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The WEDDING at CANA
Table of Contents INTRODUCTION The “mysteries of the life of Jesus” are, as has already been pointed out in these pages, a seldom-visited topos in theology. This relative neglect may appear to be justified by the importance of maintaining a distinction between the economy of salvation and the intradivine teologia: theology, many would say, is primarily about God’s eternal being and not about his temporal actions on the stage of the world. Without wishing for an instant to call into question God’s transcendence, we need to hold fast to the admittedly scandalous claim that the events of God’s saving economy have implications for what we take God’s eternal being to be like in the first place. For this reason, the mysteries of the life of Jesus are not just a kind of colorful picture gallery to be viewed for relaxation when the serious work of theology is finished; they are sources for theological understanding itself. Of course, the mysteries of Jesus’ life cannot function as such sources unless they are reread in light of the Resurrection and in the Holy Spirit. The theology of the mysteries is necessarily a pneumatic one. The mystery of the Wedding at Cana, to which the first part of the current issue of Communio is devoted, highlights in a particular way this interplay of the Spirit and the flesh, because, as Peter Henrici shows in his “The Miracle of Cana,” it is a mystery of the Incarnation as the eschatological fulfillment of the spousal relation between God and humanity that is inaugurated in the Old Covenant. Since Mary plays an indispensable role in this fulfillment, she occupies the center of attention in José Granados’s “Through Mary’s Memory to Jesus’ Mystery,” which explores how the Holy Spirit makes Mary’s memory the womb of faith in the Incarnation and, therefore, of the Church. Complementing Granados’s account of Mary, Giorgio Buccellati, in “The Prophetic Dimension of Joseph,” marshals the resources of archeology and philology to make the case that the New Testament portrays Joseph as a prophet of the Incarnation of the Son of God in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Finally, David S. Crawford’s “Of Spouses, the Real World, and the ‘Where’ of Christian Marriage” argues that the virginal/spousal relation between Jesus and Mary depicted in the account of the Wedding at Cana is at the foundation of the sacramentality of Christian marriage. The next two articles deal with the question of just how deeply the trinitarian communion that the mysteries of Jesus’ life impart touch the heart of reality. In “Communio: A Theological Journey,” a reflection prepared for a conference in Rome in 2005 on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Nicholas J. Healy shows that a conviction of the literally cosmic sweep of Christian eschatology inspired the founding of the journal and needs to guide its future development. Stratford Caldecott examines a facet of this world-embracing universality: in “Beyond ‘Unity’: An Approach to Inter-Spiritual Dialogue,” he argues that “deep ecumenism,” while rejecting arrogant claims to own the Truth, finds the “transcendent unity of religions,” not in an undifferentiated One, but in the Trinity revealed in the flesh of Jesus. Retrieving the Tradition complements the reflection on the universality of ecclesial communion with one of the founding documents of the review. Since Healy’s article takes as one of its reference points Hans Urs von Balthasar’s “Communio: A Program,” we reprint the text here. Notes and Comments returns to the topic of Cana with Holger Zaborowski’s “‘Do whatever he tells you!’: A Meditation on the Wedding at Cana,” which considers how the language of the biblical text mediates and forms part of this mystery of the life of Jesus as an inexhaustible mystery. In a final selection, “The Cross as the Locus of Truth: Joseph Ratzinger’s Meditations on the Way of the Cross,” Jan-Heiner Tück briefly presents the theological core of then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s contemplation of the via crucis, an ancient devotion that provides a window onto some central mysteries of the life of Jesus. AJW Go to Table of Contents. | |
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