Transcript

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the native people of Mexico City suffered conquest first by the Aztecs and then by the Spanish conquistadors.

It was the custom of the Aztecs to harvest the conquered people as victims for human sacrifice offered to the snake god, Quetzalcoatl.

By the Aztecs' own account, this cost a quarter of a million human lives per year.

In the dedication of just one temple, a celebration lasting four days, they slaughtered more than 80,000 men and women.

As you can imagine, these native peoples lived a life of natural and supernatural terror.

Yet the fear of their idols kept them trapped in idolatry, and they resisted conversion to the Christian faith.

The best efforts of brilliant missionaries proved basically ineffective.

Then, in 1531, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared in Mexico City to a peasant man named Juan Diego.

He was an older man, a simple man, a convert to the Catholic faith, and he was hurrying on his way to Mass when Our Lady appeared.

She asked him to go to the bishop and requested a church be built in her honor on that very spot at Tepeyac.

The bishop was skeptical and asked Juan Diego to provide a sign that the vision was authentic.

When Juan Diego next saw Our Lady, she filled his overcoat with roses, even though it was winter and roses were out of season.

When the bishop took the roses from Juan Diego's rough garment, the men saw that Mary had miraculously left her image on the fabric.

Juan Diego's overcoat was made of cactus fiber, so the relic shouldn't have lasted 50 years.

Let's be honest, after five years, it should have been falling apart.

But now, it's lasted half a millennium, and her image still looks with eyes of mercy upon hundreds of thousands of pilgrims.

What happened in the wake of Juan Diego's visitation?

Well, the bishop built that church at Tepeyac, of course.

And soon, nine million Native American people embraced the Christian faith.

The entire continent converted to Catholicism.

Where the missionaries and the military had failed, a poor man succeeded with the assistance of his blessed mother.

Mary told Juan Diego, "Am I not here?

I, who have the honor to be your mother, are you not in my shadow and under my protection?

Are you not in the hollow of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms?

Do you need anything more?

Do we need anything more?"

The Church is calling us to undertake a new evangelization, and the task seems daunting.

In fact, it seems downright impossible.

But are the obstacles today any greater than they were in 1531 for that man on the hillside of Tepeyac?

Juan Diego was in his 50s.

He was considered an old man, and he'd already outrun his life expectancy.

Yet, his evangelistic life was just beginning.

And look what he was able to accomplish.

Look what God was able to accomplish through him.

Look what his mother inspired him to do.

What, do you suppose, is God's plan for you and me?

Welcome back to the Bible and the Virgin Mary.

In our first couple of lessons together, we learned how to read what Scripture has to say about Mary, both the literal and the deeper meanings of the text.

And in order to see the spiritual meaning, we need to understand the connection that exists between the Old and the New Testaments.

That connection is God's plan for salvation history.

It's His plan to get us to heaven.

That plan unfolds through His covenants with His people.

Now, all the covenants of the Old Testament, the covenants that God made with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, they pointed to and they prepared people for the New Covenant in Jesus Christ.

This connection between the Old and the New Covenants is made clear through the use of something called typology.

Now, typology recognizes that people, places, and events of the Old Testament are actually signs that point the way toward Christ and His saving work.

Over the next couple of lessons, we're going to put the techniques we've learned to work by focusing on one of the three gospel scenes where Mary plays a prominent role, the wedding at Cana.

As you read through the Gospels, you'll notice that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell many of the same stories about Jesus.

For example, all four report the story of the Last Supper.

Similarly, all four Gospels tell the story of Jesus' baptism.

But the few stories involving Mary are a little different.

Each one is unique to the Gospel that records it.

Only Luke, for instance, tells the story of the Annunciation.

Matthew alludes to it, but gives no details.

Mark and John, they don't even talk about it at all.

Likewise, the event we'll study in this lesson, the wedding feast at Cana, is only found in John's Gospel.

So let's start with the actual account in John 2, 1 to 11. On the third day, there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.

Jesus also was invited to the marriage with his disciples.

When the wine failed, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine."

And Jesus said to her, "O woman, what have you to do with me?"

My hour has not yet come.

His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."

Now six stone jars were standing there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding 20 or 30 gallons.

Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water."

And they filled them up to the brim.

He said to them, "Now draw some out and take it to the steward of the feast."

So they took it.

When the steward of the feast tasted the water now become wine and did not know where it came from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew, the steward of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, "Every man serves the good wine first, and when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine.

But you have kept the good wine until now."

This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him.

