2nd Sunday of Ordinary time 2025 Year C

John 2:1–11 “And the wine failing, the mother of Jesus saith to him: They have no wine.”

Jesus and Mary were present at the wedding at Cana. They blessed it with their presents, they blessed it with a miracle. The Church teaches that Christian marriage (i.e. marriage between baptized persons) is really a sacrament of the New Law in the strict sense of the word, it is for all Catholics an indubitable truth. According to the Council of Trent this dogma has always been taught by the Church, and is thus defined in canon i, Sess. XXIV: “If any one shall say that matrimony is not truly and properly one of the Seven Sacraments of the Evangelical Law, instituted by Christ our Lord, but was invented in the Church by men, and does not confer grace, let him be anathema.”

St Leo XIII in his Encyclical states, “Arcanum” (February 10, 1880): “To the teaching of the Apostles, indeed, are to be referred the doctrines which our holy fathers, the councils, and the tradition of the Universal Church have always taught, namely that Christ Our Lord raised marriage to the dignity of a sacrament.”

As early as the second century we have the valuable testimony of Tertullian who say that “marriage is pleasing to God” and “it enjoys the protection of the Divine grace?” and in another work says (II, ix, in P.L., I, 1302): “How can we describe the happiness of those marriages which the Church ratifies, the sacrifice strengthens, the blessing seals, the angels publish, the Heavenly Father propitiously beholds?” Now… who doesn’t want God to bless and protect their marriage?

As God created all things, He created Adam and Eve, man and woman, that together, united, they may glorify God. It was God's original design. And now in Christ this union between man and woman has been sanctified, made holy, blessed, made anew in Christ. Like the water in today’s Gospel, the water of God’s creating hand, is transformed into wine by the power of Christ, so the natural marriage which God first formed is transformed in Christ into the Sacrament in which God’s faithful and true love is manifested in our gift of ourselves, without reserve, to our spouses.

Quoting Saint Teresa of Avila, “Marriage is not just a union of two bodies, but also of two souls.”

According to Sr. Lucia of Fatima the final battle between the kingdom of Christ and Satan will be over marriage and the family. We can see how the modern world is attacking and undermining marriage, normalising divorce and remarriage, trying to redefine marriage, emptying it of all that is holy and even of what is natural. We must not be taken by the world with its empty promise of happiness. We must stay true and faithful to Christ, with His full promise of eternal life of blessed happiness.

Christ says “Have you not read that He Who made them in the first place made them man and woman? For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate" (Matthew 19:5-6). Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of your hardness of heart; but it was not this way from the beginning. Now I tell you that whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman, commits adultery.” (Matthew 19:8-9)

No one wants to get divorced but it may be a lesser evil like amputating a limb, no one wants to cut off their own leg but if they have gangrene, it is a lesser evil to lose a leg then die. Amputation and divorce it is painful and you lose a part of yourself.

Marriage is sacred, something holy in the eye of God. We must treat it with great respect, not defiling it with lustful lives; not perverting it, turning it away from God; not mocking it with cartoonish imitations; not breaking it for selfish reasons. Marriage is a gift from God given to sanctify us, to bring us closer to Him, making us more similar to Him, loving as He loves. Rejecting God’s gift of marriage will at the sametime indulging in acts reserved to marriage is offensive to God. As driving a car on the road without a license breaks law and you can be prosecuted criminally, so marital acts outside marriage break divine law. Marriage is a blessed gift, a gift from God and a gift of ourself to our spouse.

Saint John Chrysostom: "When husband and wife are united in marriage, they no longer seem like something earthly, but rather like the image of God Himself."

Saint Clare of Assisi: "We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become".

Venerable Fulton Sheen: "When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women".