From the Natural to the Supernatural

 Second Sunday after Epiphany

Sanctuary of the Church in Cana

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  It is no accident that our Lord’s first miracle–or sign, as St. John calls it–is at a wedding.  When we talk about vocations, we often think of the call to priesthood or religious life, and those are certainly beautiful vocations that show forth for us the beauty of the heavenly life, even while here on earth.  But holy matrimony is also a beautiful vocation, and our Lord not only blessed a wedding with His presence, but also made sure that the bride and the groom were not embarrassed by running out of wine.  
    The idea of a marriage permeates the Old Testament.  We start salvation history with Adam and Eve, the first husband and wife.  The prophets use the image of a husband and wife to describe God and His relationship with Israel.  The prophet Ezekiel in particular talks about choosing Israel, though she was left to die on the side of the road, and making her His own.  But, Ezekiel points out, Israel was unfaithful, and sought other lovers who had not cared for her.  Hosea, too, is called to take a wife, but his wife is a harlot, which God uses to show Israel’s infidelity to Him.  But, God takes Israel back, despite her infidelity, and continues to love her.  The Song of Songs, Jewish romantic poetry, also talks about the love between a woman and a man, and the Church Fathers see in this book the love between God and His People.  
    I preached at Christmas of how, in Christ, divinity was wedded to humanity, never to be divorced, and eternity was wedded to time.  So as we continue to unpack the mystery of Christmas and Epiphany, it is fitting that we look to the wedding at Cana.
    And what we see is that Christ makes every wedding better.  Symbolically, we see this in the water that becomes wine.  Christ takes what is natural (water) and raises it to the level of the supernatural (wine).  This is certainly true of marriage.  Marriage is a natural institution.  Many people who are not Catholic, or not even baptized, get married, and as long as there are no impediments to marriage, the Church sees these marriages as valid.  But marriages between the baptized are raised to a supernatural level and become sacraments–efficacious signs of God’s grace, based in the Paschal Mystery, which call for and cause grace.  And because of the supernatural dignity of marriages between the baptized, they need to happen in a church building, as the place where God dwells in a particular way with us.  In fact, when a Catholic does not get married in a church, according to the rites of the Church (unless the bishop gives permission), that marriage does not take place, and a couple would be living in the state of fornication, until they remedied their situation in the Church.
    Most of you are married or will become married at some point.  Yours is not a second-rate vocation, but a beautiful, sacramental call to witness the love that Christ has for His Church.  You not only receive God’s grace to live in a marriage that is faithful, lifelong, for each other’s good, and open to children, but by living in such a way, actually become a conduit of God’s grace to the world, in a similar way as water that communicates God’s grace in the sacrament of baptism.  By living as husband and wife according to God’s plan, God’s grace can flow through you.  This is the beauty of marriage, the wine that was transformed from the water of natural marriage.
    Living the vocation of marriage is not always easy.  And that is why the presence of Christ, not only at the wedding but throughout the entire marriage, is so necessary.  It’s not enough to invite Jesus, his Blessed Mother, and disciples to the wedding.  They want to be a part of your entire married life.  So each day, invite them by prayer to be a part of your married life.  Whenever possible, pray together as a couple.      I know a priest who told a story about his mom and his dad.  This priest said that, when the door to mom and dad’s bedroom was closed at night, no one was to enter, and, as one of many children, he later could guess why this rule existed.  But when he was a young child, he broke the rule once, and peeked in to see mom and dad after he was supposed to be in bed.  When he looked in through the crack in the door, he saw his parents, kneeling together at the side of the bed, praying the rosary together.  What a beautiful witness of inviting our Lord and Lady to the marriage!  But whatever the prayer, whether a full rosary, or a decade, or maybe simply some brief prayers from memory or from the heart, it is a way to help you be the vehicle of God’s grace that marriage is meant to be.
    But both for married and non-married people, Christ wants to make life better for all, and does so through those who are united to Christ in baptism.  When we are living to the call of our baptism, we fulfill what St. Paul talked about in the epistle.  When we are living as Christians, we are called to hate that which is evil, and cling to that which is good.  We are called to love each other with mutual affection, and honor each other.  We serve the Lord through rejoicing in hope, being patient in trials, and persevering in prayer.  When we follow the Lord, we are able to increase the natural joys with the supernatural joy of Christ.  When we follow the Lord, we are able to weep with those who are sad, but help them to see that God’s plan, even if not clear, and even when it includes the allowance of suffering, leads to a glory that cannot be compared with any earthly happiness.  We, too, are called to continue that presence of Christ, and help change the natural into the supernatural.  Maybe we won’t change water into wine (a gift that many of us would like to have, I’m sure), but will do greater signs than changing the substance of a liquid, by convincing sinners to be saints, and storming heaven with those who want the salvation that Christ offers.
    Christ is not satisfied with the natural good that we experience.  He draws us through passing things to the things that endure forever.  He lifts up, perfects, and transforms what is naturally good to make it supernaturally good.  And that is no truer than in the Eucharist, the bread that becomes the Body of Christ and the wine that becomes the Blood of Christ.  Through our worthy reception, may we be drawn into that to which marriage points, the eternal union of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

