How well do you know the mysteries and rich symbolism of the Bible? Join us as we unlock biblical secrets with our Hosts Jordan Whiteko, Father Chris Pujol, and Father Andrew Hamilton. Father Hamilton sets the scene for us as we journey to the wedding feast of Cana, the backdrop for Jesus' first recorded miracle, where water is transformed into wine. Father Hamilton paints a stunning picture of life in Cana, where everyone in the town is invited to the wedding. We delve into the profound meaning behind Jesus addressing Mary as 'woman', a seemingly simple term that harbors connections to the new Adam and Eve, and ultimately, the redemption of the world.
Ever pondered why the best wine was served last at Cana? It's a potent symbol of God's abundant generosity, even when we least deserve it. As we step into the shoes of the amazed banquet servers, we begin to understand the grandeur of the miracle that unfolded before their eyes. Father Pujol shares insights on this divine display of grace, reminding us of God's ceaseless love. Prepare to see this biblical tale in a new light, deepening your understanding of God's grace, and His desire to serve the best for last.
How well do you know the mysteries and rich symbolism of the Bible? Join us as we unlock biblical secrets with our Hosts Jordan Whiteko, Father Chris Pujol, and Father Andrew Hamilton. Father Hamilton sets the scene for us as we journey to the wedding feast of Cana, the backdrop for Jesus' first recorded miracle, where water is transformed into wine. Father Hamilton paints a stunning picture of life in Cana, where everyone in the town is invited to the wedding. We delve into the profound meaning behind Jesus addressing Mary as 'woman', a seemingly simple term that harbors connections to the new Adam and Eve, and ultimately, the redemption of the world.
Ever pondered why the best wine was served last at Cana? It's a potent symbol of God's abundant generosity, even when we least deserve it. As we step into the shoes of the amazed banquet servers, we begin to understand the grandeur of the miracle that unfolded before their eyes. Father Pujol shares insights on this divine display of grace, reminding us of God's ceaseless love. Prepare to see this biblical tale in a new light, deepening your understanding of God's grace, and His desire to serve the best for last.
Jordan Whiteko:
You're listening to the Catholic Accent Podcast. In this podcast, we discuss the acts and miracles that Jesus performed that stunned his disciples. Today's topic is the wedding feast of Cana. I'm Jordan Waikko, along with Father Andrew Hamilton and Father Christopher Poojol, and we're both stunned. It's so good to be with both of you today. Why don't you set the scene for me? What would a Jewish wedding of that time period in Galilee have been like?
Fr. Chris Pujol:
Well, father Hamilton actually just came back from the Holy Land, so we'll let him set the stage, because one of his favorite pastimes is, of course, going to weddings.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
It was so nice of you to let me set the entire scene for us here. Cana of Galilee right when you go there now and modern Israel. It's a much bigger place than it would have been at the time, but Cana would have just been a small town that Jesus would have been very close to, my guide said whenever I was in Israel maybe like four to five hundred people. The interesting part of that is that it's such a small town that back then, most people that lived within a small town were related to one another. People have some sense of this still, Maybe if they come from a smaller town in western Pennsylvania that you have a lot of relatives. I remember growing up in Ford City. My parents are from Leechburg, my whole family was from Leechburg and I wasn't related to anybody in Ford City High School and that was like a bizarre thing for people. Everybody was like a cousin of somebody.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
So you never, talk bad about anyone, right, don't burn your bridges, but nonetheless, cana of Galilee, the old hospitality laws at the time of Jesus, would have necessitated that, if anybody that was related through marriage by blood, whatever it might be, you would be then invited to the actual wedding itself, and so my guide said, most likely almost the entirety of the town of Cana would have been invited to the wedding of whoever this mysterious couple would have been.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
So that really would have been a great wedding. I'm sure A lot of people.
Jordan Whiteko:
Yeah, but everybody. You'd be related to everybody, so like you couldn't mingle you know, jordan's looking for a wife. So did you happen to see a wedding while you were there? There was no weddings while I was there. Do you know like do they still pretty much invite the entire town?
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
I don't know about that, but in terms of the church where this miracle would have happened, that's built on the ruins over time of ancient Israel, and then the Crusader church and then now the modern church that's there and one of the side chapels. It's a tradition that basically, couples come there and they renew their wedding vows, so people witness a wedding in that sense, but more Christian marriage than Jewish.
Jordan Whiteko:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you talked about the miracle, and the disciples were at this wedding party with Jesus and his mother after just meeting Jesus. What do you think their first impression was when they were at that wedding and they ran out of wine and Jesus was called to act.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
Well, I think, first, the disciples would have first been stunned by the fact that they went to the wedding, right, because they weren't from Cana and they were passing through, and yet they went anyways, because Jesus knew this couple, and the Blessed Mother was there as well. And I think, to see Mary's role to begin with, that is, a woman in that time period is the one who's commanding her son to do something and act, is a moment for all of us to pause and see. You know, running out of wine at a wedding, especially around here, seems to be a common reality, right, and we can go get more because people enjoy themselves at weddings and loosen up, but for them to run out here would be a great disgrace, because it was always that the abundance of the wine and of the food showed the abundance of the love of the couple and of the families coming together.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
They knew how to party, in comparison to us today. Right, weddings weren't just like one evening after an hour in a church. It was like a week week day, so your preparations for that wedding were immense.
