More than we expect

In our church calendar the Gospel reading for today relates the story of the wedding at Cana. It is a familiar story to Christians but its very familiarity can obscure one of its main points  and that is, that God’s methods are unfamiliar to us. Through the prophet Isaiah the Lord told His people

“ my thoughts are not your thoughts neither are your ways My ways.” Nevertheless knowing a thing intellectually is very different from experiencing it.  John Henry Newman  said that experiencing god’s work within the world is, for humans, like waiting and listening for a clock to strike, and yet when it does, it startles us.  Just so, it ought to be a little unsettled by the wedding at Cana. It is the fulfillment of grand prophecies, as the inclusion of this Sunday’s Old Testament lesson from the book of Isaiah, suggests.  At the wedding at Cana we see the Builder of Zion rejoicing over his Bride. We see fulfilled the prophetic expectation that the Advent of the Messiah would mean an abundance of wine. Jesus here takes it upon Himself the traditional responsibility of the Bridegroom of providing a lot of good wine for the guests at the feast. Jesus’ mother is also conspicuous in this story, perhaps even oddly so.  John begins by telling us that “the mother of Jesus was there” and that Jesus and disciples had “ also” been invited..  It must be said that although the Gospel is not about Mary, nevertheless she is all about the Gospel.  And we find her at Cana fulfilling her divine vocation that was spoken to her by the angel at the Annunciation. Here too, perhaps, there is a foretaste of the sword which the aged Simeon said would pierce Mary’s soul at Golgotha.  When Mary tells Jesus about the embarrassing shortage of wine His reply might make us wince when Jesus says “ Woman, what concern is that to you and Me?  My hour has not yet come.” Here the identity of her divine Son stretches beyond the horizon of Mary’s understanding.  Perhaps these words were painful for her to hear.  Discovering Jesus to be other, and always more, than we thought Him to be can be acutely painful. And the pain of this experience is proportional to the love that had bound us to Him in the first place.

But Mary’s word to the servants exemplifies her superlative faith in God, on account of which her cousin Elizabeth  had pronounced her blessed among women. Undaunted by her son’s admonition, led by her mother’s love and her heroic faith she says to the servants “ Do whatever He tells you” and we suddenly come to the crux of the matter.  Suddenly Jesus “hour” has indeed come.  He turns water into an abundance of good wine and in doing so He revealed His glory.” And the story concludes with John telling us that those who had eyes to see “believed in Him.”

I wonder how many of us today find we have the eyes to see and just as importantly how many of us believe in Jesus and how many of us get more than we expect?