The Temptation To Do Things For Jesus
Simone Riva - This Sunday’s Gospel reports the first miracle performed by Jesus after his baptism in the Jordan: the wedding at Cana. Suddenly, the evangelist John recounts a decidedly anomalous response from Jesus to his Mother. Benedict XVI offered a unique commentary on that passage:
“‘What have I to do with you, O woman? My hour has not yet come’ (John 2:4).
We would like to object: You have much to do with her! It was she who gave you flesh and blood, your body. And not only your body: with the ‘yes’ from the depths of her heart, she carried you in her womb and, with motherly love, introduced you into life and set you in the community of the people of Israel. But if we speak to Jesus in this way, we are already well on the way to understanding his response.
For all this should remind us that, at the Incarnation of Jesus, there were two dialogues that went together and merged into one. First, there is the dialogue that Mary has with the Archangel Gabriel, in which she says, ‘Let it come to pass of me what you have spoken’ (Lk 1:38). But there is a parallel text—a dialogue, so to speak, within God—which the Letter to the Hebrews mentions when it says that the words of Psalm 40 became like a dialogue between Father and Son, a dialogue in which the Incarnation is initiated.
The eternal Son says to the Father, ‘You wanted neither sacrifices nor offerings; instead, a body you have prepared for me… Behold, I come… to do your will’ (Heb 10:5–7; cf. Ps 40:6–8). The Son’s ‘yes’—‘I come to do your will’—and Mary’s ‘yes’—‘Let it come to pass of me as you have said’—become one ‘yes,’ and so the Word becomes flesh in Mary. In this twofold ‘yes,’ the Son’s obedience takes on a body; Mary, through her ‘yes,’ gives him that body.
‘What have I to do with you, O woman?’ In the deepest sense, what they share is this double ‘yes,’ in whose convergence the Incarnation occurred. It is precisely this point of their profound unity that the Lord is targeting with his response. Right there, he sends his Mother back. There, in that common ‘yes’ to the Father’s will, lies the solution.
We must also learn, again and again, to walk toward this point; that is where the answer to our questions emerges” (from the homily given at the Altötting Shrine, Sept. 11, 2006).
Even for believers, that of Jesus can become a sort of container in which to accommodate everything. When reduced to mere inspirational value, it becomes a great excuse for not looking at our own human journey, which he came to renew.
However, there is no room for this risk in the relationship between Jesus and Mary. Both, in fact, meet in that ‘yes’ that declares the primacy of the Father’s initiative. Before anything is done for others or for God—before filling Christ with our own ideas or embarking on enterprises for the conversion of the world—the episode of Cana reminds us that the work of the Trinity is already present and waiting to be recognized. And the precious heart of this work is us.
The water changed into wine became the first unequivocal sign of the Son of God’s will to save us humans. With that gesture, it is as if he is saying to us, “Friend, don’t worry about spending your life for me or doing things for me; you are already mine. Open your eyes, open your heart, and enjoy the good wine for which you have done nothing.” What a liberation that would be, and what a reclaiming of what we regularly neglect: ourselves.
The author hasn’t reviewed the English text or its translation.
