The Lenten Lessons of Cana

No doubt many of you join me in giving up our pleasure in good wine as a Lenten mortification. And yet, I want us to consider the wedding feast of Cana in connection with Lent.  

How can that be? In Lent, we take away wine. But at that feast, Our Lord provided wine. Lots of wine. In fact, about 800 bottles. 

Let’s remind ourselves what Lent is. Lent is sometimes said to be an imitation of the forty days Our Lord spent fasting in the desert to prepare himself for public ministry. And certainly, it is that. 

But Lent also should be a time of more intense prayer, almsgiving, and fasting. These are the three things I want to consider in relation to the wedding feast at Cana. Let me begin by reminding you of that episode. If you don’t mind, I will provide the translation of the beginning of the second chapter of John out of my own book, Mary’s Voice in the Gospel According to John: 

On the third day there was a marriage feast in Cana of Galilee. The mother of Jesus was there. Also invited to the marriage feast was Jesus, and disciples. The wine had given out, so the mother of Jesus tells him— 

“The wine—they are out of wine.”  

“What is that to me and to you, woman?”  Jesus says to her, “My hour has not yet come.” His mother tells the servants: 

“Whatever he should say to you—do it.” 

Now there were six stone water jars placed there, for the ritual cleansings of the Jews, each capable of holding twenty or perhaps thirty gallons. 

“Fill the water jars with water,” Jesus tells them.   

So they filled them to the brim. 

“Draw some out right now and bring it to the chief steward,” he tells them. 

And they brought it. Now, when the chief steward tasted the water which had become wine—he did not know where it had come from, but the servants knew, the ones who had drawn out the water—the chief steward calls for the bridegroom.  

“Everyone else puts out the fine wine first.  And when the guests are drunk, that’s when they bring out the inferior wine,” he says to him, “But you!—you have kept the fine wine under lock and key until now!” 

This beginning of his signs Jesus worked in Cana of Galilee. He manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him. 

Prayer

First, where does prayer enter in here? What is prayer? Prayer is conversation with Our Lord. The Gospel of John is a series of conversations stitched together with a narrative frame. I highlight this in my translation by indenting the conversations so one can see at a glance how much “space” they occupy, as you can see above. Since most of these conversations are between Jesus and others, they might be counted as so many prayers. Each gives us an example of prayer: Nicodemus questioning; the woman at the well testing; the woman caught in adultery, silent and observing. 

Our Lord’s first public miracle was occasioned by Mary. Consider their brief exchange: “What is that to me and to you, woman? My hour is not yet come.” Not harsh, yet it does signal that Jesus was not going to perform the miracle of his own accord. Lawyers refer to it as a “but for” cause: but for Mary’s intervention, there would have been no miracle.  It was Our Lord’s intent to teach this to us. 

Also, Mary’s response was full of faith. “Do whatever he tells you.” What did she expect him to tell them? What could he have done? It was a feast, a big feast, and there was no wine. It’s not as though he might have sent wagons to another town with cash. He could not have solved that problem then and there except by creating wine. She had complete faith that he could accomplish this through his divine power. 

One of the beautiful things about approaching John’s Gospel from Mary’s point of view is that we see how Mary anticipated the apostles by thirty years. She had to have known that Jesus was God incarnate. She had three decades to reflect on this. She brings this understanding fully formed to his public life. This viewpoint suffuses the Gospel: “I am.” 

So what does Cana teach us about prayer in Lent? We might be tempted to regard all of Lent as a long slog of austerity and penance. But Mary offers, as it were, an easy road to prayer. Go to Jesus through Mary. Make your Lenten prayer deeply Marian. Rely on her strong faith, not your own weak faith. Let her do the asking for you.  

What does this mean concretely? The rosary must be primary—each day, “in commune” if possible. The family rosary. Meditation of the stations of the cross with Mary. The Stabat Mater.  

(My first Lent as a Catholic, I resolved to say the rosary each day, and it was a difficult discipline. But my late wife resolved to give up coffee. That seemed superhuman to me. It was her first Lent to do so, and her last Lent also. However, saying the rosary every day—that practice stuck. I’ve had to solidify it once or twice, but it has been lifelong. Unlike giving up coffee.) 

Okay, so prayer, almsgiving, fasting. We’ve covered prayer. Let Mary do the praying for us. What about almsgiving? 

Almsgiving

To get at the topic of almsgiving, I want to draw your attention to another line in the Cana story: Mary’s simple, “They have no more wine.” They’ve run out of wine. Their wine has given out. In my translation, I put the wine first and repeat it, for emphasis, because it comes first in the Greek translation, and it kind of leaps out at you, as if it’s a sudden realization and concern. 

We don’t appreciate how deep Scripture is. I’ve read many commentaries on the Gospel of John—by Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas, Newman—and yet (I may be wrong) I don’t recall any of those great saints, or anyone else, raising the question of why the newlyweds ran out of wine.   

Maybe the wine supplier defrauded the couple. Maybe someone made a mistake in the quantity that was ordered. Maybe there was an accident in the delivery process. Maybe some powerful or wealthy person in the area placed a large order for wine, and it was felt he had to get it first, and little else was available for this couple of modest means.  

Or maybe, most outrageously, the couple was more generous than their means afforded, and they invited more people to the feast than they could afford. Maybe in their simplicity or idealism—and this is even more outrageous!—they just trusted that it would work out somehow: “God will provide!” 

I like this last supposition, because I love to think of them just casting the dice, throwing caution to the wind, risking embarrassment, and saying to themselves, “The heck with it, God will provide!” And then God does provide because, as if to honor their faith, God shows up at their wedding reception! Not only that, in God’s providence Mary ends up being there precisely to take care of them as a mother. 

