The Second Sunday after the Epiphany 2024

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The Bible begins and ends with a wedding: At the beginning, the marriage of our first parents; and at the end, the marriage of Christ and the Church, inaugurating the new creation.

In between these two weddings is the fall, and all the messed-up marriages, with rebellious children and false worship. The joy is gone; the wine seems to have run out, and what’s left isn’t sitting so well inside us.

The wine running out symbolizes the thorns creeping up from the ground, the betrayal of a friend, the death that comes to all in the end….

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The Second Sunday after the Epiphany 2023

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A wise man once said, “Some people work very hard at top speed, only to find themselves falling further behind.” Does that describe your life? It’s tempting to imagine that this is the result of our always-connected devices, with the expectation that you work from the moment you awake until the moment before your head hits the pillow. Certainly the ability to be on another continent in a matter of hours, and the twenty-four hour news cycle, leads to a frenzied sort of existence. But at its core, the saying reflects a very old problem. This saying—“Some people work very hard at top speed, only to find themselves falling further behind”—this saying comes from The Wisdom of Sirach [11.11 NJB], a second-century BC Jewish book similar to Proverbs. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I read from the NJB; the ESV is a bit more stately: “There is a man who works and toils and presses on, but falls behind so much the more.”

That idea of failing, falling, falling behind – it’s a universal human experience. Try as we might to accumulate resources, it’s never enough. And time, our most precious commodity, is steadily ticking away. All the fears about population and climate change reflect the human anxiety that we are running short, lacking, dying.

That’s what underlies today’s Gospel. It’s a real event, not a parable. Jesus really did change water into wine at Cana. It’s not fiction – but it is loaded with symbolism. Running out of wine makes the wedding a failure….

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Second Sunday after Epiphany 2022

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“And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews.” Six is the number of man, for man was made on the sixth day of creation. Because man—who is identified by the number six—fell into sin, six is also in the Bible a number designating incompleteness/lacking/deficiency. Because of this damaged deficiency, every man needs purification for the sins that he does and the sin that he is, i.e., the sinful nature we all have inherited from Adam. Not out of convenience, then, does the Lord select these six stone waterpots used for the Jewish purification ritual before a meal. The transformation of the water from these waterpots points to the transformation of the entire ritual system of purification – a transformation that culminates in the death of Jesus, where He gives His own blood for wine.

So Jesus answers His mother as He does, and John tells us that this miracle was a sign, so that we won’t miss the most important fact…

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Second Sunday after the Epiphany 2019

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It is no mistake that our Lord chooses to perform His first miracle at a wedding. But it is not simply a miracle, a magic show, a spectacular event to wow the crowd or to help His mother save face. St. John calls it a sign, the beginning of signs. A sign does not exist for itself. A sign signifies, points to something greater.

This sign of transforming water into wine is done in the context of Jesus talking about His hour. Throughout John’s Gospel Jesus says repeatedly, “My hour is not yet come.” Then finally, just before Jesus washes the feet of His disciples, the night before His crucifixion, St. John tells us that that great event, the Passion of Jesus, is His hour: “Now before the Feast of the Passover,” John says in ch. 13, “when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

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