Weddings are happy occasions. Wine lends warmth and friendliness to the wedding banquet, lowering inhibitions and relaxing the guests, many of them strangers to one another. Conversations are easy to start, more dancers get up on the floor, joy seems to permeate the air. Even the wedding banquets of the working class in Chile seldom lacked for wine and food, I found. The climate and soil of central Chile provides abundant wine for all celebrations. The possibility of running out of wine during a party would create a deep concern in any Chilean’s heart—as would the calculation about when to bring out the best wine.
Photos provided by Fr. Bob MosherBut some landowning families in rural parts of Chile, I discovered, would try to use the abundance of wine to pay lower wages to their grape pickers, during the dictatorship years. They allowed their workers access to as much wine as they wanted, as long as they accepted the unjustly low monthly salaries. Both alcoholism and poverty blighted the life of many rural communities in those violent, oppressive times.
“My hour has not yet come,” Jesus tells his mother—the hour of his passion and death on the Cross. He was only beginning to launch his mission to his people, and yet there was a need right before him. So, the first of many signs was performed, moving his disciples to believe in him, though without fully understanding yet the deeper meaning of the signs.
Jesus would reveal to the readers of John’s Gospel, and to his followers today, the true banquet that he is inviting everyone to, a banquet at which the wine of living in joyful harmony with our Creator would be served, reconciling us with one other in justice and truth, and with all of Creation in sustainable treatment of our natural home, until the end of time.
Notes on the Sunday Readings
First Reading Isaiah 62:1-5 – Preaching during the last part of the Babylonian exile, the prophet hears God break his silence, and renew his love for the people Israel, in the sight of all nations, restoring her to that joyful, innocent age of long ago, when she was the virgin spouse of God.
Responsorial Psalm Psalm 96:1-3,7-10 –The missionary character of this psalm is striking, as the inspired psalmist commands God’s people to make his glory known throughout the world, and “proclaim his marvelous deeds to all the nations!”
Second Reading 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 – The matter of spiritual gifts, or charisms, was one of the issues bothering the Christians in the city of Corinth that Paul wished to shed some light upon in this letter. he charisms are given by the Holy Spirit to benefit the community, and Paul lists the ones related to speech in today’s reading.
Gospel John 2:1-11 – The Gospel writer John opens the first of the signs of Jesus’ mission with the phrase, “On the third day,” alerting us to an event that symbolizes the coming “hour” of Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection, and the arrival of the “best wine” at the wedding feast of the long-awaited Messiah.