Sometimes I wonder if God shakes his God-head at the tiny scope of my prayers. “Please, let me be on time!” “Please, heal this cold.” “Please, tell me what to preach.” The Maker of Heaven and Earth invites us to pray for earthquakes to subside and wars to cease, and most of us don’t even pray about cancer and terrorism. Do we think we’re only worth the small stuff, or that God is finished doing the big things?
If we based our prayer life on what we read in the gospels, we’d pray about big things all the time – abundance beyond measure, even beyond need. Twelve baskets of leftovers, and here, at Jesus’ first public miracle, more wine of greater excellence than the whole town of Cana could get through:
Now standing there were six stone water-jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, ‘Fill the jars with water.’ And they filled them up to the brim.
Did he use those jars because of their size? Or because of their purpose, for ritual baths? Are we to make a link between purification and the wine that is to be manifest in these vessels? Those who go in for a more allegorical approach to biblical interpretation would say every detail, especially n the Fourth Gospel, is fair game. But I'm going to focus on their size and capacity. Jesus wasn’t making only a little bit of table wine; he was crafting vats of the finest vintage. Because that’s how God rolls.
“Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap,” Jesus says later, exhorting his followers to generosity. (Luke 6:38). The Realm of God is not a place of just enough. Sometimes "just enough" is our experience, often enough, it would seem, to dampen our expectation of God’s radically abundant provision.
Maybe we need to recall those times when we’ve experienced more than enough, when the jars were filled to the brim, when the gift was completely out of proportion to our sense of deserving or ability to respond in kind. Remembering those times can help us raise our expectations of God’s power and love. Another thing that does that for me is reading healing books. Those stories of God’s power to transform situations, sometimes against all natural hope, inspire me to greater boldness in my prayers, and bolder prayers lead to greater capacity to engage in God’s mission.
The next time you feel the pinch of scarcity – or even just the fear of it – call to mind a large stone water jar, filled to the brim with water, a little sloshing over. And then realize it’s not water at all, but thousands of dollars worth of wine, all for the taking and sharing.
And then realize God wants to fill us to the brim with Life, transformed into grace for the world. Are we vessels with enough capacity? There’s a prayer…
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