A Homily for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 62:1-5 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 John 2:1-11
A toddler in trouble immediately turns to a parent. Bump a shin or stumble, they open their arms, fully expecting mom or dad to receive them. And their parents are there. They take them in their arms.
The same is true of small children when they have been taught to trust in God. When in need, they confide in their creator. This past fall, a newly widowed parishioner asked our kindergarten teacher and me to be with her when she told her son that his father had died.
How does one explain the reality of death to a young child? We can scarcely conceive of it ourselves! In answer to his questions, we had to explain to the boy that this meant there could be no more visits to the hospital, nor could he phone his dad. He took a visible moment to ponder this terribly final separation. Then he said, “So we’ll just ask God to create him again.”
Kids trust that the love will be there when they need it. At what age do they stop extending their hands, stop believing that it is simply a question of asking God for help?
Of course, part of parenting is building resilience in children, teaching them to care for themselves. But there is no corresponding moment in catechesis when we are told that God expects us to solve our own problems. Yet this is what most people somehow seem to learn, somewhere along the way.
How does this happen? Is it through prayers that appear to have gone unanswered? Or is it the presence of sin in our lives? Why do we stop believing that God will be there for us?
A parishioner recently passed, just shy of her 100th birthday. When death came, it was swift. Bernetta became sick and increasingly unresponsive. Within a few days, she died. Bernetta was not responding to us, but she was quite alive to her Lord.
In those last days, Bernetta repeatedly asked for her rosary, and even without it in her hands, one could hear her say, “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” She would also spontaneously pray an Act of Contrition, which she knew from her childhood along with the prayer “Angel of God.”
Angel of God,
My guardian dear,
To whom God’s love
Entrusts me here.
Ever this day
Be at my side,
To light and guard,
To rule and guide.
How wonderful, how blessed, that this woman could end her life the way she had begun it! She simply opened herself to her Lord, fully expecting him to be there, to receive her. That is the key to discipleship, its primary project. We learn to entrust ourselves to the Lord, and we do this by opening ourselves, by offering some tangible—for us, not for God, who needs no such—sign. We pay a visit to church and perhaps light a candle; we return to Sunday Mass; we go to confession; we take up the rosary or our Scriptures—anything that says, “My arms are open.”
The Gospels are manuals of discipleship. At Cana, Mary models discipleship for us. Jesus’ hour of glory, which will begin with his public ministry, has not yet come. But that is for the son to know, not the mother. She simply sees a need and entrusts it to her son. “They have no wine” (Jn 2:3).
Notice that she does not tell him what to do or what she wants. She simply opens herself to him with a request. He will know what to do, what is best.
Ever so slightly, though in a manner rather jarring to the uninformed, Jesus challenges her faith in him:
Woman, how does your concern affect me?
My hour has not yet come (Jn 2:4).
If her faith is being tested, it clearly proves itself. Mary does not reiterate, does not cajole, does not grow despondent. Far from it, with utter confidence in the goodness of God—the God who has become her son—she turns to the servers and says, “Do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2:5). This is prayer offered, trust engaged and faith in action. To be a true disciple is to be a trusting disciple.
Toddlers know they need only to open their arms. When did you learn, when did you begin to think, that this would not work with God?
