“Do whatever he tells you.”
The wedding at Cana is the last of the great three Epiphany miracles following those we encountered over the last two weeks: the visitation of the magi and the baptism of the Lord in the Jordan. In all three we see a “showing” or a manifestation of the Lord’s identity, each at a different transition moment in his life: in the final days of the Holy Family’s stay in Bethlehem, in the Lord’s first public miracle in Galilee, and in the inauguration of his public ministry in Judea.
We should notice that the third event, what we read about today, is rather different in character from the other two. I think the traditional Benedictus antiphon for Epiphany helps us understand how: “Today the Church is joined to her heavenly Bridegroom; because in Jordan Christ hath washed away her offenses: the wise men with their offerings hasten to the royal marriage, and the guests are regaled with water made wine, alleluia.” In her liturgical imagination, Holy Church actually reads both the visitation of the magi and the baptism through the lens of the wedding at Cana. In the baptism, Christ prepares the sacraments that give life to his bride. In the magi, the gifts signify the Bridegroom’s identity. In the wedding, the water made wine reveals God’s lavish and excessive love for his beloved.
In the Incarnation, the prophet’s promise comes true:
For as a young man marries a virgin,
so shall your sons marry you,
and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you.
God’s love for us, transforming his people from “forsaken” and “desolate” to “delight,” is utterly unnecessary and gratuitous. We did not earn it. We cannot really requite it. We are often unworthy of it and reject it and scorn it, turning our back on God’s gifts and seeking other relationships. Yet God’s faithfulness transcends ours. The Incarnation itself is the ultimate act of divine love. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, in his sermons on the Song of Songs, meditates first on that opening line: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” For Bernard, this intimacy-wrapped-within-intimacy can only mean the union of divine and human natures in Christ: the Word which comes from the eternal Father himself inhabits our nature, making it his own. It is an embrace that the intimacy of the marital embrace can only ecstatically mimic.
The nuptial mystery does mirror the divine mystery somehow. It can be hard to see it, perhaps, when you’re in the midst of raising children and paying the bills, or when you notice that divorce rates among Catholics are basically those of society at large, or when you long for marital bliss but find it constantly out of reach. Our marriage rite speaks of matrimony as “instituted of God himself, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee.” Adorned and beautified. Further sacramentalized, you might say. But there were marriage and its meaning long before there were the sacraments of the New Covenant. It is, indeed, something like the original sacrament, the original sign that means something more than the sum of its parts, for here embedded in the most basic unit of human society is a sign of the whole purpose of humanity’s existence: God’s delight in his beloved, and his desire that this delight bear fruit: further life, further joy, further goodness. Marriage is the sacrament not just of Christ’s love for his Church, but of God’s creativity and goodness in creating the world.
Our consistent failures to live up to this vocation don’t change what the vocation is. And anyway, Jesus turns water into wine.
We could note here in passing the obvious eucharistic resonance of transformation from one thing to another. If I might make a brief apologetic comment on Catholic belief in the Eucharist vis-à-vis various objections: I am not aware of anyone in the Protestant world who believes that John’s account of the water into wine is “just a symbol.” It is, of course, a powerful symbol, but it is also a change in reality, one noted by everyone present.
But this miracle is about more than a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. Or rather, I should say, it is pre-eminently a foreshadowing of the Eucharist, because it shows not just how bread and wine might become body and blood, but how the elements of nature, and the work of human hands, often the signs of our failed stewardship, our failed lordship, our scarcity, and our sin, can be changed by the divine Word into the things that bring us closer to him. This Bridegroom will dismantle every obstacle between him and his bride, turning each into a kiss, a flower, an offering of devotion and affection.
“Do whatever he tells you.”
What an incredible statement of faith is contained in that little command from Mary—the final words, by the way, attributed to her in Scripture. She is at the center of this drama, somehow. On a macro level, it’s worth pointing out that we probably have this story mainly through her. There were, no doubt, many witnesses, but it’s telling that it is only John, of the four Evangelists, who tells it, because it is he who becomes the guardian of Our Lady after Good Friday. So I wonder if we have this story partly because she thought it was important for us to have it. She saw here something more than just another miracle, more even than just the miracle that happened to be “first” for most observers.
We should neither overemphasize nor understate the Marian tone to the event: though the miracle is our Lord’s, he clearly does it as a favor to Our Lady. It is not that his wisdom is insufficient and that he must be guided. It is rather that he then, as now, somehow entrusts us to her. Those of us who have followed St. Louis de Montfort’s concept of “total consecration” to Mary understand this as a fundamental principle of the Christian life: the first and most simple, childlike way to imitate Jesus is to place ourselves in the care of the Blessed Mother.
But why, again, might she think it so important to show us this? She does not draw attention to herself. “Do whatever he tells you.” That is the supreme criterion of all authentic Mariology. I think there is a subtle point that reiterates the basic theme already present in the water-made-wine itself, and it is this: he acts not out of necessity, but out of love.
In other words, it wasn’t necessary for him to change the water into wine in the same way that we might say it was necessary for him to enter the Jordan, or to die on the cross. We could quibble about what “necessity” means in both of those cases, but the tradition is comfortable with the language. The “necessity” of various things in salvation history is always couched in the utter non-necessity of creation. In no way was it necessary for the Lord to bless the marriage at Cana with his presence, to provide an excessive amount of the finest wine after all the other had run out. It was not necessary to grant his mother a favor. But he did these things out of love—for his mother, for his friends, and for us.
When she tells us, “Do whatever he tells you,” it is not an imperious command with an implicit “Or else!” It is an invitation to accept the gracious burden of God’s love, which is true freedom, to “taste and see” the goodness of the Lord. He delights in us, even when we run away. Unlike a human parent, or a human spouse, he has no self-interest or hidden motive; it is only love. And his love is the only thing in this world that does not run out.