Today's Gospel has a happy ending: Jesus "thus he manifested his glory and his disciples believed in him.l". At a wedding feast, celebrating the union of a man and a woman in marriage, Jesus performed the first of his miracles and gave the first glimpse of his divine glory, which led his disciples to have more faith in him. It all seems so beautiful and so simple.
But then we go back to the beginning of the gospel and we consider How it could all go so terribly wrong. "There was no wine, and the mother of Jesus said to him: 'They have no wine'.". The evangelist narrates this very soberly, but the more one thinks about it, the more unpleasant the whole scene seems. The wine was running low. "No wine". This was not only a practical problem, but also a spiritual one. Several Old Testament texts associate the flowing wine both with the coming of the Messiah (e.g., Joel 3, 18) - when the Messiah came, the wine would flow - as with God's enormous generosity. One psalm describes God as the giver of all gifts, including the "gift of wine".wine that gladdens your heart" (Psalms 104, 15). It seemed that God was not giving his gifts to this couple, as if he was cursing them. At least this is how some people might have viewed the failure of the wine at the feast. The couple would probably have had to live in Cana for the rest of their lives, subject to continual gossip about their wedding day.
But the essential of this episode is that Mary was present at the wedding, and with her Jesus and his disciples, the twelve apostles, the cornerstones of the Church: We could say, Jesus and his Church. Because Jesus was there, with his Mother, with his Church. What seemed to end as a catastrophic disaster ended up being a joyful manifestation of Christ's glory, leading to a deeper faith in Him. People who have been married for a long time could tell us that this happens often. Time and again situations arise that seem disastrous, with no apparent human solution. God seems to have turned against you. The wine has run out. But as long as Jesus is there, as long as Mary sees the problem and has the power to convince her Son (and she always does), as long as we remain within the life of the Church, every problem will be an occasion for the grace and power of Christ to manifest itself and for us to believe in Him more.
