Today’s readings: Isaiah 62, 1-5; 1 Corinthians 12, 4-11; John 2, 1-12.
To believe in God is not a duty. It is a gift. In religion, we need to learn more the language of gratuitousness. We were very often brought up to think of being in duty bound to worship God or to give Him His due. These are all misconceptions that need to be unlearned.
At a time when there are multiple signs of weariness in marketing our beliefs, with feelings of being lost, confused, almost cornered where the coherence of belief is concerned, we need to appropriate ourselves of the certainty that comes not from our way of thinking but from the way God manifests Himself to be.
The gospel account of what happened at the wedding at Cana must have been very important in the sign language of John, given that he puts it at the very beginning of his gospel, claiming that it was the “first of the signs given by Jesus” whereby “he let his glory be seen, and his disciples believed in him”.
This first sign though, is quite different from all other signs where Jesus is seen as healing the sick, restoring sight, feeding the hungry, or even restoring to life the dead.
At Cana in Galilee he is enjoying a wedding feast which would not have ended in tragedy without him performing this sign. From the narrative itself, it transpires that the guests had already had plenty to drink.
This can simply be seen as a case of gratuitousness on the part of Jesus. God’s gratuitousness comes out clearly also in Isaiah, who speaks of God taking delight in Israel, as well as from the second reading from Paul, which is a celebration of the diversity of gifts bestowed through the one Spirit who is the giver of life.
In poetic language, Isaiah voices the new possibilities for Israel after the exile and speaks of the restoration of the fecundity of creation at a time when the tunnel showed no light at its end. The God who presided over the devastation of creation is the God who now has the power and the will to make creation function fully. Isaiah appeals to the joy of the newly married, almost a prelude to what Jesus does at the Cana wedding.
In this resolve to new creation, Yahweh promises to overcome all forsakenness and abandonment known in Israel and the world.
God’s kingdom, represented at the Cana wedding in the new wine, is an added value to life. Like love, it is gratuitous. It is God’s salvation, which is not earned as payment for services rendered.
This goes far beyond the image of God we have for so long perpetuated. The biblical God, the God of Jesus Christ, is very different from the God of philosophy. He is the God of surprises and of unpredictable gestures.
Meister Eckhart was right when he wrote: “I pray God to rid me of God”. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us.
Unfortunately, having subjected Christian living to the mechanisms of juridical order, many still find great difficulty to live their frailty in harmony with God’s unconditional love. Even the Church itself experiences serious blockages in channelling God’s true love and mercy where human vulnerability thrives.
So people go their way and find for themselves ways of coping and of living sensibly. It is not for us to persuade people or the world of God’s love. God may be missing but not missed.
As Pope Benedict recently said, our mission in times like ours may consist in surprising people with a gift they don’t know they need.
People may be wrong in having the feeling of self-sufficiency. But tasting God’s new wine is a point of no return experience.
In his The Trinity, Augustine prayed: “Search in ways by which we can make discoveries, and discover in ways by which we can keep on searching”.