Today and for the next seven Sundays, we will be in Ordinary Time, liturgically.  This past Monday, we celebrated the Baptism of Jesus when He heard that He was the Beloved.  Beginning with that event, Jesus went into His ordinary time of making all time extraordinary by blessing every moment of existence with His grace.

So we begin our journey into our ordinary time by some changings.  In the First Reading we hear today about the new names by which God will be calling Israel.  Instead of former names of abandoned and forsaken, Her new name will be “espoused” and “My Delight”.  

God is seen as a bridegroom rejoicing over His bride and God is pictured as marrying Israel.  There are some words of great change meant for all of God’s people.  God is changing image and that change, changes the image that the people have of themselves.

The Gospel seems to have a marriage theme as well, but change is in the air.  John recalls a time when Jesus and His mother, along with His apostles attend a wedding.  The unexpected happens, they run out of wine.  Chaos, disaster, abandonment enter as a backdrop for the Changer.  

Water, an image of chaos, is brought to Jesus in six stone jars.  Six days of bringing order out of chaos and six jars of chaos changed into six signs of life, meaning and order.  This is not a ceremony of human marriage at all, but a reenactment of how Jesus is the New Creation, wedded to us and committed to our changing from disorder and wandering into our being “The Beloved of God” in Christ.  The wine that has been saved for the last is the life lived under the intoxication of Jesus’ teaching and love.  As the first day of creation was a bringing order from the abyss, so this changing of water into wine is the “beginning of His signs”.  And so revealed His glory, and His disciples began to believe in Him.”

In a strange way, the history of God’s revelation is a study in punctuation.  Creation begins as an exclamation point.  Human response is a question mark.  God continues the conversation with commas and semicolons, always hinting that there was more to be said.  With Jesus there are more definite statements ending with periods and more rearranging which end where God began, with double exclamation points.  With Jesus, God is saying “yes!”  

Our ordinary time is spent in allowing His embrace of us as His new creation, His new family, His new wine, takes place slowly.  The way we know our driving under His influence is that we allow the waves of disorder and chaos to roll up on our shores and flow back where they came from.  God takes delight in us, imagine that!  In God’s eyes we are diamonds and not coal!

Redemption is not a legal experience, but a creative result of God’s loving relationship with us.  We are to change our minds about ourselves and the about others and then about all of creation, because we have changed our thoughts about what God sees us to be.  Water into wine, diamonds out of coal, beloved from disowned; these are all changes that take time, ordinary time, which is made extraordinary by His having married us.