This world offers inferior wine. If you want the good wine, you have to go to Jesus.
Someone
who just met me asked if I was 21 yet. Now I know I look really
young, and I certainly still am, but I assure you that I really am 28
and have tasted good wine and I have tasted bad wine – and thanks
be to God I know what's good and what's week-old, nasty skunk wine.
If that was my first glass, I may be a teetotaler!
Jesus
manifests Himself to His disciples with wine, at a wedding – both
symbols of joy. This should remind us that joy (real, sincere joy)
is a sign of God, and if we don't have joy in our lives, we might be
missing out on God!
Christian
Marriages are meant to be joyful because the Christian life is meant
to be joyful. If you want to have real joy in your life, let Jesus
lead your marriage, and always invite Mary.
Marriages
always start out joyful. There really is the wine of joy to
be found in a nice ceremony, then dancing, cake, etc. But sooner or
later, and it may be years down the road, that wine will run out.
The honeymoon phase will end, and marriage cannot run on the fumes of
human euphoria forever. Neither can priesthood or any life-long
commitment! This drought is where where marriages can potentially
stagnate and so many people sadly just give up. They feel they have
drank the wine to the end, they have bought the lie that there is
nothing more for them, when this is only an invitation to more.
This
pain arises because the human heart knows there is something more out
there.
We
have to move to something deeper, and this will demand something
great of us: we have to humble ourselves before Jesus, preferably
through Mary, and tell Him “we have no wine.” Then, even harder
than admitting our weakness, you must “do whatever he tells you”:
no matter how difficult it may seem, whether it is growing in your
prayer, changing your lifestyles, converting to the teachings of the
Church, whatever.
This
command, “do whatever He tells you,” comes from Mary. Mary knows
that it is scary to obey God completely. She also knows, as St. Paul
says, that “the sufferings of this present life are nothing to be
compared with the glory that is to be revealed in us” in Heaven.
Mary is telling us: there is better wine coming! This isn't the end!
So
don't settle for mediocrity. Water = natural, pure, true, Good,
moral. Wine = fulfilled, elevated, transformed to an absolutely
higher plane. Notice that this does NOT destroy what was there, but
making it more than it already was!
Marriage
is a sacrament!, i.e., an
effective sign of Grace that was instituted by Christ and entrusted
to the Church. The spousal love of husband and wife are meant to not
just symbolize God's love, but actually to make it present, that's
what an efficacious sign means: I mean the difference between a
picture of the Grand Canyon and actually being there. A holy
sacramental marriage makes the love of Jesus for His Bride, the
Church, physically present by loving daily with the same dramatic
love of the Cross, the love we experience in the gift of the
Eucharist – here at the wedding feast of the Lamb. As this kind of
living and breathing Gospel, marriage teaches the faith of the
Church. CCC
1666 The
Christian home is the place where children receive the first
proclamation of the faith. For this reason the family home is rightly
called "the domestic church," a community of grace and
prayer, a school of human virtues and of Christian charity.
So
let's not give up in our vocations, especially in the great sacrament
of matrimony, when the inferior wine runs out. Remember that God
hold the good wine until later, for those who are faithful.
This world offers inferior wine. If you want the good wine, you have to go to Jesus.
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