Miracle in the Mundane

I was chatting with some folks this past week about how short the Christmas season was this year. Part of that is because whenever we have a long Advent, as we did this year, the Church’s Christmas celebrations will necessarily be shorter. But part of the reason too why Christmas might feel like ages ago – even though Christmas Day was just three weeks ago yesterday – is that we’ve gotten back to the normal routine of daily life, with its various worries and difficulties. And now the new year has brought new challenges, too, like the recent surge in covid cases, that’s affected our lives and the lives of family and friends. It’s enough to leave us feeling stressed, maybe even a little depressed, wondering where all the joy of the holiday season went.

Fortunately, for those of us feeling a little down in the dumps, our readings today bring us some Good News. These first few weeks of Ordinary Time still contain vestiges of Epiphany-tide, a season we used to celebrate after Christmas where we continued to reflect upon what means to have God’s presence among us in the person of Jesus. One of the episodes for reflection in Epiphany-tide is precisely the story that we hear in the Gospel, the wedding feast at Cana.

Adam van Noort, Wedding at Cana (c. 1620)

At first glance, this first miracle of Jesus may seem a little unimpressive, perhaps even embarrassing for pious Christians. Is Jesus using his divine power to simply keep the party going? This superficial way of looking at things underestimates the value of what it means to have the God-Man fully with us and among us. His power is able to touch our reality – and yes, transform our lives – not only in big and showy ways but even in the more ordinary realities of daily life. It’s true that transforming water into wine is not as critically important as some of Jesus’s later miracles: healing the sick, curing the blind and the lame, raising the dead. But this first miracle of Jesus shows us the degree to which God desires to make even the ordinary parts of our lives extraordinary, and to bring his power to even the mundane challenges of our experience.

Of course, whether God will do that is partly dependent upon our response. “Do whatever he tells you,” Mary says to the servers. Maybe these servants had other thoughts about how to fix the problem, but they put their trust in the power of Jesus, even if it seemed pointless to believe wine could somehow come from plain water. Sometimes, we want God’s help in the really big matters – to fix that relationship, to get that big promotion, to help that family member with their illness or addiction, whatever it may be – but the rest of the time, we think we can handle things on our own. That’s not really an attitude rooted in faith, however. The likelihood is that unless we put ourselves in God’s hands in the smaller moments, with the more mundane matters, then we probably won’t really have sufficient faith that he can act in those larger ways. As Jesus tells the disciples in another part of John’s Gospel, “Without me, you can do nothing.” 

And friends, perhaps, that is the most important takeaway for us today. More than any thing God might fix in our lives, what we most truly need from him is he himself. It’s fine to ask for God’s help in big matters and small, in things that are very important and in the day-to-day things that we need routinely. But we should realize that what really keeps us going is not any blessing we may ask for, but rather our communion with him, and learning to rely totally upon that, and not anything else.

As we prepare to receive his Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar, let’s deepen our faith in his ability to do that: to help us to rely completely on him and on him alone. “Without me, you can do nothing,” Jesus says, and may we respond, “Yes, Lord, and with you, we can do anything, and with you, we need nothing more.”