Gospel John 2:1-11
There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.
When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.
”And Jesus said to her, “Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.”
His mother said to the servers, “Do whatever he tells you.”
Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings, each holding twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus told them, “Fill the jars with water.”
So they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them, “Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.”
So they took it. And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine, without knowing where it came from— although the servers who had drawn the water knew —,the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him,
“Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now.”
Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him.
REFLECTION:
“There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding."
We have moved from Christmas season into the public life of Jesus. Traditionally we hear the story of the wedding of Cana and the miracle of the wine as the beginning of Jesus' public life.
We celebrate weddings. We are either the people getting married, or friends or family of the bride or groom. And later on the couple might announce that a new life is forming in the bride's womb. Life is full of hope and expectation for a better future through the young couple in love and their future children.
But weddings have been in decline worldwide for decades now as well as birth rates in certain countries. In the US the marriage rate has decrease from 12 out of 1000 people in 1920 to 6.2 in 2024. Live births have also declined to about 54 out of 1000 women of fertile age giving birth in 2023 in the United States. *
For us Catholics, we have similar rates of divorce and number of children as other groups in society. Probably because we have forgotten or don't understand what marriage is.
In the encyclical "Casti Connubii", Pope Pius XI explains to us how when we marry, we consent about whom we are marrying, and not what marriage is:
6. Yet although matrimony is of its very nature of divine institution, the human will, too, enters into it and performs a most noble part. For each individual marriage, inasmuch as it is a conjugal union of a particular man and woman, arises only from the free consent of each of the spouses; and this free act of the will, by which each party hands over and accepts those rights proper to the state of marriage,[4] is so necessary to constitute true marriage that it cannot be supplied by any human power.[5] This freedom, however, regards only the question whether the contracting parties really wish to enter upon matrimony or to marry this particular person; but the nature of matrimony is entirely independent of the free will of man, so that if one has once contracted matrimony he is thereby subject to its divinely made laws and its essential properties. For the Angelic Doctor, writing on conjugal honor and on the offspring which is the fruit of marriage, says: "These things are so contained in matrimony by the marriage pact itself that, if anything to the contrary were expressed in the consent which makes the marriage, it would not be a true marriage."[6]
No person is free to redefine what marriage is. We are, however, free to choose whom we marry.
In the encyclical "Humanae Vitae", Saint Pope Paul VI tells us that marriage:
"It is a love which is total—that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything".
That "Married love is also faithful and exclusive of all other, and this until death."
And that "this love is fecund. It is not confined wholly to the loving interchange of husband and wife; it also contrives to go beyond this to bring new life into being. "Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents' welfare."
Comments