Jordan Whiteko:
So that explains why it needed to be done. They wanted the party to keep going, essentially.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
Absolutely Well. It's an overabundance of God's grace which is then flowing from that marriage which, even in ancient Israel, judaism marriage is the bedrock of society understood, of course, go the whole way back to Genesis, right man, woman together. It's bad that man is alone, which takes us into something else within the actual story itself, which is why does Jesus call his mother woman?
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
It seems very odd, or maybe abrupt that he would do so, but it's actually there's a twofold nature to this, one being more spiritual and then one cultural. The spiritual would have been he's making reference the whole way back to Eve. So one of the titles that we know the Blessed Virgin under is the new Eve, as Christ is the new Adam bringing about the redemption of the world from the fall that came through Adam and Eve. And so he's going to his mother as the one who's brought forth him into this world and he's working his first sign we're told in the Gospel of John.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
So if you break down, I'm fresh out of seminary says this comes more closely to me from Yoannine literature, the study of the Gospel of John and his other writings. There's the book of signs and then there's the book of glory later on, and so we're still early on the second chapter of the Gospel of John. We're seeing the first sign of Jesus working this miracle at Cana, and he's revealing his glory through the signs. What's the greatest revelation of his glory Whenever his hour has come? We hear in the scriptures as well.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
So, his hour, of course, is his dying for us on the cross, the redemption of the entirety of the world, but he's bringing the nations of Israel to himself by working these signs, and so his making here of wine from water is that, and so he's, of course, referring to Mary as as woman, relating to Eve. Now, the cultural context of that of the time and this is still true of a lot of Jewish communities that are more conservative, as well as Islamic communities in the Middle East you wouldn't necessarily call out one of your relatives names in front of strangers. Like I said, people were related, whether by marriage or by blood. Maybe that were at the wedding feast of Cana, but that didn't mean that Jesus would have known everybody exactly there, nor that Jesus was exactly related. He could have been passing through. We don't know exactly why?
Jordan Whiteko:
Why do you think he was invited then?
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
Well, one of the things reading into that would be that he wanted to work one of his, his signs, but if he had been known before, that is kind of growing up as the Christ child. You know maybe people that run into him. You want certain people at your wedding that are exciting or you meet, so it didn't have to necessarily was like a celebrity invited to the wedding.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
He showed up, not necessarily yet because he's he's early in his ministry. Okay, of course he would stick out more than somebody else, but the point of calling woman in that context is as if we were in front of a bunch of strangers. It was considered polite to actually not call your loved one by their name, revealing their name to somebody else, but rather to call them by the general context of woman, and so it's actually a sign of respect that Jesus is doing that in front of potential strangers, with Mary.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
And that's the same reality with the Jewish people and the way they contact God and speak about God.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
They never say his name because it's that close intimacy of love between son and mother and Father. Hamilton touched on the importance of that wine and I think it's so beautiful, and we look at how wines made that you take many hundreds of thousands of grapes right and they're crushed down and they become one, and so what Jesus is doing here is saying the old and the new are coming together. So you have grapes and wine, you have water. You can almost see it as the old and the new, and now they're coming together as one, where you have Jesus coming into this new community. They're meeting him and he's still giving himself fully, just as the church. Now, together, we all come and in that we're one in him. And so that's why it's critical that the very first miracle has to do with wine, because for us as Catholics, it points us directly to what is to come in the future with the Eucharist you need a lot of wine too in an ancient culture, because the water isn't necessarily trustworthy.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
So you'll see that they cut wine a lot of the times with water so that people are able to drink it. So it's not as strong as it would be, but it keeps at least bacteria out of the water and then people can enjoy that. So maybe we're a dehydrated culture, but maybe we're having a better time than we are.
Jordan Whiteko:
So we explained why Jesus would have made all this wine. It's a week-long party. Essentially, it's just like the fact that the disciples were invited. You know they were stunned by that, but then Jesus performed this miracle. So can you talk about how the best wine was served at last?
