Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

What a coverage Mary MacKillop is having! And what a mixed bag of responses!

In the SMH, Friday 15 January 2010, p.10, her forthcoming sainthood is referred to as “the church’s promotion of dark ages superstitious thinking about so-called miracles” and another writer maintains that “prayer should be to God”.  Leaving out the word ‘superstitious’, right on both scores.

In today’s gospel story of the wedding feast at Cana, the miraculous happens and “reveals God’s glory”.  Who works the miracle –
God-in-Jesus or Mary who asks for it?  This event, the “first of his signs’, is actually pre-dark ages by about five hundred years, and the pattern has, therefore, been with us from the dawn of Christianity.  It is enshrined, moreover, in the second half of the Hail Mary, though written at a later date.  This prayer, so precious a part of our Catholic tradition, makes no extravagant claims about Mary but simply asks her to pray for us to her Son:

Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners
now and at the hour of our death.  Amen.

I think most of us have an appreciation of intermediaries.  How many of us, as children, asked, “Mum, will you ask Dad if I can go to the pictures?”- or some such request.  In adulthood we are usually a bit more subtle but still it happens!

How lovely, too, that this first of His signs took place at a wedding, an occasion so full of promise and of joy.

Let us not be as sceptical as our critics when it comes to calling on Our Lady and the saints - canonised or not - to intercede for us in our needs.

                                                                        Helen Ryan OP