When Catholics use the term Cana, they are usually referring to marriage. Most Catholics will use the term Pre-Cana to refer to the preparation program for marriage. People call the office every week asking about Pre-Cana procedures and policies.
So why Cana? This flows from today’s Gospel. Jesus was present at a wedding celebration at Cana in Galilee. We Catholics believe that the Lord is present in the celebration and in the living of the sacrament of marriage. The purpose of the Pre-Cana meetings, be they conferences, meetings with married couples, or as we do here at St. Ignatius, meetings with a priest, the purpose of Pre-Cana preparation is to help the couple prepare for the sacrament, prepare for the Real Presence of the Lord in the marriage uniting His Love to their love for each other. Actually, the preparation for marriage begins many years before the bride and groom meet. The child, teen and young adult who develops a relationship with Christ is preparing for a marriage centered on Christ, preparing for the sacrament of marriage. Many young people pray for their future husband or wife, and pray that they recognize this person when they come into their lives. They look for someone with whom they can pray for the rest of their lives. They look for someone with whom they can celebrate life in every aspect of life, physical, emotional, and, particularly, spiritual. They must not choose someone based solely on that person’s physical qualities. Yes, chemistry is important, but the physical must be united to emotional support, and, even more important, infinitely more important, to the ability to share the spiritual life.
Most people spend many years in school preparing for their careers. That is why they go to college, or take special courses. This is good. But the young need to spend time and energy preparing for their lives with Christ. If Christ calls them to Him through another person, they will be ready for Him. For the vocation to the sacrament of marriage is the call to Christ through their husband or wife. Then, if so blessed, the vocation to the sacrament of marriage can flow through the natural result of their physical and spiritual love, their children, their love for Christ and each other, loving them back. As parents, they will seek continual new ways to guide their children to the Lord. At the same time, they will be strengthening the Kingdom of God by increasing the number of committed Christians. You are good people. Our world needs more good people like you. We need more committed Catholics.
At the wedding feast of Cana Jesus turned water into wine. This was the beginning of the hour, the time of the Lord’s passion, death and resurrection. Events would now rush towards that evening when instead of changing water into wine, Jesus would change wine into His Blood, Holy Thursday. Events would rush to that afternoon when the Blood of the Lord would be sacrificed on the cross, Good Friday. Events would rush to that morning when all would be offered the New Life of Lord, Easter Sunday.
The changing of water into wine, the beginning of the hour teaches us about sacrifice. Those marriages that seek the Lord as their Center are seeking to love as He loved, to love with a sacrificial love. The husband must put his wife before himself. The wife must put her husband before herself. The needs of their children must come before the needs of the parents. This is sacrificial love, expressed countless times in the daily routine of the Catholic family.
In truth, all Christians are called to sacrificial love whether this love is expressed within a marriage or within the life of the committed Catholic single. The great gift of marriage is that the married are continually challenged with ways to love sacrificially. Occasions present themselves daily whether it is doing the shopping or laundry, changing the baby, getting the child to soccer or dance, working harder to provide better, taking the cars in for an oil change, or simply, getting off the couch to play with the kids. All are expressions of sacrificial love which are the routine of marriage. All are ways of living the sacrament of marriage.
To you who are looking to marry someday: prepare yourselves by nurturing the Presence of the Lord in your lives. Seek out that person with whom you can pray. Yes, chemistry may draw you to many cute guys or beautiful girls, but don’t be shallow. Allow the Presence of the Lord to draw you to a person with whom you can journey to Christ.
And to all of you who are married: may you celebrate the Presence of Christ in the Cana’s that are your Catholic homes.
Matter of Timing
What does the story mean in the first place? We are all familiar with the miracle, but let us remember that this is from the Gospel of John, which is not simply the life-story of Jesus but seven symbolic miracles accompanied by seven sermons. It seems that everything in John’s Gospel signifies something else. The people in Jesus’ time were primarily fascinated by what Jesus was able to do. They would turn out to see someone who makes blind people see and crippled people get up and walk. Who would not follow someone who turns a boy’s lunch into enough food for thousands? And we would fall down in awe before someone whose voice the winds and waves obey, and who calls dead people out of their tombs.
That “something else” which John calls signs is what we must try to find in every miracle recounted in the fourth Gospel.
One possible meaning of turning water into wine was John trying to show that the Judaism he was contrasting to Jesus’ ‘good wine’ had become watered down. The brisk tasty wine of Christianity was about to renew it.
A second possible interpretation of turning water into wine focuses on the joy of the occasion. By this miracle, Jesus inaugurates the Kingdom of God, which is characterized by joyous feasting.
The third possible meaning of turning water into wine is further from the literal meaning, therefore more symbolic, therefore more like John. The actual wedding celebration is a symbol of the wedding between God and his people. A further “sign” will be turning “water into blood”- this story being a preview of the institution of the Eucharist.
