My name is Don and I’ve been a Catholic priest for over 50 years. During that time, I’ve pondered these readings over and over again and have discovered something that I never saw there before. It’s given me new hope, new energy, new image of what I do and how I do it. I pray the message that I’m sending you will be equally valuable to you if you find it. So please share these podcasts with your friends. Thank you.

Today we celebrate the second Sunday in Ordinary time. And before I begin the readings, I just want to pray that you are safe and healthy. And during this time, the pandemic seems to have turned a corner and then come back with even more of a ferocious, contagious development. And it’s really strange because I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, about how crazy it is to have something that we keep thinking is gone and then it’s back and we think it’s better and then it’s worse. It just leaves us with a sense of powerlessness, not being in charge, not being in control. And that there’s a really interesting relationship on how it affects us is really interesting.

And what it does, it seems to rob us of a core thing that we need constantly to have, and that’s peace, a sense of well being, that we’re loved, cared for, everything has purpose and meaning. So I just want and pray that today’s program will bring you some of that peace, because it is the theme, I think, of this set of readings and there’s a secret in this set of readings about what it is that we need to find that peace. The opening prayer. Almighty ever living God, who governs all things both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. The first reading is from the old testament.

Isaiah 62:1 5. For Zion’s sake, I will not be silent. For Jerusalem’s sake, I will not be quiet until her vindication shines forth like the dawn, and her victory like a burning torch. Nations shall behold your vindication, and all the kings your glory. You shall be called by a new name, pronounced by the mouth of the Lord. You shall be a glorious crown in the hand of the Lord, a royal diadem held by your God.

No more shall people call you forsaken, or your land desolate, but you shall be called my delight and your land espoused for The Lord delights in you, makes your land his spouse. As a young man marries a virgin, your builder shall marry you. And as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you. The Word of the Lord. Responsorial Psalm Proclaim his marvelous deeds to all the nations. Sing to the Lord a new song.

Sing to the Lord all you lands. Sing to the Lord, Bless his name. Proclaim his marvelous deeds to all the nations. Announce his salvation day after day. Tell his glory among the nations, among all people his wondrous deeds. Proclaim his marvelous deeds to all the nations.

Give to the Lord, you families of nations. Give to the Lord glory and praise. Give to the Lord the glory due his name. Proclaim his marvelous deeds to all the nations. Worship the Lord in holy attire. Tremble before him all the earth.

Say, among the nations, the Lord is king. He governs the people with equity. Proclaim his marvelous deeds to all the nations. A reading from the New Testament from St. Paul’s First Letter the Corinthians, 12th, chapter 4. Eleven brothers and sisters there are different kinds of spiritual gifts, but the same spirit.

There are different forms of service, but the same Lord. There are different workings, but the same God who produces all of them in everyone. To each individual the manifestation of the spirit is given for some benefit to one is given through the spirit, the expression of wisdom to another, the expression of knowledge according to the same spirit to another faith by the same spirit to another gifts of healing by the one spirit to another. Mighty deeds to another prophecy to another discernment of spirits to another variety of tongues to another interpretation of tongues. But one and the same spirit produces all of these, distributing them individually to each person as he wishes. Hallelujah.

The word of the Lord God has called us through the gospel to possess the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. The gospel for this second Sunday in Ordinary Time is taken from St. John, second chapter, first, the 11th verse. There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding. When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him, they have no wine.

And Jesus said to her, woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come. His mother said to the service, do whatever he tells you. Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings, each holding 20 to 30 gallons. Jesus told them, fill the jars with water. They filled them to the brim.

Then he told them, draw some out now and take it to the head waiters. So they took it when the head waiter tasted the water that had become wine without knowing where it came from, although the servants who had drawn the water knew, the head waiter called the bridegroom and said to him, everyone serves good wine first. And then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one, but you have kept the good wine until now. Jesus did this at the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee, and so revealed his glory. And his disciples began to believe in him. The Gospel of the Lord.

The original piece of music entitled Humble, was composed and produced by Ryan Hardner. For our program last Sunday. We celebrated the baptism of Jesus. And in that image of the Spirit descending upon him at his baptism in a bodily form and a voice being heard from the heavens. And the voice was saying very clearly, you are my beloved, my favor, my love, my presence is poured into you. And there’s a deep, deep oneness within us.

And what’s so important about that image is because that’s what it means to be baptized. It means that the relationship that we have with God is so amazingly free of anything that would keep him out from us, anything in us that would keep us from Him. It was a celebration of the promise that God has made to all of us. That intimacy with him is the goal. It’s been the goal from the call of Abraham. It’s been the goal from Adam and Eve.

You know, God wants an intimate relationship with you, and it’s a struggle to find that intimacy. And I think it’s because of the Old Testament primarily. And that is this. The Old Testament is the beginning of the revelation of who God is. It is not the full revelation of who God is. And the unique thing that one has to have engaged in their imagination when they read the Old Testament is that this is a process of God slowly revealing himself.