A Great Deal

Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord

Shel Silverstein

One of my favorite poems from Shel Silverstein is called “Smart.”  It reads:

My dad gave me one dollar bill

‘Cause I’m his smartest son,

And I swapped it for two shiny quarters

‘Cause two is more than one!

And then I took the quarters

And traded them to Lou

For three dimes — I guess he don’t know

That three is more than two!

Just then, along came old blind Bates

And just ‘cause he can’t see

He gave me four nickels for my three dimes,

And four is more than three!

And I took the nickels to Hiram Coombs

Down at the seed-feed store,

And the fool gave me five pennies for them,

And five is more than four!

And then I went and showed my dad,

And he got red in the cheeks

And closed his eyes and shook his head—

Too proud of me to speak!

Obviously the kid in this poem thinks he’s making a good deal, because he trades one for two, two for three, three for four, and four for five, when in fact he’s making a bad deal, because everything he trades for has less value than what he had before.  

What we celebrate today in Christmas is a great deal for humanity, and maybe makes God seem like the boy in Shel Silverstein’s poem, but is really God showing His love for us.  It is what St. Augustine, the saint depicted in the icon to the far right, described as admirabile commercium, or the admirable or great exchange.  And the exchange is that God take flesh in Jesus so that we can become one with God in Jesus.  St. Athanasius, the saint depicted in the icon to the left of the tabernacle, said it this way in his work on the Incarnation: “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”

This theme is taken up in the Prayer over the Offerings at the Christmas Mass at Night: “May the oblation of this day’s feast be pleasing to you, O Lord, we pray, that through this most holy exchange we may be found in the likeness of Christ, in whom our nature is united to you.  Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.”  And that same theme is re-echoed in our preface, the prayer that begins our Eucharistic Prayer: “For through him the holy exchange that restores our life has shone forth today in splendor: when our frailty is assumed by your Word not only does human mortality receive unending honor but by this wondrous union we, too, are made eternal.”  And, as the Collect, or Opening Prayer of the Christmas Mass during the Day says, “we may share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

This is kind of a bum deal for God.  He’s definitely trading down.  God who is not limited in any way, in the Person of Jesus can be located in one place at one time, and is limited in His human nature by external forces, like gravity and the material world.  God, who cannot suffer, can, in the Person of Jesus, get a splinter and stub His toe, and be nailed to a cross, bleed, and die.  God, who knows all things and sees all things, must learn how to talk and has eyes that cannot see everything at once.  This is not to say that Jesus is not God, or that Jesus loses His divinity, but that Jesus, who is infinite, assumes our humanity, which is finite.  He humbles Himself, and, as St. Paul says, takes the form of a slave.  

We, on the other hand, are joined to God in Christ.  By the power of the Holy Spirit we are united to divinity and are placed on a trajectory towards eternal happiness even though we start in this world as in a vale of tears.  We gain the opportunity of becoming, in heaven, impassable, that is to say, we cannot suffer, and not being limited by time and space, and being enveloped by perfect love, joy, and light.  That’s a great deal for us.

But God does not begrudgingly enter into this admirable exchange.  He is not forced into in by any way by any person.  God sees us in our weakness and fallen state, and rushes down to strengthen and save us, raising us up to realms of light and glory in heaven.

The deal is not automatic.  We don’t automatically get the deal just by being born.  We don’t even automatically get the deal just by being baptized.  We have to say yes to the deal, to give God our lives, and to accept His life as our own.  Each day, each hour, each minute we have to make that conscious choice of whether or not we are going to participate in the best deal ever offered.  

Every time I celebrate Mass, I mix a drop of water into the wine, and say the prayer, “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”  Our challenge, this Christmas season and always, is to live out what happens under those signs of water and wine, to unite ourselves to Christ by what we do and what we say.  That is how we show God how grateful we are for the great exchange.  Today we recall that the Son of God became man for us.  May we respond to the great deal of salvation, so that we might become God.