uniting is not simply for the bride and groom, about but about Jesus laying down his life for you and for me.

Marriage symbolizes what God does for us and what he wants to do for us.

He also makes what is incomplete into what is complete.

Jesus takes water and turns it into wine. But it's notable that Jesus doesn't take spring water from the Napa Valley or Sonoma Valley and turn it into the best Northern California wine.

Jesus takes water used for ceremonial washings. The water might already be dirty water. Maybe somebody's feet may have been in that water, or somebody's hands were in that water.

This is degraded water, and our Savior turns it into the best, excellent vintage of wine. This is something Jesus can do for you and for me, when we allow ourselves to be transformed by him, he also takes water that's used for something superficial and makes it into something we can drink some we can consume something that can come into us.

God's prayer and God's word is not just for superficial things, but to heal the resentment in us, to heal the bitterness in us, to heal the inability to forgive that might be in us.

The wedding is a significant model for Jesus's ministry and a model for us living our vows to him, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, in good times and in bad Jesus gives us His love, which is a better wine than we could supply on our own.