“A wedding was held at Cana” (Jn 2:1)

Introduction

At Cana the famous wedding was celebrated, and the Gospel does not mention the name of the spouses. Some have seen in this omission a sign pointing to a spiritual Marian interpretation of the episode: Jesus and Mary are the true ‘spouses’ whose ‘mystical wedding’ was celebrated at Cana.

Cana of Galilee

In fact, there is no unanimity about the location of the Gospel town of Cana. Among the various candidates, however, the Galilean town of Kafar Kanna, only 10 kilometers from Nazareth, seems to hold the strongest claims to authenticity and tradition. The town appears as a small urban cluster set on a gentle slope that descends toward the fertile plains of Galilee, today widely exploited by the advanced agriculture of the State of Israel.

It was the account of a sixth-century pilgrim that identified this town with the Gospel town, since he placed it a day’s journey from Sepphoris. The anonymous pilgrim claimed to have been able even to use the very seat on which Jesus sat at the famous wedding and to have seen and touched the two jars of the miracle, although it is impossible to affirm this account with certainty. What we do know with certainty is that, from the sixteenth century on, the place where the present ‘Shrine of the Miracle’ stands was recognized as the site of the Gospel wedding banquet, since some excavations had revealed a hall with columns that immediately suggested a Byzantine basilica or a Crusader building and therefore a Christian place of worship.

Recent archaeological studies, however, tend to recognize in that hall a synagogal setting, a Jewish sacred building from the first centuries after Christ, rather than a Byzantine or Crusader place of worship, although there are also later Christian burials. In other words, it is not possible to affirm with certainty that this was a Christian place of worship, nor whether it corresponds to the one visited by the anonymous pilgrim.

Therefore, it will be even less possible to affirm with certainty that this site corresponds to that of the Gospel wedding. Nevertheless, this should not take away the importance of this monument which, at the end of the nineteenth century, was built by the Franciscans on the newly acquired land and used by the small Latin-rite Christian community present there, as a memorial and remembrance of the Gospel episode of the miracle of Cana.

“There was a wedding feast” (Jn 2:1)

Rather than dwelling on the specific details of this place, it is worth recalling that the columns and capitals of the ancient synagogue, the setting discovered in the sixteenth century, were used to support the atrium of the present church, which, in its rather eclectic style, yet of a certain monumentality, conveys a certain serenity. In the shrine dedicated to the Miracle of Cana, we can see the very figure of Mary: we will not look for her presence in some sacred spot or in some part of the church, but, on entering it, we will let ourselves be embraced by the Virgin who has become Church.

It is no accident that parts of an ancient synagogue were used as the foundation for the atrium of the Christian temple. If we recognize in the Church the figure of the Virgin, it is not strange to think that the authentic elements of Jewish religion and worship served as the preparation and support on which Mary Most Holy built her monumental faith and the worship of the true God, whose definitive revelation came about through Jesus Christ.

It should be remembered, however, that the episode of Cana of Galilee has much to teach us about our faith. An initial detail that surprised some Fathers of the Church is that the Gospel episode, although described in rich detail, completely omits the identity of the two spouses. In this omission we can see the sign of a spiritual interpretation of the episode: only Mary and Jesus are spoken of, indicating that they are the true mystical spouses, whose wedding is celebrated at Cana.

The miracle of Cana marks the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, a ministry of teaching the truth and of the sanctification of souls, which is the mission entrusted to Him by the Father. However, this ministry establishes the New Covenant which, just as the prophets described it in relation to the ancient covenant with YHWH, is well represented by the nuptial metaphor: just as YHWH wedded the people of Israel, now Jesus weds Mary, who takes the place of and represents the whole Church, the mystical people of the true worshipers of God in spirit and truth (Jn 4:23).

It is true that the Church would be brought forth only with the death on the cross, the fulfillment of Jesus’ saving and redeeming mission, but Mary already anticipated the Church, being preserved from every stain of sin and taking its place at the beginning of Jesus’ public life. It is no accident that an evident parallelism is observed between the episode of Cana and that of the death on the cross: Jesus’ enigmatic reply to the Woman (My hour has not yet come, Jn 2:4) is related to the fulfillment of that hour on the Cross (The hour has come, Mk 14:41), before the Woman (Jn 19:26).

