The Wedding at Cana

At Mass this morning, the gospel reading concerned the wedding at Cana where Jesus Christ transformed water into wine and thus became a miracle-worker:

There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee,
and the mother of Jesus was there.
Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.
When the wine ran short,
the mother of Jesus said to him,
“They have no wine.”
And Jesus said to her,
“Woman, how does your concern affect me?
My hour has not yet come.”
His mother said to the servers,
“Do whatever he tells you.”
Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings,
each holding twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus told them,
“Fill the jars with water.”
So they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them,
“Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.”
So they took it.
And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine,
without knowing where it came from
-. although the servers who had drawn the water knew -.,
the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him,
“Everyone serves good wine first,
and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one;
but you have kept the good wine until now.”
Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee
and so revealed his glory,
and his disciples began to believe in him. --- John 2:1-11

The homily brought to light an aspect of this event that I had not noticed despite having read it any number of times. Father Robert pointed out that the reason Mary asked Jesus to provide more wine is that she empathized with the bride and groom and didn't want to see their wedding day diminished by having run out of wine.

WordGirl and I have discussed Mary and her role in Christianity quite often over the past few years, and the homily and reading surfaced one area we hadn't considered: Mary as Christ's anchor to humanity.

Here we have the most important man in the world about to embark on his quest to redeem humanity, and yet his mother asks him to do something about wine stocks at a wedding. Can anyone be surprised that Christ asks what concern this is of his? He's got much more on his mind than a party.

And yet he does as Mary asks, no doubt in part because she is his mother, but I believe also because she helps him see the little picture as well as the big; to see humanity not as one teeming amorphous horde but also as a collection of very different individuals. He is not simply redeeming an abstraction; he has come to personally save each of us, despite our particular sins.

Protestants recoil against any notion of Mary as mediatrix---Christ is the only one who plays this role in out salvation, they hold---but are we to presume Christ was completely self-sufficient? That he needed no one, sought no succor, was a divine automaton marching inexorably to Calvary?

Or is it possible that Christ needed his mother, that she humanized him, taught him to empathize with the plight of others more perfectly, honed his sense of charity, and did all the things that our mothers have done and do for us?

With one foot in this world and one in the next, it's not hard to imagine Christ struggling to keep grounded in both. Given Mary's intercession at the wedding, we have evidence that she played some role in helping Jesus to be mindful even of the smallest and least human concerns as he began his mission to resolve the most cosmic.