Wedding at Cana
Second Luminous Mystery
The Wedding at Cana
It Takes Three to Marry — and Mary Leads Us to Him
Jesus is the most important person in a marriage, as Venerable Fulton Sheen so memorably put it:
Sheen means by "love" here nothing merely romantic or sexual, but the whole ordered ascent of love that finds its summit in charity, as we will see below. His point is that Love itself, which is God, must be the third and primary person in every marriage. Husband and wife are the lover and the beloved; the Love that binds and sustains them is Christ. Just as a marriage will fail without Him, this wedding feast would have failed without Him. And it is no coincidence that this passage in the Gospel of St. John shows the intercessory place of the Blessed Virgin Mary before her Son, on behalf of the bride's parents and, through them, on behalf of us.
The Blessed Virgin Mary was approached on behalf of the wedding, and she in turn approached Jesus. This help from Christ is the first public miracle that began His public ministry, and it came at His mother's asking. That is the pattern of intercession, and Cana teaches its whole grammar.
When we pray, whether to the Father in the Name of Jesus, or to Jesus directly, or to the Blessed Virgin Mary that she pray to Jesus for us, there are levels of intercession at work:
The Rosary itself is all of this at once: meditation on the life and mysteries of Christ, the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, prayer to Jesus that He act in our lives, and prayer to the Father in praise, worship, and adoration.
There is a second light in this mystery, and it answers the modern world directly. The materialist imagines a closed universe, a sealed box of matter and law where nothing from outside can reach in. Cana quietly dismantles that picture. The same Christ who at Mary's word makes wine from water is the One who holds that water in being at every instant.
Because God is Ipsum Esse Subsistens, subsistent Being itself, He is not one cause among the causes inside the world but the very ground that sustains the whole of it. So when the water becomes wine, the Author is not breaking into a system from outside; He is acting freely within His own work. The miracle is not magic upon inert stuff, it is the Maker doing as He wills with what He upholds, and here He does it at the asking of His mother.
There is a typology in the vessels too. The six stone jars were set there "according to the manner of the purifying of the Jews," the water of the old ritual washings. Christ fills them and makes them wine, the old purifications giving way to the new wine of the Gospel. Six, the number that falls just short of the Sabbath seven, is brought to its fullness in Him.
The Greeks had four words where English has one, and a wedding gathers them all. There is storge, the quiet affection of family and the familiar; philia, the love of friends who choose one another; and eros, the desiring love of the bride and the bridegroom. These are the natural loves, and they are good. But left to themselves they are the wine at Cana: real, warm, and finite, and sooner or later the cry goes up, "they have no wine." The honeymoon's sweetness fades, affection cools, friendship is tested, and desire alone cannot carry a marriage to the end.
Then Christ acts. He does not throw out the water of the natural loves; He fills the jars to the brim and transforms what is already there. So too He raises storge, philia, and eros into agape, the self-giving love that is charity, the love that "seeketh not her own" and lays itself down for the beloved. This is the wine the steward marvels at, the good wine kept until now. Natural love, poured full and touched by Christ, becomes the supernatural love of God Himself.
The fruit of this mystery is to go to Jesus through Mary. To some of my Protestant readers this may not sit easily, as though Mary were an obstacle placed before Christ. But as we have seen, it is simply intercession.
Pray each verse, then the Ave Maria, letting St. John's account of the first sign carry the decade.
Christ's words to His mother in verse 4 have struck some readers as harsh. The Douay-Rheims commentary answers that objection well.
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