Our Wine Jars Runneth Over
“Do whatever He tells you.”
These are the last words of Mary recorded in Scripture, and I would venture to say that they are probably the most important ones. Mary, for 2000 years, has been considered the exemplar, the model for the Church, because in these words are the entire purpose of the Church. The Church, just like Mary points out, “do whatever He tells you.”
It’s interesting in this Gospel account, we hear Mary mentioned first at being at the wedding. You would think the Gospel, which is all about Jesus, would say, “Jesus at the wedding and so was his mother, but no. It begins with “Mary, the mother of Jesus, was there,” because Mary is the protagonist of this story. This isn’t just any wedding. Mary is the center of the story because she set the entirety of salvation history in motion.
It’s not by accident that Jesus’s ministry begins with a wedding. Throughout the Old Testament, God reminds people that His relationship with them is a marriage. He is the groom, and his people are the bride. It is intended to be a covenantal relationship, never to be broken, and of course, God will never break it.
But the bride did.
And so, this wedding at Cana is the beginning of a new relationship, a new marriage, and it begins here with the intervention of the Blessed Mother. This is the beginning of what was promised in the Old Testament: “As a young man marries a virgin, your builder shall marry you. As a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you.”
The story is all about wine and, in a way, it’s not. They run out of wine and Mary goes to Jesus, which she always does, and tells Him that there’s a problem. And Jesus basically turns to her and says, “yeah but not my problem.” But being the good Jewish mother that she is, she ignores Him, turns to the waiters, and says, “do whatever He tells you,” knowing full well what she asked Him to do, He will do. This is one of the reasons why, for 2000 years, the Church has said that if you want something from God, it’s not a bad idea to ask His mother. Every approved Marian apparition has basically done the same thing. It has pointed to Jesus and told us that what we asked for, we shall receive.
But we shall not merely receive what we ask for, and this is another point of this Gospel reading. There were six water jars each holding 20-30 gallons, so we’re looking at 120-180 gallons of wine. I did the math (well, Google did the math); that’s 900 bottles of wine. Archaeologists tell us that there were probably about 50 people living in Cana at that time. So adding on 12 apostles, Jesus, and Mary, we’re now up to 64 people. We figure that the wedding probably has been going on for a couple days if they ran out of wine. So we have 64 people, five days, and 900 bottles of wine. (How do I get invited?)
The point of this is that God doesn’t just give us what we ask for; God gives us a superabundance of what we need. Every time we pray the Our Father and we get to the part where you ask God to give us this day our daily bread. The word in Greek isn’t the word “daily;” the word is “supersubstantial.” After all, God never feeds us just what we need; he feeds us in abundance. He gives us an abundance. This is the point of 1 Corinthians 12, where we see that same abundance that we see in the wine at the Wedding at Cana. We see the gifts that God bestows on each one of us. God fulfills His part of the covenant by never abandoning us and giving us everything in superabundance.
The question is, how do we use those gifts that we have received through the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, the gifts we have received in abundance in order to serve the Church? This is the whole reason why we received the gifts: because we’re supposed to play our part in the Church pointing out to the world, “do whatever He tells you.” That's our job!
I’ve always imagined that if every single baptized Christian began to put the gifts they’ve received to good use in the Church, the world would change overnight.
Sadly, the vast majority of people never open their gifts, saying, “somebody else will take care of this.” But we receive those gifts for us to point to the world and say “do whatever He tells you.”
Mary begins her journey in Scripture with the words, “let it be done to me according to Thy word,” and she ends her speech with “do whatsoever He tells you.” These two phrases should be the leitmotif of our lives, speaking first to God, “let it be done to me according to Thy word,” then when we’re out in the world, “do whatever He tells you.”
Jesus, I trust you. Amen.