“They have no wine.”
And Jesus said to her,
“Woman, how does your concern affect me?
My hour has not yet come.”
The hour of his Passion was when he would consecrate his spiritual marriage between God and man, earth and heaven. It was then above all that the Builder of creation would marry it, as a young man marries a virgin. For the celebration of that wedding feast he would give his own Precious Blood under the appearance of wine. At Cana, Mary appeared as faithful daughter Zion, requesting what was lacking for the people from the God whom she knew could provide it. Jesus responded, not so as to refuse outright, but so as to say 'Not yet in fullness'. He was the bridegroom and Mary was an archetypal figure of the perfection of Israel, the bride. But this miracle would only be a sign pointing forward, not the consummation of that celebration.
His mother said to the servers,
“Do whatever he tells you.”
Although it was not the time for consummation that didn't mean that there was nothing to be done or that the world and its needs ought to be entirely ignored and neglected. There was genuine validity to the good things of life in this world. There was a real continuity between normal marriage between a woman and a man and that of Jesus and his bride, the Church. The one was able to serve as a sign for the other. This did not mean that worldly marriage was only useful insofar as it pointed to something else. It really did have some participation in the goodness of the eschatological reality. The joy given by the gift of an excellent wine really did foreshadow, though dimly, the joy of the marriage between heaven and earth.
“Everyone serves good wine first,
and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one;
but you have kept the good wine until now.”
Humans tend to do human things. We tend to try to take what we can get while we can get it. We don't often to have the patience to begin with something inferior to work toward that which is best. We are all too aware that we don't control the future in a world that seems to be tending toward disintegration and nothingness. In the final analysis, only God can truly build toward a lasting goal. And this is the goal toward which every offering of the Eucharistic feast tends and in which each is already even now a participation. If we set our stakes lower than this we will tend to find ourselves intoxicated with lesser vintages until, as always happens, they run out. But when the wines of this world fail us it is then that the true bridegroom appears to help us to raise our minds and to fix our hearts on the good wine that he alone can give.
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