Wine

Today's Gospel reading (John 2:1-11) was the wedding feast at Cana. I alluded to it briefly in my post at the beginning of this year which spoke of Mary as the Mother of Mercy.  Mercy is about compassion and she showed compassion with the plight of the people at this wedding whose wine ran short.  Running out of wine was considered a real insult in those days, so there was definite embarrassment and shame for the couple, so this was something serious.  (Running out of alcohol, I guess, isn't considered something good today, either, when you think about it.)   Mary had pity on them, and asked Jesus for help.
Jesus helps by turning water into wine.  In our last post, we spoke of water.  Water is a sign of life, and we cannot survive without it.  So why would Our Lord want to turn water into something else?  Well, we can physically survive without water, but we cannot live spiritually without wine.  Wine is the sign of splendid, divine life.   Water quenches our thirst.   Wine quenches more than our thirst, it quenches our soul.  When we think of wine, we think of good taste, using it to celebrate something, and we think of the effects on us.   So, yes, we can "get by" and "survive" with water, and it is absolutely necessary, but to thrive, to be a champion, to be spiritualized, we need wine, and it is Our Lord Jesus Christ who gives us the finest wine, as the headwaiter in today's Gospel noted.

Mercy is like fine wine.  One who drinks wine feels like a "new" person.  The same holds true for one who has received mercy.   The one who gives wine feels like he or she has provided a fine gift, and they feel noble in doing so.  The same holds true for who one who extends mercy to another.
We use wine as the matter through which the Blood of Christ comes to us at the Eucharist.  Whatever or whoever is soaked in the Precious Blood of Christ is soaked in mercy.

In this Year of Mercy, as we are feeding the hungry, and giving drink to the thirsty, we must also realize that while those works are necessary, and noble, and we cannot be saved without doing them (as we have noted), those works are not enough.  Those works are the "water".   We also need the spiritual works of mercy, which are the "wine".  (We will speak more on those as this Jubillee Year goes on.)  We need to, as Mary did in today's Gospel, not just do go good deeds, but lead people to a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ.  We need to proclaim Him as Lord and Savior.  We need to tell the world that His Body and His Blood are the fine food and wine that will satisfy our thirst well beyond the physical thirst.  We need to help bring people to the Eucharist and to the other Sacraments of the Church, be it for the first time, or back to the Sacraments if they have been away from them.

Saint Joseph kind of took a back seat to Mary and Jesus.   He is the quiet one, and allows them to do the talking.  We can learn from him in that regard.  All the good deeds that we do should not be about us, they should be about Christ.   Christ can turn our works from having a temporal effect like water does, to having consequences that can change a person in his or her core  (like wine does) because it brings them to Jesus.   Let us seek the wine of mercy, and let us bring wine of mercy to others.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.