1-17-19 - Transformation

(You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.)

Should it surprise us that Jesus could cause vats of water to become wine of the finest order? No more than that he could walk on water or speak palsied limbs into wholeness. As far as I’m concerned, the One who made the molecules that we know as matter can order and reorder them as She likes.

When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, ‘Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.’ Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

This was the first BIG way that Jesus revealed the Life of the Kingdom he came to invite humankind to live in. This Life of God is a grand and cosmic reality; it is also manifest on a sub-atomic, micro level. And one of its most fundamental principles is transformation. That is how God-Life becomes visible, wherever one thing is transformed into another.

In this story, we see water transformed into fine wine, the ordinary into the extraordinary. At our communion tables, we experience ordinary wine transformed into the blood of Christ. Whether or not molecules are altered in that transaction is immaterial (as it were). A spiritual transformation occurs which catalyzes an even deeper transformation: ordinary people are transformed into carriers of God’s Life. The Bread becomes the Body, and then the corporate Body becomes the bread broken again to be shared with the world.

As we allow that Life to take root in us, we experience the deep transformation of our spirits being reshaped by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of the One who took water and made something delicious out of it, even more delicious than pure water, which is pretty amazing itself.

However you are feeling about yourself or your life today, remember this: This Jesus has taken us at our best and our worst, our most faithful and most self-centered, our most creative and least inspired, and has already turned us into wine of rarest vintage to bring life and joy to the people around us. Let’s not only attend this party – let’s bring the wine of life.

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