Homily, 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time C: Isaiah 62:1-5; 1 Cor 12:4-11; John 2:1-11

We are now back to the Ordinary time of the year and the gospels readings this liturgical year C will mainly be from St Luke. However, the emphasis on Luke is set aside this week with the story of the wedding feast at Cana, one of the very first things Jesus did as he embarked on his public ministry. 

These first weeks after Christmas can easily be referred to as a season of "epiphanies." The first epiphany was to the Magi when Jesus was revealed as Savior of all people. The second was His Baptism at the Jordan when Jesus was revealed as God’s beloved Son. And the third is the miracle at Cana when Jesus is revealed as the One who can change water into wine. It reveals the transforming power of Christ not only over water but over human lives. John calls this miracle a ‘sign’ because it points beyond itself, to what Jesus does among us even now. It is about Jesus changing the ordinary things of our life into places of extraordinary grace. 

Throughout the Old Testament, we read of how God continually called straying women and men back into right-relationship with Himself. The Hebrew Scriptures are filled with signs and stories that reveal God’s covenant-love with His chosen people. For instance, the rainbow after the great flood (Gn. 9:1-17), Abraham’s star-filled sky (Gn. 15), the giving of the Law to Moses (Ex 15 and 24), and the promises made to King David and his descendants (1 Sm 7:12-13). Each of these stories reminds us that while the people of Israel violated this relationship time and again, God’s love and mercy remained constant. 

The first reading this Sunday reminds us of God’s abiding and merciful love. The prophet Isaiah presents an outright celebration of nuptials: God’s relation to Israel, to us, is an undying covenant of love and fidelity. “You shall be called ‘My Delight,’ your land, ‘Espoused.’ For the Lord delights in you and makes your land his spouse. As a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you.” We have a God who refashions the human body into a temple of flesh inhabited by divine life. God’s desire and delight is to be one with us, to share in our life and destiny through thick or thin, to possess the same Spirit of love over all our miscellany of time and disposition. It is that Spirit, writes Paul, that we have been given in Christ and that unites us in body, worship, and common labors.

But the signs and symbols of the Old Testament were only representations of God’s love. On that first Christmas night, everything changed. In Jesus — who is the Word made flesh — God “made his dwelling among us and we have seen his glory.” (Jn 1:14)

The miracle at Cana was the first time that Jesus manifested his own transforming power and his glory. At Cana, we discover that Jesus wasn’t simply another prophet or holy man. He was God’s “beloved” who holds the power to transform, power to recreate and renew the elements of the earth and more importantly, the hearts, minds, and souls of his followers. Jesus can change our past into a different future. He has the power to change the waters of our doubt into the wine of faith, the waters of our despair into the wine of hope, the waters of our selfishness into the wine of love.

Today, once again the Lord comes to us in the miracle of the Eucharist, turning the bread into his body and the wine into his blood. But Jesus is challenging us to ask ourselves - Is the water of our lives being changed into wine? Is the glory of God being revealed by the tasks of our daily life, our compassion, our work for justice, our willingness to forgive or in the joy we bring to the people around us? 

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, the civil rights giant whose holiday we are celebrate this week, once observed that life’s most persistent and urgent question is ‘What are you doing for others?’ Positive involvement in the life of others should both be our duty and our vocation.