Now, at first glance, the story seems pretty straightforward.

Jesus turns water into wine.

And Mary is the one who calls his attention to the fact that this wine has run short.

But again, as we discovered previously, when it comes to scriptural references to Mary, there's always more there than meets the eye.

And the first clue that tells us we should be looking for a deeper meaning is the story's opening words: "On the third day."

Well, the third day from what?

These words point us back to what has already occurred in the gospel.

Basically, the Cana story marks the conclusion of a series of events that began in John's first chapter.

John begins his gospel with a kind of recapping of the creation story found in the Bible's first book.

His first words are the same as the first words of Genesis: "In the beginning."

Also, just as the first verses of Genesis describe God creating light and separating it from the darkness, so John's first verses describe Jesus as a light shining in the darkness.

In the creation account in Genesis 1, we hear of the Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters.

John, in turn, shows the Spirit hovering above the waters of baptism.

And just as Genesis begins by telling us about what happens on each one of the seven days of creation, John seems to narrate an account of a new creation week.

And he does this with a Genesis-like repetition of the words, "the next day."

The first event in the Gospel of John happens on day one.

It's the introduction of John the Baptist in John 1:19-28. Then, on the next day, so day two, John sees the Spirit descending on Jesus at his baptism in verses 29 to 34. On the next day after that, says John, day three, Jesus calls Simon Peter to follow him in verses 35 to 42. And on the next day after that, day four, Jesus finds Nathanael, who then becomes one of the twelve apostles, resting under a fig tree in verses 43 to 51. So what happens on the fifth day?

We don't know.

John skips right over the fifth and the sixth days, picking up his account on the seventh day.

And he signals that it's the seventh day at the beginning of chapter two with the words, "On the third day, there was a marriage."

Now, the only way that sentence makes any sense is if we understand it in the context of all the other days that have come before.

Those are the days signaled to us by John's repeated use of the phrase, "the next day."

So, if we haven't clued into what John has been doing when we start reading chapter 2, we're left asking, "On the third day since what, John?"

But reading those words in context, we see that John is saying on the third day since the last day we mentioned, which was day four.

Then doing a little basic math, and I don't want to stretch anybody here, but you add four plus three, and that tells us that what is described as the third day is actually the seventh day of that new creation week.

What's the point of this?

John is using the seven-day structure to show us that the coming of Jesus into the world marks a new creation.

And in this new creation, a new people of God is to be born by faith in Jesus and by the power of water and spirit in baptism.

And importantly, it's on the seventh day of this new creation that Mary makes her appearance.

And this is no coincidence.

If you look back at Genesis 1, Adam and the animals were created on the sixth day.

Now, after the man finished naming the animals and after he realized there was no helper fit for him among the beasts, he fell into a deep sleep.

And while he slept...

Genesis 2:21 to 22 tells us that woman was formed from his side.

Now, the ancient rabbis believed that Adam's sleep marked the passing of the sixth day.

Accordingly, they also believed that it was on the seventh day when Adam awoke, and that's when he met his bride, Eve.

Which would mean that in the first creation account, the woman also appears for the first time on the seventh day.

So, Eve appears on the seventh day, and Mary appears on the seventh day.

It's also important to note that in Genesis, the seventh day is the pinnacle of creation.

It's when creation is completed, sanctified, and perfected.

The seventh day, as the book of Exodus tells us, was instituted as an everlasting sign of God's perpetual covenant with creation.

Therefore, the sons of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, observing the Sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant.

It is a sign forever between me and the sons of Israel, that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.

Now the Greek Old Testament word that is translated there as "sign" also makes an appearance in John's story.

John describes Jesus' miracle as the beginning of his signs.

What that tells us is that the seventh day in John's creation account is the new Sabbath.

It's the sign of the new creation and the new covenant.

Additionally, Mary's presence on this Sabbath tells us that she is part of the sign of God's new and everlasting covenant with his creation.

Before we take a closer look at Mary's role in this new creation, we've got to understand her son's role.

And you have to do this because you cannot separate Jesus and Mary.

For John, as for the other writers of the New Testament, Christ is the new Adam.

He's come to undo the damage done by the first Adam.

And throughout the Gospels, we see parallels drawn between the two.

Luke shows us that Adam was called to be the firstborn Son of God in creation.

And Jesus is the Son of God, the firstborn of the new creation.

Adam was created sinless.

