This coming Sunday is the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time.  ¹¹ Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs in Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him. 

O’Day [539-40] insightfully notes: “The contrast between the responses of the steward and the disciples can help the contemporary Christian interpret and appropriate this text. Modern Christians distort and oversimplify when they assume that first-century people would have more immediately embraced the miraculous. The steward is perplexed by the sudden appearance of wine of such quality. He summons the bridegroom, the host of the party, because he assumes that the wine can be explained by conventional reasoning. He attributes the wine to the unprecedented hospitality of this man, but this miracle cannot be explained by an irregularity in etiquette. Rational explanations miss the mark. Jesus’ disciples, by contrast, see in the miraculous abundance of good wine a sign of God’s presence among them. They recognize the revelation of God in the prodigious flow of wine, and they recognize Jesus as the one who brought God to them. The miracle of the wine shatters the boundaries of their conventional world, and the disciples are willing to entertain the possibility that this boundary breaking marks the inbreaking of God. The steward tried to reshape the miracle to fit his former categories, while the disciples allowed their categories to be reshaped by this extraordinary transformation of water into wine, and so they “believed in him” (2:11) as the revealer of God

Image credit: The Marriage Feast at Cana | Bartolomé Estebán Murillo, 1672 | The Barber Institute of Fine Art | PD-US | Photograph by DeFacto – Wiki Commons | CC-SA-4.0

This coming Sunday is the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time.  ⁶ Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings, each holding twenty to thirty gallons. ⁷ Jesus told them, “Fill the jars with water.” So they filled them to the brim.

The gospel provides an interesting amount of detail: the number of jars, their composition, purpose and size. The half dozen represented a good store of water for carrying out the kind of purification of which we read in Mark 7:1–4. Before the meal servants would have poured water over the hands of every guest. “Stone jars, in contrast to earthen jars, are free from the possibility of levitical impurity (Lev 11:33). The ‘rites of Jewish purification’ probably refers to the ritual cleansing of hands at meals (cf. John 3:25). Even taking into account the possibility of a large gathering at the wedding, the quantity of stone jars and their capacity is unusual. Everything about v. 6 is overdrawn, from the description of the jars to the amount of narrative space the Evangelist devotes to the description. The narrative technique mirrors the size of the jars in order to emphasize the extravagance of the miracle that is about to take place.” (O’Day, 537-38)

This coming Sunday is the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time.  ⁴ (And) Jesus said to her, “Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.”  ⁵ His mother said to the servers, “Do whatever he tells you.” 

Jesus’ mother asks nothing explicit of him in v. 3, but his response in v. 4 makes clear that her words carried an implied request. Jesus’ mother assumed her son would somehow attend to the problem. Why Mary would make such a request is the stuff of speculation. The suggestions range from her desire to save the groom embarrassment, forestalling a legal liability (see notes on v.3), her awareness of Jesus’ larger role, or any host of reasons.

This coming Sunday is the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time.  ¹ On the third day there was a wedding in Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.   ² Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding. ³ When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”

The very sparse opening of this narrative calls a host of questions to mind. Who is getting married? Why is it that Mary, Jesus, and the disciples are all there? How is it that the wine runs short? […with only good humor intended, some suggest that as soon as the disciples showed up the wine ran out!] All these points and questions are important to the modern mind, but John is interested in the sign (semieon) of the story: water miraculously transformed into wine.

This coming Sunday is the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time. In many 20^th century commentaries, I am always surprised by the tendency among some scripture scholars to seek to explain away the miraculous. More than one (but thankfully not a lot) offers that Jesus, realizing people were well inebriated already, simply ordered the jar filled with water, and then the water taken to the master of the banquet who enters into the merriment while not wanting to embarrass the bridegroom, proclaims this wine to be the best. The bridegroom becomes a silent conspirator as the word spreads – and thus the miracle is born of rumor.

This coming Sunday is the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time. Our information about the details of marriage ceremonies (as distinct from marriage regulations) in first-century Judaism is very sketchy. There are later references and details about weddings, and so if one assumes the customs did not change a great deal, then perhaps we know more.

We know that marriage was preceded by a betrothal that was much more binding than our modern-day engagement. It included a solemn pledging of the couple, each to the other, and was so binding that to break it divorce proceedings were necessary. At the conclusion of the betrothal period the ceremony began with the bridegroom and his friends making their way in procession to the bride’s home. This was often done at night, when there could be a torchlight procession (such seems to be the case with the “Wise and Foolish Virgins” account.) Undoubtedly there were speeches and expressions of goodwill before the bride and groom went in procession to the groom’s house, where the wedding banquet was held. It can be assumed that there was a religious ceremony, but we actually have no details. The processions and the feast are the principal items of which we have knowledge. The feast was prolonged, and might last as long as a week (cf. Judg. 14:12).

This coming Sunday is the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time in Lectionary Cycle C. In the previous post we noted that while Cycle C’s primary gospel is Luke, this reading is from the Gospel of John. Many scholars have noted that repeats the theme of Creation as he begins the narrative of the Gospel. Where the synoptic gospels focus on the events at the beginning of Jesus’ public life, John seems to assume that the reader is familiar with those accounts and calls our attention to the ways in which people respond in faith to him – yet, at the same time, unlike the other gospel writers, places the beginning events on a timeline.

Even though we are in Year C of the liturgical cycle, the first gospel proclaimed in Year C-Ordinary Time is taken from the Gospel according to John – the wedding at Cana. In many ways it is considered a type of “proto” ministry before the very public beginning at the synagogue in Capernaum. In the ancient lectionaries of the church, John 2:1–11 was read on Epiphany, a practice carried over into the Eastern church. In the modern Common and Catholic lectionaries, this text is read at the beginning of the season following Epiphany. In Catholic circles this is labeled “Ordinary Time.” In the Common Lectionary the celebration appears as the “Second Sunday After Epiphany.”