This, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed at Cana in Galilee. He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him. John 2:11
The scene John describes is a wedding feast in a community where friends and family are getting together for a celebration. Jesus attends with his newly acquired disciples and with his mother. They join in the festivity until a problem starts to brew behind the scenes. Somehow Mary found out about it and then she brings the concern to Jesus. “They have no more wine.”
Jesus isn’t interested in getting involved. He’s just completed a big week in which John the Baptist solidified his identity as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He also gained five disciples. His public ministry has barely started. It seems a bit premature to jump right into performing miracles.
Maybe Mary thought Jesus would comfort the people in distress. She may have expected him to have a quiet conversation with the groom and his family to encourage them and to smooth the situation over. But that isn’t how the events played out. Discreetly, Jesus holds a conversation with the servants. His work was completely hidden from the hosting family and from the bridegroom. He didn’t draw any attention to himself as he completely exceeded Mary’s expectations. Her request for him to do something to ease the problem turned into a divine act that transformed the party.
The master of the banquet was quite impressed. “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink. But you have saved the best until now,” he said to the bridegroom.
He knew nothing of where this high-quality wine came from, but the disciples did. Jesus’ glory was revealed to them. In a common family living in an obscure town, glory shines. While saving simple, poor people from a disaster, glory quietly spreads in the form of kindness and compassion.
The disciples witnessed a miracle. It was done with the purpose of growing their faith in him and helping them to believe that he really was the Lamb of God, the Son of God, and all those other things John the Baptist said about him.
Can you remember a time when you were healed, or when an intervention occurred that protected you or provided for a need you had? Any of those situations would qualify as a miracle worked in your life. They don’t have to be big, awe-inspiring events. Miracles can be subtle, taking place in our common everyday lives. We may not even realize we’ve received a miracle until later when we look back and see that our circumstances could have gone very differently from what they did. We could have ended up with worse health complications or with harm done to ourselves or someone in our family.
But instead, we have this sense of being spared, of being rescued, and of being favored. We can’t explain it and we don’t understand it. We can only thank God for his attention to us and celebrate the blessings he has poured into our lives.
The disciples probably felt the same way. They saw Jesus doing his natural activity. To the disciples and to us, miracles are amazing and supernatural. But to Jesus, they are easy, and they are expected. Miracles are intended to help us believe and to grow our faith. Like Mary’s life, the lives of the wedding couple, and the lives of the small-town guests, our lives are filled with the simple, the common, and sometimes the disastrous. Jesus provides when our resources run out. His ways of working are discreet and sometimes hidden. He transforms problems brewing under the surface into invitations to place our faith in him.
