Water into wine, wine into blood - the way of the Cross.
Many have now taken down their Christmas decorations, but some still follow the old tradition found in the Tridentine Liturgical calendar and do not take down their Christmas decorations until Candlemass on 2nd February. Today, in the liturgy of Christmas, whichever tradition we follow, we find that there four epiphanies:
The Epiphany at the Nativity where Jesus appears to the Jews represented by the poorest of the poor, the shepherds;
the Epiphany to the Wise men where Jesus appears to the Gentiles represented by Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar;
the Epiphany at the Baptism of the Lord where Jesus appears as the Messiah to John the Baptist and all those at the river Jordan;
and the Epiphany at the wedding feast of Cana where Jesus turns water into wine and, as this is his first miracle, this is the appearance of his Divinity.
The Old Rite of the Tridentine Liturgical calendar called this Sunday the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany. The Old Rite stills echoes in our present Liturgical Calendar of the Novo Ordo where on the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary time it too, like the Old Rite, focuses on the 4th Epiphany of the Lord, namely, the Wedding Feast of Cana.
The Gospel of John presents us with the first of Jesus miracles [Grk: dunamis] which St John calls ‘signs’ [Grk: semeion] and it was performed at the bequest of Our Lady at the Wedding Feast of Cana [John 2:1-12]. Now the miracle is changing water into wine, but the sign is that the miraculous wine proved to be better than the wine brought by the bridegroom which had now run out. Traditionally, it was the bridegroom who brought the wine. So the miracle of changing water into wine is a sign not just of the divinity of Jesus but also that he himself is truly the Bridegroom, the Bridegroom of Israel. He changes water into wine because he is God; he is the Bridegroom because he has bought the best wine; and so in this first sign he makes clear that he is the Messiah who is the fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah [cf 62:1-5]:
‘Like a young man marrying a virgin, so will the one who built you wed you, and as the bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so will your God rejoice in you.’
Our Lord Jesus is, thus, the Bridegroom Messiah and this spells out a number of profound truths fundamental to Salvation History. Firstly, Our Lord has raised Matrimony from a natural, human and divine institution to a supernatural means of grace which we call a Sacrament; but it is only a sacrament when a baptised man and a baptised woman marry. In so doing Our Lord also reveals the cosmic, historico-Biblical and salvific significance of Matrimony, as it sheds light and brings into focus the importance of the covenant of Matrimony in the Biblical story.
The Bible begins with matrimony, for Adam and Eve were created in this state [Gen 1:27; 2:23], and the Bible ends with Marriage, as Heaven is described in terms of the wedding banquet of the Lamb of God and the Bride of Christ, the Church [Apoc 19:6-9]. Throughout the ministry of Jesus this reality punctuates his preaching and has a close connection with the Kingdom of God as found in the parables of the Wedding Banquet [Matt 22:1-14], the five foolish and the five wise virgins [Matt 25:1-13] and the lost coin [Luke 15:8-10]. Indeed, St Paul speaks of Jesus as the Bridegroom and the Church as the Bride [Ephesians 5:22-33] and this is what we find echoed in the Gospel of John as he relates to us what happend at the Wedding Feast of Cana.
We discover further that Matrimony is that promordial instituion that pre-dates the Fall and survives the Fall but suffers from the wounds inflicted by the Fall; the Fall of man and woman, as these wounds derive from original sin and its ongoing effects [see the stories starting with Cain and Abel]. But it also witnesses to the fact that love is fundamental to God and Man, to History and to the Cosmos. When a couple gets married they are saying that the universe is really a cosmos where love is meant to exist. Indeed if God is love then the seemingly cold, materialistic and dead eyed view of an indifferent universe is turned by Adam and Eve, and by all couples who follow them, into a cosmos of significance, of meaning and of purpose. It is not lust that wins out but love; not infidelity that wins out but fidelity; not adultery that wins out but honour. For Matrimony has been taken up by Our Lord and placed within the higher dimension of sacramentality where grace triumphs over a cold dead universe of mere matter and determinism and where love even triumphs over death, death on a cross! [Phil 2:5-12]
Matrimony is also the primordial covenant upon which the history of God and Man rests and through which it is also illuminated. Fundamental to the nature of a covenant is that it is about making people kith and kin and so this is what God is doing. When he takes up and uses the form and matter of a covenant God is making a family. The Primordial covenant is with the first Man and woman and it is signified by a couple, Adam and Eve; God expands it further to include a family in Noah’s covenant; then God expands his covenant further to include a tribe in his covenant with the chieftain, Abraham; he then goes on to include a nation of 12 tribes with the Mosaic covenant; finally he makes a covenant with a Kingdom through a King, called David. However, in Jesus Christ all these previous covenants are both fulfilled and superceded when a New Passover is established based on a Sacrifice that takes away the sins of the world and founded on Jesus being both Priest-King [John 18:37ff] and the New Temple [John 2:19] for both Jew and Gentile who are now welcomed into a universal family that gathers all the nations. It is for this reason that all the sacraments lead up to and flow from the Eucharist and it for this reason that the Church is the family of God established by God to bring all nations into communion with the Blessed Trinity and so it is Universal; or in the Greek form of this word, it is Catholic.
Matrimony means that the love that spouses must have for one another is that love [agape] in which they are both willing and both able to lay down their lives for the beloved, take a bullet for the beloved and would honour, cherish and die for the beloved. Not surprisingly, we find that Jesus too acts and speaks like a Bridegroom wooing, exhorting and calling his beloved - Israel and the Gentiles - such that he lays down his life for the beloved. But he is the Briodegroom Messiah who has the power to raise this life up again and to raise up all true loves.
Our Lord is the bridegroom for every chalice-shaped-heart that wishes to love God, love their neighbour, love their spouses and their children, and so that this may happen in such a broken world, Our Lord makes it a sacrament. In this Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, he as the divine Bridegroom now pours his divine life-giving-love daily into such hearts. Our Lord’s story as the bridgroom of both the Church and of every soul is the story of love conquering all; it is one where he begins his ministry by turning water into wine, and then make his way to the Cross of Redemption where he turns wine into his blood, and then come his Resurrection and Pentecost the sacrament of his body and blood turns us from fallen creatures into beings made for the heavenly realm. Only the God who loves and is love could do this!
When a couple came to a priest in Hezogivinia and said, “Father, we want to get married!” He replied, “Congratulations! You have chosen your cross!” All such couples choose to enter not only the mystery of the Cross but also the heart of both the Cosmos and Salvation History which is marked by the Great Adventure into Being where only those who truly love and risk all for love have a real future.
In the words of G K Chesterton:
“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.”