But whatever the reason for running so short of wine, no one thinks, “Hey, it’s their fault they ran out of wine. They should suffer the consequences.” Or perhaps there could be a “moral hazard” if newlyweds who plan so poorly get bailed out. And yet no one raises this question—not Mary, not Jesus, not the disciples who were there, and not even do we raise it when we read this passage. It’s as if John tells the tale by design so that you don’t think of this obvious question. 

This observation leads to a lesson about almsgiving. I suspect there are people around us like those newlyweds who are out of wine and for whom we might follow the example of Our Lord and his Mother and not think about whether or not it was their fault. Yes, in the Catholic Church we rightly speak of the preferential option for the poor. Typically, and most clearly, charitable giving is shown in the relief of suffering of the “least of his brethren,” such as the starving people that Catholic Relief Services assists, say, in sub-Saharan Africa; or unwed moms; or orphan children who are reduced to selling their bodies to survive.   

In the Gospel of John, most of the time Our Lord is dealing with those types of the poor—the man born blind; the man paralyzed for so many years and unable to get into the pool; even Lazarus, a simple man from a humble home. And yet, and yet—Christ’s first miracle is not to relieve the needs of the poorest of the poor but to help a couple of newlyweds. 

What is the kind of thing I mean? The couple you know who got married despite a huge nut of college debt to crack, and she’s already pregnant. The couple with three children; she’s expecting a fourth, and they cannot afford a minivan. The family with bills out the kazoo for Catholic school tuition. How about that couple with five kids celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary who aren’t even able to afford—they believe they cannot be so selfish as to afford—an evening out for a nice dinner and hotel room?  

I once had a work colleague who opined that he needed a raise. “I’ve got eight children,” he said, to which another colleague replied, “And whose fault is that, friend?” We don’t want to be that crass person, of course. On the other hand, a couple such as the one at the wedding feast at Cana is never going to tell you about their needs. They didn’t go from table to table asking if anyone could help them with the wine. Of the hundreds of guests, probably only two noticed that they were out of wine: the one who said it, and the One to whom she said it. 

Charity begins at home. Here too I think Mary can help us. She can help us to pray, by doing the praying for us, and she can help us to “see.” Let’s ask her, “Mary, show me the wedding couple at Cana right now in my life who has run out of wine, so that I can help.” 

Fasting

Remember, we’ve said that Lent consists of prayer, almsgiving, and fasting. And we’ve brought prayer and almsgiving under Mary’s mantle, as it were. What about fasting?  

What in the world can a marriage feast teach us about fasting? In a word: everything.  

When Our Lord was asked about fasting, he used the example of a wedding feast to explain it. Perhaps you remember that his disciples came to him, and they told him that the Pharisees were wondering why the disciples of John the Baptist fasted, but Jesus’ disciples didn’t. And Our Lord replied, how can the friends of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? But when he is taken away, then they will fast. 

Mystically, of course, the bride of the Lord is the Church, as St. Paul tells us. Or, as the Fathers liked to say, the Incarnation was like a marriage of God and man that is accomplished when Our Lord conquers death and takes to himself the Church as his bride. So a wedding feast is precisely where one does not fast—but some kind of interruption or breaking up or forestalling of the marriage feast is.  

This is of course what happens during the passion and death of Our Lord. “He descended into hell,” as the Apostles’ Creed says. But it also applies to the time right now when we are not fully united to Our Lord. Through the Eucharist, he stays with us. As his friends pleaded on the road to Emmaus, “Stay with us, Lord.” They saw him, and he was with them, in the breaking of the bread. And yet that means that, apart from the breaking of the bread, apart from the Eucharist, we are separated from the Groom during our time on Earth. 

You have probably heard this joke before: the CCD teacher asked her students, “How many of you want to go to heaven?” All of them raised their hands. “How many of you really, really, really want to go to heaven? Keep your hands up high.” All the children strained to reach the ceiling with their raised hands. “Okay,” the teacher said, “how many of you want to go to heaven today?” And all the hands went down. 

The joke illustrates something understandable, and very human, and yet it points to an area of our lives too where we can stand refinement, where our love is possibly not as fervent as it should be. We need to love more with a love that wishes to be fully united with God.   

If we think of fasting as what is proper to do, as Our Lord taught us, when we recognize that he is no longer with us, this becomes a powerful motive for fasting during Lent. Lent becomes not an exercise in self-discipline, or some difficult and harsh regimen of austerity, or a kind of marathon race of self-deprivation. It’s simpler than that: it’s an expression of the sorrow of separation caused by Our Lord’s death, which in turn our own sins caused. 

Maybe you have suffered the loss of a close loved one, a mother, father, spouse, son, or daughter. I bet you did not find it difficult to fast then. You mourned, and you fasted. 

Here too Mary makes it easier. There is a great hymn to Mary at the foot of the cross, the Stabat Mater, that has been around for nearly a millennium and set to music by just about every composer of note. The most famous version is probably that of Palestrina. The hymn has two parts. The first part meditates on Mary suffering in compassion with her Son. The second asks her, begs her, that we may share in her sorrow.  

May I suggest then that on this third note too we “take things easy” ourselves, with respect to our own efforts, our own strenuous acts of will—which are absurd in any case—and rely upon Mary throughout Lent. Rely on her and her faith to pray for us. Rely on her for the eyes and heart to help others. Rely on her to mourn and feel sorrow specifically with her grief.