Memorial of Saint Anthony, Abbot
“He's in his honeymoon period.” When have you heard that line before? Maybe it was said about you when you started a new job, got married, or entered into a contract of some kind.
Today Jesus speaks of a honeymoon using wedding imagery. Our Lord asks, “Can the wedding guests fast when the bridegroom is with them?” His presence with humanity was a honeymoon period. And the wedding continues. Jesus is our bridegroom and the marriage at Cana is the wedding feast of the Kingdom of God.
Wine was a necessity at any first century Jewish celebration, as attested to by yesterday's (Sunday's) Gospel. Jesus likens his presence with the “new wine” of the new covenant. This new wine, the choicest wine, demands fresh wine-skins. Putting vino nuevo into worn and tired skins will cause it to burst. What is frayed and tattered cannot hold what's new. We can never settle for doing things as we've always done them. We can never settle for thinking things the way we've always thought them.
“Our God,” Pope Francis says, “is a God who does new things. God must be received with the openness of what is new.” The Holy Father spoke of the need to adapt and uses the image of an electric appliance: “If the appliance doesn't work, one sometimes needs an adapter. The same is true for us. We need to adapt too, to be open to new things.” New wine. New wine-skins.
Just three weeks ago Joseph Cardinal Tobin of Newark, a strong supporter of Pope Francis, spoke to this. He said that there are no pat solutions to today's unique challenges. “We must ask the question, 'What is God saying to us today?'” This requires new thinking, new solutions. New wine skins.
Change is very much at the heart of what it means to be a disciple. This change demands a heart of flesh and not of stone. This change demands self-knowledge, perseverance, and the ability to adapt to new circumstances.
In the Hebrew scriptures the word for such change is metanoia---conversion of heart. All scripture is about the need for metanoia. The sacramental life of the church draws us continuously into this conversion of heart. The Christian life must always be about this change of heart. But metanoia requires courage.
Our Holy Father speaks of this courage as necessary to transform into fresh skins for this new wine, “the courage to discern always, to discern...what the spirit is doing in my heart, what the spirit wants in my heart, where the spirit is leading my heart.”
Let us pray throughout this Winter Ordinary Time for metanoia---the grace and courage to discern where the spirit wants to lead us anew as disciples in this marriage feast we call the Kingdom of God.
Timothy J. Cronin