The hour that had not yet come, that is, the fulfillment of the Redemption, is accomplished on Calvary with the birth of the Church, which is drawn from the side of Jesus, just as Eve was drawn from the side of Adam.

Mary and grace

In contemplating Mary, the “Virgin made Church“, according to the famous expression of Saint Francis of Assisi, we can perceive that the episode of Cana has something more to teach us. If the Virgin Mary represents the true faith of the chosen people, which is fulfilled in the definitive revelation of the announced Messiah, it is no less true that the new Law is principally, as Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches, “a law of grace“. Jesus came not only to reveal the complete face of God, revealing His Unity and Trinity, a mystery of love unknown to the Jews, but also to raise us to a new condition, the condition of children of God by adoption through grace: this is the essence of the new Covenant.

The Gospel account of Cana is one of the texts of Scripture that best reveals how, in the economy of supernatural grace, the Virgin Mary occupies a place of great prominence, that of “universal Intercessor”. Mary is not the source of grace, since supernatural grace can come only from God and not from Mary, who is a creature like us. However, by divine disposition, it is Mary who mediates grace, drawing it from the bosom of the Most Holy Trinity in order to dispense it to all men.

On the one hand, it is she who brings the prayers and the afflictions of men, in this case the real spouses of Cana, embarrassed by the lack of wine, to the loving Heart of Jesus, thus mediating, from below upward, the longings of men. On the other hand, from above downward, it is she who obtains from her beloved Son the intercessions for all men, including graces or material help, as in the case of the wedding at Cana with the miracle of the wine, and grace properly so called, the grace that makes us children of God.

It is no accident that the miracle of the wine itself can be the object of a spiritual interpretation: the water changed into wine can represent our humanity (the water) which, through the supernatural action of the grace infused into our hearts, is divinized, in the sense that it becomes one with divine filiation, “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4) and a temple of the Most Holy Trinity, thus rising to heights unattainable for our human nature.

The Mother of the Church

In this context, we discover that what up to now we have considered as the “Virgin made Church“, a perfect model and example of the Church herself, is revealed, because of the mediation of all graces carried out by her on behalf of all human beings, as the “Mother of the Church“. The Gospel account of Cana begins by calling the Virgin Mary “mother“, although this is understood in the sense of the mother of Jesus (cf. Jn 2:1).

Moreover, the miracle of Cana was interpreted by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church as a prefiguration of at least three sacraments. In the first place, matrimony which, starting from its natural form of consent between man and woman (the simple water), becomes a sacrament, that is, an efficacious sign of the union between Christ and the Church (that is, the wine). Baptism can also be well represented, both by the transformation it works in human nature, divinizing it with sanctifying grace, and by the fact that the Gospel itself informs us that the vessels used for the miracle were jars of purification (Jn 2:6), a beautiful image of the baptism in which sin is removed.

Finally, the Eucharist too is well represented by the miracle of Cana, both because of the common reference to wine and because of the transformation of substance that occurs in both cases. Therefore, the episode of Cana speaks of the sacraments of the Catholic Church, which are the gift and the principal mission that Our Lord left to the Church in order to save and sanctify human beings. At the moment when the Church is born, that is, on Calvary, the water and the wine that flow from the side of Jesus, from which the Church is drawn as the New Eve, are they not the sign of the sacraments, in particular of Baptism and the Eucharist?

The sacraments are the nuptial gift left by Christ to the Church, His bride, but first of all they were given to Mary, as Mother of the Church. It is she who always and until the end of time reminds the Church and its members of the call made for the first time at Cana: “Do whatever He tells you” (Jn 2:5). In the shrine of the miracle of Cana, as in all the other churches on earth, let us therefore allow ourselves to be embraced by the Mother of the Church, by the One who brought forth the Church with Christ and who will assist her with her maternal protection until the end of time.

The episode of the wedding at Cana is central to the reflection on Mary’s mediation. The encyclical Redemptoris Mater by John Paul II devotes an in-depth analysis to this Johannine text as a revelation of Mary’s intercessory role.

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