2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C) - 19 January 2025

19th January 2025
“St Thomas Aquinas says that by the words, ‘My hour has not yet come,’ Jesus Christ intended to show that, had the request come from anyone else, He would not then have complied with it. But because it came to Him from His mother, He could not refuse it.” - St Alphonsus Liguori
 
A reflection on today's Gospel by the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J Sheen:
 
"When Mary at the foot of the Cross saw that soldier offer Him wine and heard Him say, ‘It is consummated,’ she thought of the moment when it all began. There was wine there too, but not enough. It was the marriage feast of Cana. When in the course of the banquet the wine gave out, the first to observe the lack of wine was not the steward. It was Our Blessed Mother. She notes human needs even before those commissioned to supply them.
 
"Our Blessed Mother said to Our Lord a simple prayer: ‘They have no wine.’ That was all. And her Son answered: ‘Woman.’ He did not call her Mother. ‘Woman, what is that to Me and to thee? My hour is not yet come.’ Why ‘Woman’? He was equivalently saying to her: ‘Mary, you are My Mother. You are asking Me to begin My public life, to declare Myself the Messiah, the Son of God, by working My first miracle. The moment I do that first miracle you cease to be just My Mother. As I reveal Myself as Redeemer, you become in a certain sense a co-redemptrix, the Mother of all men. That is why I address you by the title of universal Motherhood: “Woman.” It will be the beginning of your womanhood.’
 
"But what did He mean by saying: ‘My hour is not yet come’? Our Blessed Lord used that word ‘hour’ often in relation to His Passion and Death. When, for example, His enemies took up stones to throw at Him in the Temple, the Evangelist says, ‘His hour was not yet come’ (John 7:30). The night of the Last Supper, He prayed: ‘Father, the hour is come. Glorify Thy Son, that Thy Son may glorify Thee’ (John 17:1). Then when Judas came out into the Garden, Our Blessed Lord said: ‘This is your hour’ (Luke 22:53). The Hour meant the Cross.
 
"The working of His first miracle was the beginning of the hour. His sixth word from the Cross was the end of that hour. The Passion was finished. The water had been changed into wine; the wine into blood. It is perfected. The work is done.
 
"From these words the lesson emerges that, between the beginning of our assigned duties and their completion and perfection, there intervenes an ‘hour’, or a moment or mortification, sacrifice, and death. No life is ever finished without it. Between Cana when we launch the vocation of our lives, and that moment of triumph when we can say we succeeded, there must come the interval of the Cross."
(Seven Words of Jesus and Mary)
 
Prayer to Expedite the Hour of Grace (Paul Thigpen, A Year With Mary, day 237)
Lord Jesus, I must confess that in some areas of my life, I ‘have no wine.’ I am empty, thirsty, dry. Through Your Blessed Mother’s intercession, fill the stone jar of my heart to overflowing with Your life-giving water, and turn the water into the wine of gladness in Your love. Amen. 🙏💐💖
 
What does the Church teach us about the Virgin Mary and her role in the Church?
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) teaches us that: Mary’s role in the Church is inseparable from her union with Christ and flows directly from it. “This union of the mother with the Son in the work of salvation is made manifest from the time of Christ's virginal conception up to His death”; it is made manifest above all at the hour of His Passion: Thus the Blessed Virgin advanced in her pilgrimage of faith, and faithfully persevered in her union with her Son unto the cross. There she stood, in keeping with the divine plan, enduring with her only begotten Son the intensity of His suffering, joining herself with His sacrifice in her mother's heart, and lovingly consenting to the immolation of this victim, born of her: to be given, by the same Christ Jesus dying on the cross, as a mother to His disciple, with these words: “Woman, behold your son.” (964)
 
It further teaches that Mary by her “complete adherence to the Father's will, to His Son's redemptive work, and to every prompting of the Holy Spirit,” is the Church’s “model of faith and charity.” (967) She is a “mother to us in the order of grace” as she, in a wholly and singular way, “cooperated by her obedience, faith, hope, and burning charity in the Saviour's work of restoring supernatural life to souls.” (968)
 
The motherhood of Mary in the order of grace “continues uninterruptedly from the consent which she loyally gave at the Annunciation and which she sustained without wavering beneath the cross, until the eternal fulfilment of all the elect. Taken up to heaven she did not lay aside this saving office but by her manifold intercession continues to bring us the gifts of eternal salvation .... Therefore the Blessed Virgin is invoked in the Church under the titles of Advocate, Helper, Benefactress, and Mediatrix.” (969)
 
If you’ve yet to develop a relationship with your spiritual mother Mary, now is a great time to start!