Is 62:1-5 / Cor 12:4-11 / Jn 2:1-11
There’s a Peanuts cartoon which shows Linus listening attentively to his sister Lucy. Now Lucy has a really tough reputation, but it seems that she may have changed.
“I’ve decided that I should be an evangelist,” she says. “You know that kid that sits behind me at school? I convinced him that my religion is better than his religion.”
“No kidding!” says Linus. “How’d you do that?”
“Easy,” says Lucy. “I hit him with my lunchbox!”
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Some things never change! We say that often and with good reason. But Sunday’s gospel urges upon us a very different way of thinking. As Jesus takes those jars of ordinary water and transforms them into an extraordinary wine, He’s doing more than just a simple kindness for an embarrassed host. He’s assuring us that God has the power to transform us, to take the ordinary in us and make it extraordinary.
God has the power and the desire. All that is needed is that we accept Him as our full-time partner. You’ve heard our Protestant friends ask, “Have you accepted Christ as your personal Savior?” This is what they are talking about: a serious partnership, with no exclusionary clauses, a partnership that puts everything on the table and is ready to do real business.
There’s a long distance between that kind of intense partnership and the cool, arms-length, episodic relationship with God that we settle for so often. And that’s a real tragedy because an occasional, arms-length relationship with God yields no growth, no change, and therefore no real satisfaction.
Why? Because it withholds so much, hides so much, and puts so much of life off limits that God can’t even get close to the parts of us that need Him most. In a word, keeping God at arm’s length is a sure recipe for slowly rusting into oblivion, a sure recipe for sadness.
Jesus’ miracle at Cana says, “Don’t settle for rusting away or for the sadness and despair that go with it. Don’t settle for what you call survival, but that is not survival at all!
We are called to be extraordinary, each in our own way. And with God as our full-time partner, extraordinary is what we will become, slowly, one step at a time, in a partnership that will last for all eternity!
