What a debut to his public ministry! In biblical times since many guests had to travel far, wedding receptions lasted for days, not hours. No wonder the wine steward was desperate when his supply was running low. Mary saw his plight and told Jesus, “They have no wine.” She then told the servers to do whatever he told them. Jesus instructed them to fill the empty cisterns with water. Upon tasting it, the headwaiter commended the bridegroom; “You have kept the good wine until now.”
While the setting for this miracle, which John calls a sign, is a wedding reception in Cana, the lesson here isn’t about weddings or marriage, it is about change. Transforming water into wine prompted his disciples to believe in him.
Not the change you have in your pocket or drop into the collection basket or the tip jar, but the notion that just as Jesus could change water into wine, he can change us. He came to change the world, to teach us how to transform our lives by loving God and one another. He changed people wherever he ventured; people who were sick, he made well. He changed sinners by forgiving them and urging them to live better lives. He changed people who were possessed by demons and set them free. Two thousand years later, he comes to change us as well.
He continually calls us to change. When he began to preach, he urged people to change their lives, to get their priorities straight, and to put God first. He worked miracles of change in special meals such as when he transformed a few loaves of bread and some fish sufficiently enough to feed more than 5000 people. At the last meal he shared with his disciples on the night he was arrested, Jesus changed bread and wine into his body and blood, which he continues to do at every Mass.
Whenever Jesus called people to change their lives, that did not always happen. Many walked away rejecting some of his lessons. We have a free will to accept or reject what God has spoken to us. For any number of reasons, some people choose to walk away instead of pondering the value of changing their minds and seeing the wisdom of what Jesus is saying for living a better life and making this a better world.
Other times when Jesus told someone to change, change did happened, whether he was changing a blind person into one who could see, a lame person who could then dance, a paralytic who was then able to pick up his mat and go home, a deaf person to hear, or a leper to be cleansed.
Why then do many people not believe in the Eucharist? At the Last Supper, as he fed the apostles, he said, “This is my body…this is my blood.” He didn’t say they symbolize him. He changed the bread and wine into his body and blood. On the day he rose from the dead, he did that again when two disciples recognized him in the breaking of bread at their home in Emmaus. He has done that at every Mass.
We can choose to believe what happens when we hear the words of the consecration that the substance of bread and wine are changed and that Jesus does this so that we can be changed. What we see obviously is not a human body but when you consider all that God has done, that out of nothing all that exists has been created, who are we to limit what God can do?
The changed bread and wine, now Jesus’ body and blood, is what we receive in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is God’s tool for changing us to become more like his son and draw closer to him. Our faith is dynamic because Jesus is at work in us, endeavoring to change us to grow in holiness. Later on John records Jesus telling his listeners, “I came that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
“Do what he tells you,” Mary told the servers. She instructs us to do the same if we want to have life to the full. As we begin a new year, ask yourself if you are content with the status quo; if not, what change might you make to make your life more abundant, more joyous, more fulfilling?
Change doesn’t come easy. When we are set in a routine way of life, we resist the notion to disrupt the status quo yet consider the reality. Our world changed because restless minds didn’t settle for how things stood. They endeavored to improve their surroundings through innovation and creativity.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was one who changed our world. He is best remembered for sharing his dream, “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” calling for a long over due change in how African Americans were treated. “Human progress never rolls on the wheels of inevitability,” he noted, “It comes through the tireless efforts of people willing to be co-workers with God.”
For us to bring about a better world, for any change to happen, we can’t wait for the right time for that time will never come. Rather the hour has come for us to believe that we can make a better world, beginning with ourselves, empowered by Christ to do so. Changing our attitudes that conflict with the corporal works of mercy is a starting point.
If we believe in the miracle of the Eucharist, and if we let him, Jesus will keep changing us until we come to the fullness of life, namely eternal life in God’s kingdom.