Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
We live in a highly complex and interconnected world. Everyone is ensnared in the World Wide Web. We count on everything running smoothly. Running is in fact the major theme of our culture. Pope Francis called it rapidification. That is why computer crashes and breakdowns are so calamitous. Everything stops, and we have to call in the experts on whom we have become utterly dependent. We don’t know (or care) who they are or how they do it: just fix it. We have become more and more disembodied in our interconnections.
Real celebrations and festivities depend on physical embodiment. You have to be there. Everyone is “family.” Our joy and happiness flow from the happiness we share with the married couple and then with everyone inebriated by the same spirit. We are caught up in a shared experience that overflows any desire to control or contain it. The limitations of time as chronos are transcended and transformed into a touch of eternity, a Kairos. All the particularities of time and place are changed into signs of a universal reality hidden beneath mundane forms. To see them is to experience a different world.
There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee. The factual and unadorned declaration alerts us to its universal and cosmic dimension. This wedding is an expression of the universal human hope to engender new life through mutual gifts of love and trust. The world is meant to find connection and communion through sharing the deepest spirit we are called to manifest to one another. A high vocation, rooted in the source of our love in God’s love for us. Each wedding is a new beginning, and the only “prenuptial” agreement needed is the gift of God’s love waiting to be revealed and made manifest. In the beginning was the Word. This was the beginning of his signs and his disciples began to believe in him. Seeing beneath the surface sign transforms those who witness it into participants in the in-break of the Kairos, the Hour, into the flesh of human reality. We become celebrants of the wedding of humanity and divinity. To be recognized, accepted and love is to be created anew. Each time it happens. Each wedding is a new beginning, stretching from the beginning in Eden (the woman named Eve because she was the mother of the living) to the woman who stood at the foot of the Cross where Jesus handed over his spirit.
There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee. God’s chosen and preferred interpretation of his relation with humanity is that of a bridegroom who rejoices in his bride. My Delight – for the Lord delights in you. We too easily brush off these declarations as unreal metaphors, as potential and motivational carrots always out of reach. Leave the six stone water jars to their designated use in rituals of purification. The Lord could not possibly delight in me as I am. (Does not a parent delight in the first, awkward steps of a child?) He could not recognize, accept, and love me as I am. That would be like changing water into wine. Is it more fear at the new beginning this would mean than embarrassment at the attention? The love of God enkindles the spark of the spirit within us, the spirit that sees signs as doorways into the possible rather than as confirmation of past knowledge. We might have the freedom to do what he tells you and find that the new wine of the spirit has been saved for the last.