Wedding and Wine: The Divine Covenant

 Jesus attends a wedding, Jesus provides wine for the celebration. God is not against the good things of life. Jesus approves, blesses and supports good things, things providing comfort and pleasure. Chastity is not against marriage, but for marriage. Temperance is not against having fun. But, in today’s Gospel, it is clear that the good things of life are truly good when they are somehow connected with God. This wedding and this wine are signs of Jesus’ mission. They are used by Jesus as signs because they are good things. Wedding and wine are good things because, 1) they are images of something divine, 2) they come from God and 3) they can lead us to God, if we use them properly.

1)  Many places in the Old Testament use the image of marriage in order to explain God’s love for human beings. But the consummated union between God and humanity, a union that could not be broken, had not yet happened. When the Word became flesh, God united to himself a human nature forever, in such a way that nothing and no one will ever be able to separate God from man in Jesus Christ. Jesus is not a mixed of divinity and humanity; Jesus is not a divinized, graced humanity like our humanity after baptism; Jesus is not a shrinking of the divine nature, or a transformation of the divine nature into a human nature; Jesus is a union of two natures which, remaining distinct in themselves, are indissolubly united in the Person of the Son of God. The Son of God, who already had a divine nature, omnipotent and immutable, assumed, took for himself as Person a human nature like ours. He did not have to divest of his divine nature in order to assume this human nature but, rather, by his divine power creates this human nature and with His own divine being makes this human nature subsist as His own. Jesus’ human nature, as a human nature, is limited and created but, because it belongs to the Son of God and subsists by the infinite being of the Son of God, each atom and each cell of Jesus’ precious body is thrice Holy, because it subsists with the infinite being of God Himself.

God’s only begotten Son will never revoke this union with His human nature. After the resurrection, He did not divest from His flesh but took it to Heaven and seated at the right hand of the Father. God’s Son will be forever also a man. But this is not all: God’s Son became man so that every man and woman may also become one with Him and in Him. Today’s wedding signifies also the wedding of Christ with His Church. On a wooden marriage bed, the Cross, and with the wine of His own Blood, Jesus will bestow Himself as a Spouse to the Church. And the Church, with Mary, with John and with all the saints and faithful of all ages, are expected to express their own vows, to say “yes, I do,” to bestow themselves to Christ in love, and to be faithful to the end.

2)  The union of Jesus’ divinity with His own humanity cannot be broken. Our union with Jesus instead can be broken, not because He will revoke His vows, but because we can be unfaithful and are in fact unfaithful sometimes. These two weddings teach us many things about the great mystery of human marriage.

-  The Son of God gave Himself entirely to His human nature, not because He needed something from it but out of pure love. Love is the true desire to give good and to do good. Jesus’ love is the desire to see us happy and to see our human nature ultimately gifted with the gift of God Himself.

-  Jesus does not need our yes but desires to rejoice in our yes. The fact that God does not need man does not mean that God has no desire for us. But, what can we give God, how can we make God rejoice, what do we have that is able to make God happy? God gave it to us: it’s our freedom. God gave us something that only we can give back to Him. In a similar way, even if the Church is born from Jesus’ wounded side, like Eve from Adam, the Church comes back to Jesus as a Spouse only by an act of freedom, by a freely given yes. True, our yes to Jesus must be supported by grace; but grace supports our freedom, grace does not take freedom away.

-  The human nature of Jesus could not say no to the Incarnation, but our Lady could. This is why God loves Mary more than anyone else: because She said the greatest yes to God, the yes that allowed God to become one with our human nature.

Human love does not consist in the satisfaction of a bodily need. A person cannot be objectified and transformed into an instrument for pleasure. Perhaps love is about understanding that the greatest gift a person can give is their yes to us. The beauty of marriage is that this yes involves the entire person, body and soul and, thus, not only their body for a moment, but especially their freedom for ever. Being loved in this way produces the greatest joy and this is what a lover should desire. The model of this love is Jesus on the Cross and in the Eucharist, where He gives to us His entire Self: Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. May we respond to His yes in kind, with our own Amen, with our own faithful yes.

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