Fr. Chris Pujol:
Well, there was wine the whole time, right, but the significance is that the wine that was served after the wine ran out the head waiter says was the better wine. And he goes to the couple and says wait and serve your best wine last, because it tasted so much richer and fuller. Maybe we'd say it has better tannins and it's aerated and it's the best wine, father.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
Chris, can I butt in and? Do something from our own lives. Now, whenever you're kind of out and you don't really have like a great bottle of wine and you want people to like think well of your party and so forth, you've got to kind of disguise it a little bit and so normally you would serve like your best wine and if you didn't have a lot in reserve or in stock then it's like okay, people drank a little bit. At this point they're having a good time.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
Taste buds are on.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
They're not really worried about what wine it is, as long as it keeps flowing and coming right. So the wine can decrease over the course of the night and people don't realize like that. There's a quality loss there. So it's like bizarre and it would be stunning to the disciples that the best wine would have been served last because it's almost wasting it in some sense on that.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
But that's again a show of God's abundance and that he's giving us the absolute best of himself possible, and that that lines up with the whole entire Christian scriptures, which is, jesus doesn't just give us like part of himself for a little bit or, you know, a grade C, something he gives us grade A everything, fully, utterly all of himself. And that's what should stun us as actual disciples of Christ, that God, the creator of the universe, would give all of that to us, when he doesn't owe us any of it. Right, we sinned, we're outside of his grace. He could just leave us as we are. There's nothing on God in that way, but rather he enters into it and gives all of himself.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
And becomes one of us and that's stunning to everything because it changes the entire order of the universe. And that's what the disciples, in this first miracle, are starting to see. I mean, they would have been stunned at the beginning. They would have been stunned when Mary said one of my favorite lines in scriptures. Everyone thinks of her saying I am the handmaid of the Lord and her beautiful fiat and gives her life over. But here she says they have no wine. And you could see almost the disciples looking around like what's Jesus's mother talking about? Why is she getting involved with this? Even Jesus says I can't really help you at first and then, like any good son, he does what his mother asks and he enters into humanity, as Father was saying so beautifully and so perfectly. And that would have made the disciples stop and see that something here is different, something here is changing and this is where it's all starting to take root and from here it's just going to completely blow their minds.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
And there's like a great reversal here if you would look at like the story of Adam and Eve again and Jesus and Mary right. So Eve brings what most people think is the apple, probably a fig, in a lot of the old writings of the ancient church as well as in Judaism. But this fruit, that's this temptation to Adam and then that's where they kind of fall from the grace of God through that sin, both together. Well, now you see the great role reversal, turn it around that Mary as the new Eve is bringing the situation to Jesus that needs fixed, and then he does so rather than not living up to like, maybe like what his, his duty is in some sense, but rather he fulfills it fully for those and they enter into a joy rather than into a sorrow.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
Or into a loss. Yeah, because nothing's lost. Here you have Jesus, the new Adam, Mary, the new Eve, new man, new woman, and in this marriage you see the joining of that new life coming. So up until this point, everything was lost. Everything was offering sacrifices so that they could find God or somehow change God's favor, to be saved and enter into the new land and the new covenant. And now it's actually happening. And so for those first followers of Christ, those disciples would start to see their Jewish beliefs fulfilled, transformed. And that's stunning, because they're coming to see him not as just a teacher or rabbi or a leader, but they're seeing him as the Messiah in the completion of the Old Testament.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
Something about to stunned not necessarily disciples, but just people that were there, people that are maybe not yet disciples. Think about all the servers of the banquet, like those that had to get the wine.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
And fill the water jugs.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
Yeah, when you go to actual Canaan itself and you go underneath the church, they have a not necessarily the stone jar that was there, but it's representative of the time and they're huge. You don't move them, meaning that you move yourself to go get water. I was a banquet server in my previous life, you know, and one of the things that you would hate to do is like have to like scurry to get a bunch of stuff to try to make up for a loss during the banquet itself. Like you just feel like you're just trying to fill in a hole that keeps like getting bigger and bigger, and that's in some sense, what like those workers would have had to do is they had to go get multiple buckets of water and then bring it back so that then Jesus could actually make that into wine. So at first they would have been like why are we doing this? Like what's the point?
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
of this in the midst of us running out of wine. Shouldn't we be going to the neighbors or somewhere else to try to find something, not bringing all this water into a jar? So they would have been obviously shocked whenever it became wine.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
And it's also interesting that the wine, that those jugs would have been emptied, right, because they're for ceremony or washing and to be present at this wedding, you would have had to been ritually clean, and so those jugs would have been used to clean the utensils, the bowls, the spoons, their hands themselves, so that everyone could be together in community and in worship and then celebrate, and so all of that water would have been used up over that time period. Those were big jars, right? Yes, six of them, 20 to 30 gallons each.
Jordan Whiteko:
That's a lot of wine for Jesus to make. Did they drink that all? Did they save some of it? Would it be any good if they saved it?
Fr. Chris Pujol:
Well, I'm sure that the Lord's wine is the best vintage and the best. It doesn't have soul fights and all these other things.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
Yeah, totally organic.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
But, go over very well today.
Jordan Whiteko:
Yeah, you can drink a bunch of it and still feel fine tomorrow.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
No headache. Yeah, there's a lot of wine Jordan.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
I don't think they finished it all. You don't think they finished it all.
Jordan Whiteko:
I mean, it sounds like this party was wild.
Fr. Andrew Hamilton:
It was probably like a takeaway. Keep safe. They all took a little jug. They took a little bit of it.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
They had fresh wine skins right For the new wine skins, All right, and it was a long journey back to wherever they were going. They had to stay hydrated. Maybe Jesus took some along with them for the disciples on their next as they continued their journey.
Jordan Whiteko:
Vintage year one. I know it's not year one at that point.
Fr. Chris Pujol:
It goes back directly to that great abundance, because they were never going to go through all that wine at that point. But it shows us now that God's grace is like that wine it's never ending, never failing, and we can continue to draw into those great sisters of His grace and love. My cup of floweth over.