I wonder if you have ever expected God to show you he exists by asking for a miracle? This might be true if you don’t consider yourself to have faith, but have wanted a miracle for yourself or someone you love. I know I have. So now I want to ask – who is God to you? Is he a get-out-of-jail-free card to be used upon breathing your last? Is God a fairy godmother, called on to fix things in rough moments? Or, as the above – to do something extreme for you or a friend when life seems to teeter on the edge? There is a story in the bible of Jesus turning water into wine. I can remember as a child after hearing the story at Sunday School trying this out at home. Needless to say it didn’t work!
So why did Jesus perform this miracle? What was the point? It could have been simply to help the family out – to save them from the embarrassment of not having enough. I also happen to think that this was Jesus showing that he can meet us in the ordinary. He takes the ordinary – waiting staff at a wedding, water and jars – and uses them to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary. This was Jesus’ style – the feeding of the 5000 by five loaves and two fish – again the ordinary into the extraordinary.
You might well be asking ‘where is Jesus showing the extraordinary in my ordinary?’ If we can’t see it, maybe we are holding on to unhelpful images of a god far away, who is disinterested and uninvolved. God isn’t a party trick God whose job it is to entertain us.
Maybe we don’t expect to see God at work in the mundane everyday.
Mary, his mother, expected Jesus to do something. She had seen something extraordinary in the ordinary – her elderly cousin falling pregnant; shepherds; angels; visitors from far away. Mary had become a seasoned spotter of the extraordinary. The images we have of God will influence our expectations which will influence what we see. If I think that God is far away, disinterested and mostly grumpy, then I have no expectation of seeing God in the ordinary.
If I have learned anything from Mary’s experiences and Jesus’ life it surely is that God is with us in the weft and weave of life. And then I begin to see the extraordinary in the ordinary – the unexpected encounter; encouragements coming from different sources at the same time; unexpected provisions; someone leans in at the right time offering support and kindness; the lightness of heart that skips as you see light bursting from the clouds into the gloom; a shooting star against a background of twinkling constellations; the song of the blackbird that sounds like hope as spring approaches. Then I will know that Jesus is God in flesh, God with fingerprints, God in the midst of us: shoulder to shoulder, cheek by jowl, heart to heart. This is God who transforms the ordinary.
Every. Single. Day.
Jo Hurst