And the slowness of it is based on the capacity of people to understand. And so God does not reveal Himself fully to Abraham and to the people that he was calling Abraham to form for him. First of all, you can feel in what he’s saying that it’s a little bit. It’s radically different than the New Testament. But what it’s about is about God is saying, when we take the first reading, that God is calling people into a community of Israelites, his people. He said, I want Abraham.

I want you to call a people together, that I will bless them as a people and I will guide them, and I will be with them, and I will be their God, and they are my treasured ones. It’s amazing. How religion has always the shadow of whatever religion you belong to. They tend to tell you that they’re the only religion, the best religion. When I grew up as a Roman Catholic in the 40s and 50s, I was told, and I believed with all my heart, that if you weren’t a Roman Catholic, you couldn’t get to heaven. And we believe that, you know, and that is not in any way, shape or form the essence of Christianity.

It was a hangover, it seems to me, from the Old Testament, when there was a certain sense of, I don’t know if God is going to favor me. Does that mean he loves me more than others? Well, if he tells me he does, that makes me feel very special. It gives me confidence that he’s my God, my God, not the God of other people. And so there are two things in that first reading that you need to pay attention to. One is that God first reveals himself as having chosen a certain people, and they are his favorites.

And he’s going to manifest to them his commitment by guiding them on a journey of evolution, of growth and of change. And whenever there are enemies there that are in the way of this growth and change, such as the Egyptians were, in the way of their becoming independent and being able to find freedom. And that’s the main theme of the Old Testament. Moving from slavery into any system that keeps us from fully being who we are. And so in this process of being freed, what we see in this God of Israel, a promise, I will be there. And if anybody’s in your way, I will just obliterate them and destroy them.

So you have a God who is kind and gentle to those that are his favorite and vicious and destructive to those who are the enemies of his favorites. That’s the way in which God was working with the imaginations of human beings at that time, because that’s what they believed when they thought of other gods. Gods were territorial. They belonged to just a certain group of people. They actually belong to a certain geographical area. And so God had.

All the gods were having favorites. So God started out by saying, okay, I also am like the other gods. If you let me reveal myself slowly to, you’ll find that there’s something unique about me. And what you see in the Old Testament is this God revealing himself like the other gods. Except every once in a while, you’ll see him do something that doesn’t make any sense compared to the other gods. When a human being can talk God out of doing the damage to people that he intended to do out of justice.

When Moses can say, God, you can’t destroy these people. Don’t do it. That would be unthinkable. So the Old Testament is a beautiful story of a God, like the other gods, who chooses a certain set of people, his favorites, and he protects them against their enemies. And he can destroy those enemies in vicious and horrible ways. The fact that he.

I can’t imagine when, you know, the Israel, excuse me, the Egyptians were resistant to letting the Israelites leave. And. And those plagues. And the last plague was God went into every single family and destroyed the firstborn son, which was like taking the posterity away from all those men because they lived in their children and their firstborn was the way that they continued to live. It was horrible. When you think of God destroying the firstborn of every family in a nation, he did that.

And we have to be careful of not saying, okay, if a God can do that, he can condemn me anytime he wants, because if I don’t please Him, I’m in real, real deep trouble. But that’s not who God finally reveals Himself to be. So he starts off with being filled with a kind of commitment to his people, a unique group of people, and is vicious in the way in which he protects them. And if they disappoint him, he turns that same anger toward them. Now that’s the beginning. And it slowly evolves over 2000 years until we get to something like we hear in the second reading, a beautiful image of what it is that God ultimately wants to be.

Not a God that is there for a group of people, but a God who is there for every single individual. And the reason you can see that in the second reading is because he’s saying the intention of God is not simply to govern your behavior by threats of punishment, but the real intention of God is to enter into you to enable you to continue his work, to continue being the source of life that he longed to be for the Israelite community. You are now taking over that role, in a sense. And when he lives inside of you and then he cares for his people on an individual basis, it’s a whole new religion. God’s presence is given to each person for a purpose. And that purpose is your unique destiny.

And that purpose is your responsibility to fulfill. But it’s the same God in everyone working in an intimate way, versus through the Old Testament system, which was more impersonal. So you move from a God who in a way only works with groups, and he works through prophets. He doesn’t speak directly to people, but through the prophets to the New Testament where he lives inside of you and he’s talking to you and you have a gift, and he just wants you to believe that that gift is your unique reflection of him in the world, and you bring that into the world. And what is the most powerful, powerful manifestation of the Spirit of this God living in individuals that’s different than the Spirit of God that lived, in a sense, in a community of people. And that’s intimacy.

Intimacy. And so we have this image last week of the baptism of Jesus as being this moment of human nature, being gifted with divine presence in this man, Jesus, who is also God. But careful, remember, we have to focus on him as one, just like us. Even though he was sinless, he’s still just a human being. And I think his sinlessness was the fact that he never, ever doubted his Father. He wasn’t perfect in a sense of never making a mistake or never saying a bad thing or whatever.

