2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Is 62:1-5
Second Reading: 1 Cor 12:4-11
Gospel Reading: Jn 2:1-12
In this Sunday’s Gospel Reading, Mary tells Jesus at a wedding feast, “They have no wine.” Jesus replies, “My hour has not yet come,” but Mary says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you,” and Jesus miraculously changes water into wine.
Jesus’ response seems “far out of proportion” to his mother’s “simple statement of fact,” notes Scripture scholar Scott Hahn. To understand this, he says, we must be familiar with the Kingdom of David.
When God chose Jesse’s son David to be king of Israel, he promised, “Your house and your kingdom shall endure forever before me; your throne shall stand firm forever.” At the Annunciation, Gabriel told Mary that God would give her Son “the throne of David his father” and that he would “rule over the House of Jacob forever.”
In the ancient Near East, most kings had several wives. As a result, they honoured not the king’s wife but the king’s mother.
This tradition extended to Israel from the beginning of David’s dynasty. The queen mother was called Gebirah, or “Great Lady,” but this was more than a title; it was an office with real authority. For example, Adonijah, King Solomon’s half-brother, asked Solomon’s mother Bathsheba to intercede for him, saying, “Please ask King Solomon, who will not refuse you.” When she approached Solomon, “the king stood up to meet her and paid her homage. Then he sat down upon his throne, and a throne was provided for the king’s mother, who sat at his right.”
Moreover, the king relied on the queen mother as his chief counsellor, someone who could advise and instruct him in ways no other subject dared. For example, Chapter 31 of the Book of Proverbs contains “the advice which his mother gave him,” credited as “the words of Lemuel, King of Massa.”
“There was never a Davidic king without a Davidic queen,” Hahn says: “the king’s own mother, the queen mother.” As David’s first successor, Solomon, reigned beside his queen mother, Bathsheba, so David’s final and everlasting successor, Jesus, reigns beside his queen mother, Mary.
At Cana, Mary approached her Son to intercede for the people, just as Bathsheba had spoken to Solomon on behalf of Adonijah. “Mary counsels her Son about the matter at hand, yet she counsels others to obey him and not her,” Hahn notes. “Jesus speaks to his mother as her superior, yet he defers to her suggestion, just as one might expect a Davidic king to grant the wish of his queen mother.”
In Christ’s Mystical Body, of which St. Paul speaks in the Second Reading, Christ is the Head, and we are the members. Mary is also a member, but the Catechism of the Catholic Church says she is “pre-eminent” and “wholly unique” because of her complete adherence to the will of God the Father, to the work by which God the Son redeemed us, and to every prompting of God the Holy Spirit.
In 1964, the Second Vatican Council proclaimed that Mary, after her Assumption, “was exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things.” Nevertheless, Pope Benedict XVI said, “her whole program of life” is expressed in the words, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” As at Cana, she does not set herself at the centre but leaves space for God.
“Mary’s greatness consists in the fact that she wants to magnify God, not herself,” he said. “She knows that she will contribute to the salvation of the world only if, rather than carrying out her own projects, she places herself completely at the disposal of God’s initiatives.”
Let us never be afraid or ashamed to ask Mary, Queen of heaven and mother of its King, to intercede for us with her Son. In this “wholly singular way,” said Vatican II, she co-operates with him in restoring supernatural life to souls.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English,” with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays (2 – 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and Mondays (10 a.m. – noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver). The title of next week’s talk is Mary and Joseph.
Your voice matters! Join the conversation by submitting a Letter to the Editor here.
