January 19, 2025
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year C) on January 19, 2025, at Old St. Mary’s Catholic Parish in Chicago, IL. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 96; 1 Corinthians 12:4-11; and John 2:1-11.
Our first reading is a grand passage from Isaiah promising the vindication of Jerusalem, using bold words such as “crown,” “diadem,” and “glory.” The responsorial psalm commands us to proclaim the marvelous deeds of the LORD. In our second reading, Paul celebrates that we have all been given different gifts from the Holy Spirit, including prophecy, healing, and mighty deeds.
Those readings make us think we’re building to a story about Jesus displaying his power in spectacular ways. We’re expecting dramatic lighting, a soundtrack, or — to use Fr. Frank DeSiano’s words from last week — “a big splash.” Jesus performs a miracle, but probably most of the people around him don’t even realize it.
How often do we stop and really notice God’s extravagant love and mercy for us? Let’s take a moment to revel in these extraordinary gifts!
It was just an ordinary day in an ordinary town in the Middle East, nearly two thousand years ago. Yes, the wedding feast was a big deal to the families of the bride and groom, but wedding feasts were probably the most common celebrations in the lives of 1st-century Jews. The guests were ordinary, too, including a widow of a carpenter from 4 miles away. She was considered so ordinary that her name is not recorded anywhere in the Gospel of John. The widow’s son was also among the guests, as were the friends he had made in recent days. All ordinary people.
And the crisis was ordinary, too. They ran out of wine. I’ve been to weddings where the wine ran out, and it was not a big deal. Wine was considered a more ordinary beverage in Cana 2,000 years ago than it is in Chicago today.
Scripture scholars tell us that the dialogue between the carpenter’s son and his mother, although it might sound harsh to us in the 21st century, is nothing remarkable. An ordinary crisis, at an ordinary event, in an ordinary town, retold to us at the beginning of Ordinary Time. We still struggle with that word, ordinary. Even someone as saintly as Dorothy Day once wrote, “The words ‘Ordinary Time’… put me in a state of confusion and irritation. To me, no time is ordinary.”
Jesus had told Nathanael two days earlier that he would soon see great things. What was so great about Jesus turning water into wine? It was 120-180 gallons of highest-quality wine, but what did it accomplish in God’s plan for the salvation of the world? John says that Jesus “revealed his glory and his disciples began to believe in him,” but it’s not clear how many people at the wedding realized what had happened. The servants saw, and we can presume that Jesus’ mother, Andrew, Peter, Philip, and Nathanael figured out what was going on. But did anyone else?
Maybe some of the guests, unaware that they were the recipients of a miracle, perceived that they were recipients of a blessing. Were some of them grateful to God that this joyful celebration with friends and neighbors extended later into the night than they expected? Were some of them grateful to God for providing them with such an exquisite beverage to drink?
Dorothy Day said that no time is ordinary. Perhaps no blessing is ordinary, either. Does it really matter if the thing for which we are grateful happened through the laws of nature that God established, or if it happened through God breaking those very laws? No matter whether we define something as a blessing or a miracle, the result is the same: gratitude to God.
How often do we fail to notice the blessings — or the miracles — all around us? We can experience them on any day, at any moment. They are as abundant as the 120-180 gallons of wine at the wedding feast at Cana, and they are of the highest quality. But they often go unnoticed. On this federal holiday weekend, let’s recall that it wasn’t ordinary for a person of color to ride at the front of a bus 75 years ago or to share their dreams in a nationally televised speech 60 years ago1. Let’s never fail to be grateful that every day at Old St. Mary’s, “little black boys and black girls join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Do we really need to distinguish whether it’s a blessing or a miracle?
Whenever I find the entries in my prayer journal devolving into a mere log of my daily activities, that’s a sign that I’ve stopped noticing the blessings around me. That’s when I need to rely on another prayer called the Ignatian examen. When I pray the examen, I’m amazed to find the abundant ways that God was present in my day. Every day, God’s presence in my life is like the wine at Cana: present in abundance, present in the highest quality. When I take the time to be grateful, I find God present in my conversations with friends and strangers alike, present in the joys of my ministry, present in my neighborhood, present in the meals I’ve eaten, present in so many unexpected ways!
It is then that I discover, once again, that even the most ordinary blessings can be extraordinary. As the Gospel of John attests: water turns into wine, light appears in darkness, people recover from illness, the dead rise to life, and we discover who God calls us to be. Extraordinary things, happening to ordinary people.
A spiritual director of mine put it another way: “Rich, lightning bolts of grace are falling all around you.” How blessed we are! That same spiritual director sent me a note when I was ordained. In it, he wrote: “Jesus Christ has already saved the world. Your job is to gather the people and celebrate that.”
And so, we gather once again on this ordinary weekend, as ordinary people, to bless and break ordinary bread and to bless and pour out ordinary wine. But in our blessing, in our breaking, and in our pouring out, something extraordinary happens. The bread and the wine are transformed. And in our gathering in this space, in our listening to the Word of God, and in our receiving this transformed bread and wine, we ourselves are transformed into the Body of Christ.
How do we go from being ordinary people to extraordinary members of the Body of Christ? Simply by heightening our awareness. All we need do is witness the blessings all around us, and then gather together to give God thanks.
Notes:
- Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech, “I Have a Dream,” delivered on August 28, 1963, and referenced in this homily. ↩