Being With Jesus:
John 2:11
This miracle at Cana in Galilee —turning water into wine at a wedding—was Jesus’ first public demonstration of his heaven-sent power. And his disciples believed that he really was the Messiah.
Turning water into wine! Really? For your first miracle, you choose to keep the party guests happy by miraculously making sure there is a free flow of adult beverages. Wouldn’t it have been more impressive in announcing to the world that you, the Messiah, have arrived by raising a dead person back to life or by performing some other more worthy miracle—like supplying a starving family with food or creating money for a destitute widow or by healing a young child dying with leukemia?
Doesn’t running out of wine at a wedding seem like a first-world problem? And doesn’t God stooping to supply the new, improved wine for a wedding reception seem a bit frivolous? So why this frivolous miracle as his inaugural miracle?
Well, only God knows the answer to that question, but here’s what I think: what might seem like a frivolous miracle is really the introduction of an extravagant God.
You see, many of us have been conditioned to believe that God doesn’t intervene in relatively unimportant human affairs when more pressing concerns are on his plate, like war, global warming, human trafficking or widespread injustice. We have trouble believing that the Almighty intervenes in our ordinary, unimportant, trivial affairs.
But does he? Well, sometimes! Can I expect that of him? Does he care about my wedding reception or my favorite sports teaming winning the big game or my missing iPhone? Should I really be bothering him with my ordinary, unimportant stuff?
I don’t mean to be irreverent, but it doesn’t hurt to ask! Jesus helped his mom, who was likely coordinating this wedding, out of a jam by changing ceremonial water, which theologically, may represent the limits of human fallenness, into party wine, which represents the liberality of divine grace. Jesus didn’t have to. It wasn’t on his agenda. He wasn’t responding to a life and death need. But he did it anyway.
What that shows us is something pretty cool: The extravagant nature of this God revealed in a miracle you and I probably wouldn’t have dared to ask for.
That’s the God I want and need every day of my life. And that’s the God we’re offered in Jesus!
This “frivolous” miracle brings a distant, unreachable God out of the heavenly realms and right into our humble realities. It’s significant in the Gospel of John’s account that verse 11 says the very first place Jesus chose to “reveal his glory” was somewhere very ordinary. He chose a home for his first miracle. He went public at a wedding—a common human event, in the small village of Cana—a wide spot in the road.
So what does that tell us? Simply this: Jesus desires to be real—and to reveal God—in your daily ordinariness, too. He wants to reveal glory—that is, God’s manifest presence—in the nitty-gritty reality of your life: your marriage, family, work, school and private world. It also means that he cares about what you do in your ordinary days—your marriage, job, school, private times—your life outside the sacredness of church. God doesn’t want to just show up for you at church on Sunday mornings. He wants to be real, and powerful and close, even in your unexciting, uneventful moment-by-moment world.
Nothing about your life is too insignificant to qualify for God’s extravagant grace—apparently not even the beverages on the menu at your party!
That’s the God you and I want and need every day of our lives. And that’s the God we’re offered in Jesus!
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“Consider God’s generosity toward you rather than your own unworthiness in his sight, and live in his strength, rather than in the thoughts of your own weakness. (St. Vincent De Paul)
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