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 hurricanes 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 big things?
If we based our prayers 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, fishnets full to bursting, and here, Jesus’ first miracle, more excellent wine than the people 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 link purification with the wine that is to be manifest in these vessels? Those who take an allegorical approach to biblical interpretation would say every detail, especially in the Fourth Gospel, is fair game. Today, let’s focus on 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.
The Realm of God is not a place of "just enough." “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). But sometimes "just enough" is our experience – often enough, it would seem, to dampen our expectation of God’s radically abundant provision.
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. (Just looking out my windows does that for me… I’ll never know why I am so blessed to live here.) Remembering those times can help raise our expectations of God’s power and love.
Another thing that does that for me is reading books about the healing ministry. 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 bolder participation 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 precious liquid, 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. Do we have enough capacity for what God wants to give us? Do through us? There’s a prayer…
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