We have to watch out to misunderstand what sin really is. The most serious sin in the world is doubting the presence of God and rejecting it, knowing what it is. And Jesus never did that in that way. He was always sinless. Mary never doubted God’s plan for her. She was sinless.

But in this wedding feast of Cana, we have something really unique and really powerful. And that is an explanation of the new relationship that God wants with human beings. And it is intimate. And there’s only one way to find intimacy between God and human beings who fail and sin and make mistakes constantly as part of the process of why they’re here, so they can grow through those things. And that is forgiveness. Without forgiveness, there’s no life.

And that’s what this whole feast is about. Jesus primary message. Primary message is intimacy with the Father. And there’s no way that you could teach that mysterious gift of God’s presence in a person if you also have a teaching that implies that when we sin, we lose God’s favor. When we sin, we are judged by God. And that judgment, all judgment, carries a certain patina of condemnation.

And condemnation means separation. Even the word to condemn means to separate from something, to push it away, to exclude it. So just imagine if you don’t move from pure justice in the Old Testament, if you don’t embrace the fullness of forgiveness in the New Testament, there is no way in which this intimacy with God can flourish and grow and become what it is intended to be. So let’s look at the miracle. It’s not yet time for Jesus to manifest his power. Now that’s really Interesting.

And I don’t. One of the ways I thought about this, you know, if you have somebody that’s been preparing for something for a long time and somebody comes up and says, hey, you know, do it. Perform. Do what you’re supposed to do. And you say, well, I’m not really ready yet. I’m.

I’m working on it. I’m getting ready, but I’m not quite ready yet. I mean, that would be the most normal human experience of having something inside of you that you know is powerful and you’re not sure how it works yet. And you have to understand the humanity of Jesus to get this full impact of who he is and what he’s teaching us. So he’s got this power, and he hasn’t used it publicly. Maybe he’s never used it before, who knows?

But it’s a weird, weird situation where it’s a wedding and they ran out of wine and there’s nobody there to be healed. There’s nothing, you know, essential about charity that would say you have to get the wine. You know, it’s like, it seems a superfluous reason to have a miracle, except then that there must be some reason for it. And the reason is not that it was such a crucial thing that he had to do, but it’s what it represented. And what it represented was a transformation from the law, judgment, condemnation, which is the shadow of the law, that’s the stone, water, jars. And water is that image of cleansing.

And those jars were there so that when you were a good follower of God in the Old Testament, you always had to cleanse your body to get close to God, because God sort of didn’t like the dirty body that you had. And there was always this idea of having to cleanse yourself. And in place of that water for cleansing is this intoxicating, amazing teaching that what he was here to do is to bring this new wine into the world, the old wine of justice, which was more. Which was less impactful in terms of its effect on people. You can drink a glass of water and not much changed. Drink a couple of glasses of wine, and there’s a radical change in your disposition.

So this fire and this wine water is the image of the power of forgiveness that is there as the greatest gift of God in the person of Jesus. Revealing that this gift is what we long for absolutely the most. We want this good wine. The good wine has been hidden in the Old Testament for good reason, because the people weren’t ready for it. But now in the New Testament, we were ready for it. And yet still 2,000 years later, we’re still struggling to understand it and believe it.

And when you tell people that the God that created you will never, ever turn against you because of anything that you do, that his promise is that he is there for. For you, always, that’s so foreign to some people’s mind because they say, no, no. The church tells me and everybody tells me that if I don’t do what I’m supposed to do, I’m excluded, I am kicked out. I am kept away from the gifts of God. And there’s nothing further from the truth. No God reveals his glory in this man Jesus, this God, man Jesus.

And what it is, is that he reveals a God who is seemingly too good to be true. Maybe, or just so beyond our imagining that it’s hard for us to wrap around the fact that the God who is so perfect looks at our imperfection and sees it not as something that turns him away, but something that turns him closer to us. And he wants us to believe that we’re loved. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t ramifications for what we do. We go through pain. It causes pain.

It’s not good. But nothing can do the condemnation that the law did. If you understand the fullness of this great miracle, of the new wine, the wine of forgiveness, let us pray. God, everyone seeks peace. And peace is that sense that all is well and all will be well, and that we are in your favor, in your care. And yet we so often think that when we fail that we lose that attention, that focus of your love.

And there’s nothing that can be further from the truth. So bless us with an awareness of your consistent, forgiving love and knowing that when you stay with us in our imperfection, it’s not that you ignore the negativity that we’ve created. No, there’s a sadness in you when we do that. But what we do know is that your love, your attention, your affection is increased when we are not who we are supposed to be. And we need to keep ourselves open to that gift. So we ask for this gift in Christ’s name.

Amen. I’d like to remind you that the program you just listened to is available on our website, pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com as well as on our podcast. Go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe to Finding God in Ourselves. It’s free to listen to anywhere, anytime. This ministry also needs your support, so make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website. Thank you so much for your listenership and your continued support for without it, this program would not be possible.

Thank you.