Once again, the Gospel of St John was the last one to be written, and was penned some sixty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. John sees deeper meanings in the miracles of Jesus, “signs” of the true significance of the Christ event. The changing of the water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana represented God’s gift of new life in the person of Christ.
As valuable as all these possible meanings may be, we are still allowed to wonder what the story means on its own terms. Stripped of its Jewish background, absent a wedding scenario, without considering the particular problem, even discounting the relationship between Jesus and his mother, what is the basic plot? Someone – anyone – asks Jesus to do something, and he replies that it is the wrong time. So, the central issue is timing!
Everything has its time. And Jesus changes his mind. He turns the wrong time into the right time, a bad time into a good time. So one lesson of the story could also be the proper use of time; a matter of knowing what time it is; the willingness to adjust our schedule, to let God determine the flow of our life. Tasteless water can turn to sparkling wine any time!
HARDLY A RELIGIOUS GESTURE
“There was a wedding in Galilee.” This is how this story begins in which we are told something unexpected and surprising. There’s nothing religious about the first public involvement of Jesus, the one Sent by God. It does not happen in a sacred place. Jesus inaugurates his prophetic activity “saving” a wedding celebration that could have been a disaster.
In those poor villages of Galilee everyone loved weddings. For several days friends and relatives kept the bridal couple company, eating and drinking with them, dancing as they did at feastivals, singing love songs. The Gospel of John says that it was at one of these weddings where Jesus did his “first sign”, the sign that gives us the key to understand all his activity and the deep meaning of his saving mission.
John, the evangelist, does not speak of “miracles”. He calls the amazing acts that Jesus does “signs”. He does not want his readers to dwell on the spectacular aspect of what he does. He asks us to discover its deeper meaning. To help us do so, he gives us some leads of a symbolic nature. Let us see only one.
The mother of Jesus, with an eye on all the happenings at the wedding, realizes “they have no wine”, and says as much to her son. Perhaps the couple, of humble origin, has been swamped by guests. Mary is concerned. The party is in danger. How can you have a wedding without wine? She trusts Jesus.
Among the farmers of Galilee, wine was a well known symbol of joy and love. Everyone knew it. If there is no love and joy in life why stay together? Mary is not mistaken. Jesus intervenes to save the festivities providing abundant wine of excellent quality.
This action of Jesus helps us to understand the direction and fundamental content of his whole life and of his project of the kingdom of God. While the religious leaders and teachers of the Law are engaged with religion, Jesus devotes himself to making the life of people more human and bearable.
The gospels present Jesus devoted to life, not religion. He is not there only for pious and religious people. He is also for those who have been disappointed by religion, but feel the need to live a more dignified and happy life. Why? Because Jesus communicates faith in God in whom we can trust and with whom we can live with joy; because he draws us to a more generous life, lovingly shared in solidarity with all others.
SIGN LANGUAGE
John the evangelist does not say that Jesus worked miracles or wonders. He refers to them as “signs”, because they are gestures that point towards something deeper than what our eyes can see. In other words, the signs that Jesus make reveal
His personality and tell us about his saving power.
What took place at Cana of Galilee is the first of all those signs and an
forewarning of what Jesus will continue doing all through his life. The changing of the water into wine tells us something about the saving transformation that Jesus is bringing into our lives and that He expects his followers to carry on.
It all happens on the occasion of a wedding, a most common festivity at that time, the best expression of human love, and the image most frequently chosen in the biblical tradition to represent God’s relationship with the human family. Jesus’salvation must be felt and offered by His followers as a celebration that brings joy and completion to every human occasion, when the latter have lost their content and feel empty, “without wine”, that is, incapable of fulfilling our ultimate human needs.
The story of Cana suggests something else. The water alone will be felt as wine only when, following Jesus’ advice, it is drawn out of those six big stone jars,
which were used by the Jews for their purifications. The laws of their religion which were written on stone tablets did not have much life to offer; no kind of water could
purify the human being. Their lives had to be liberated by Jesus’ life and love.
The Good News cannot be given just any way. To communicate the transforming message of Jesus one needs more that just words: we need some special signs. Preaching the Gospel is certainly not just speaking, preaching or teaching; and, most certainly, it is not judging, threatening or condemning. We must make
visible, with creative fidelity, some of the signs that Jesus made to bring about God’s joy and make the lives of people as happy as Jesus did with those at Cana of Galilee.
Most people nowadays are not moved by the preaching of the Church. Our liturgies and celebrations do not appeal to them. They are in need of other and more familiar signs that may attract them to the Church, and discover in Christians the same capacity that Jesus had to alleviate suffering and make life more bearable.
Who’s going to come to Church today when there is no Good News for them, and the Gospel is, at times, presented in a commanding or threatening tone?
Jesus is wanted and expected by many as a Saviour, as a Way of Life and Joy. If people come to know only a “watery” religion, without the joyous and festive taste that Jesus always offered wherever he went, they will continue to stay away from us.