2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022
If Holy Mother Church were entirely logical, which in general she sets out to be, I wouldn’t be here in green vestments celebrating the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time. Instead, I would be in white vestments celebrating the third stage of the Epiphany.
Epiphany is the showing forth of God the Son become man, and in the early Church it comprised three elements. The first part was the showing forth of Jesus to the Jewish people, represented by Mary, Joseph and the shepherds, as their Messiah; and to the Gentile nations, in the persons of the non-Jewish Wise Men, as the Saviour of the world, Jewish and Gentile alike.
Secondly, as seen in last Sunday’s feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Epiphany entailed the showing forth of Jesus as the Beloved Son of the Father, through the Descent of the Holy Spirit and the Father’s proclamation. Finally, there was His showing forth as God, in the miracle at Cana, where He “let His Glory be seen”, the Glory which, in the Exodus journey of the Jewish people, was the sign of the presence of God; and where He indicated the presence of the Kingdom by providing an abundance of wine, as foretold by the prophets.
For reasons which someone may know, though I do not, the second and third parts of Epiphany became overlooked, surviving only in antiphons of the Roman breviary for the 6th January celebration of the Feast. The Baptism of the Lord was eventually restored after Vatican II as a separate Feast, with no reference to its original role as the central part of the Epiphany; while the miracle at Cana is described in one year out of three not, as it should be, as part of the Epiphany, but as the Gospel of a Sunday in Ordinary Time. Like a striker missing an open goal, or a fielder squandering a golden opportunity for a run-out, the liturgists (or whoever was responsible) threw away the chance of restoring Epiphany to its original threefold glory.
So what is today about? It is, as I mentioned, a matter of the Shekinah, translated as doxa in Greek, and “Glory” in English, the manifestation of the veiled Godhead which led the Israelites in pillar and cloud to the Promised Land, as Jesus, the presence of God, is to lead humankind to the Kingdom, a Kingdom revealed as present in embryo through the superabundance of wine.
There is something peculiar about this third aspect of Epiphany: it wasn’t due to happen. This is a question of “the Hour” of which Jesus speaks, the time when, in John’s Gospel, He was due to reveal His Glory. This was to happen, as John understood it, in the single event of the crucifixion and resurrection, which was to be Jesus’ glorification by the Father. Until then, His Glory was to be concealed. As He says to His mother, “My Hour has not yet come”.
Yet it does happen. How? At the instigation of that same mother! Some years ago, I read a (Catholic) commentary on this passage which declared rather sternly, “This should not be the occasion of a Marian homily”. Well, all right, insofar as the emphasis should be on the Glory and the Kingdom, but it would be perverse in the extreme to overlook Our Lady’s role, which is extraordinary.
Mary doesn’t actually ask her Son to do anything. She merely points out the situation: “They have no wine”. Jesus struggles against responding, because it is not yet the “Hour”, yet Mary, whom Jesus has addressed as “Woman”, a title which indicates a solemn moment, knows that it is HER “Hour”; that she will prevail.
She may not know exactly what Jesus will do, but she is inspired to recognise that He will do something, and so she says to the servants “Do whatever He tells you”, and we know the result. We cannot overlook her role in achieving an anticipation of the Hour, a change in the divine plan; and we must apply to ourselves her words “Do whatever He tells you”.