Jesus is conceived without sin, says Hebrews 4:15. Adam was called to have royal dominion over creation, and Jesus is the true king of kings, says Revelation 19:16. Called to till and keep the garden, priestly duties given to the Levites later on, Adam was to serve as the high priest of all of creation.

And Jesus is our true high priest, says Hebrews 8:1. Adam was the covenant representative of all of humanity in God's first covenant with man, says St. Paul.

That's why we're all affected by his fault and original sin.

And Jesus is the covenant representative of all of humanity in the new covenant.

That's why we're all saved by Christ's work on the cross.

So you see, the writers of the New Testament all understood that Jesus was the new Adam, the one who had come to right what the first Adam had wronged.

And John in particular understood that if there was going to be a new Adam, there also needed to be a new Eve.

So he understood the pattern of salvation history.

In his gospel, he shows us who that new Eve is.

So let's look a little more closely at how he does this.

Notice that in the creation story, only the name of God is spoken.

The first man and the first woman are not identified by name, but simply as the man and the woman.

Well, the Cana story is similar.

Notice that only Jesus, God, is referred to by name.

Mary never is.

John refers to her as the mother of Jesus, and Jesus calls her woman.

This is another indicator that John intends for us to find a deeper symbolic connection between what happens at Cana and the Genesis story.

And we should keep that deeper meaning in view as we try to understand what seem to be the more difficult passages in the account.

The most infamous of these so-called difficult passages is Jesus' response to Mary when she informs him about the shortage of wine.

"O woman, what have you to do with me?

My hour has not yet come," he says in John 2:4. Now, lots of times non-Catholics use this text in their attempts to prove that Catholic devotion to Mary is unscriptural.

So they try to argue that Jesus obviously distances himself from Mary in this passage, and he even seems to scold her.

You know, like, "Leave me alone, woman," as if she just asked him to cut the lawn or something.

This interpretation, however, doesn't hold up to careful study.

Now, perhaps to our modern ears, Jesus sounds like he's telling Mary to go mind her own business.

But we've got to remember that this gospel wasn't written in English.

It was written in Greek and recounts a dialogue that originally took place in a Hebrew dialect.

The actual words Jesus uses, literally, "What to me and you," were a figure of speech common in the Greek and Hebrew of his day.

That figure of speech had several shades of meaning in the Old and the New Testaments.

And yes, it sometimes refers to a situation where someone is reluctant to do something, when there's a simple disagreement, or maybe even hostility.

But there are also times when that phrase is used to show the consent of one party to the will of another.

Now, given the context of the story, this certainly seems to be what's going on at Cana.

And those who attempt to use this passage to make it seem like Jesus is angry with his mother or is dismissing her somehow aren't really being true to the text.

First, there is no evidence anywhere in John or the rest of the New Testament to suggest that Jesus felt any kind of hostility towards his mother.

Remember, Jesus was without sin, so he was faithful to the fourth commandment and obeyed his mother and father.

There also isn't any evidence in the Cana episode that implies separation or tension between Jesus and Mary.

In fact, four times in the story's mere 12 verses, she's referred to as the mother of Jesus or his mother, words which link her closely to her son.

Perhaps the best evidence for what Jesus meant is found in Mary's reaction to his words.

She turns to the servants and says, "Do whatever he tells you."

She certainly doesn't think his words are dismissive.

She tells the servants to listen to him, and she expects him to respond to her implied request.

And he does.

Had Jesus intended to reproach her, would he have complied with her instructions to the servants?

The same points apply when non-Catholics attempt to drive a wedge between Jesus and Mary based on the passage where Mary comes looking for him with his brethren while Jesus is teaching in Matthew 12, Mark 3, and Luke 8. Jesus responds to the man who tells them they've come, "'Who is my mother, and who are my brethren?'

He immediately answers his own question, saying that, "'Whoever does the will of the Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.'"

Now, we're going to deal with the brethren issue later.

But what we need to realize is that Jesus isn't undermining Mary's role as his natural mother.

Rather, he's exalting her divine maternity.

She is the one who completely gave herself over to the will of God and thus became not just Jesus' natural mother, but the mother of God.

As such, she's also the mother of all those joined to Christ, his adopted brothers and sisters.

She's our mother.

That's all we have time for right now.

But in our next lesson, we'll continue our focus on the wedding at Cana and show how by calling Mary woman throughout this passage, St. John's actually connecting her to the woman who appears in the book of Revelation, as well as the woman in the Garden of Eden.

And by doing so, we're going to come to a new understanding of why Mary has been called the new Eve from the earliest days of the church.

And until then, God bless you.