Being Enough: Speaking to the Soul, January 13, 2022

John 2:1-11

The failure of hospitality that Jesus encounters while he and his mother are guests at a wedding jumps out at me every time I read our passage from John for this coming Sunday. I have always found it fascinating that this miracle, which only occurs in John’s gospel, is the first of the seven signs in that gospel. It’s rather a small miracle, after all, performed off the main stage in a tiny backwoods town in a tiny backwoods region that no one gave much thought to.

Hospitality back then was a much bigger deal than it is nowadays. The notions of hospitality in the culture of first century Palestine often required people to take in strangers into their own homes, and to give those same strangers whatever they requested, even if that meant that the host had to do without.

When you read carefully, probably the only people who knew that a miracle had taken place at all were Jesus, his mother Mary, a handful of servants whose arms were probably aching from toting perhaps 180 gallons of water around, and some of his newly-called disciples. The people hosting the wedding apparently had no idea what happened. And yet, if the wine had actually run out, especially in that culture, it would have brought shame down upon the hosts. After all, wine was a symbol of the blessing of God, of the abundance of God’s gifts. It was also a matter of practicality, being safer to drink than water at that time.

And here’s where our gospel speaks to our time today. We live in a time in which cries of “There’s not enough!” pervade nearly every single second of our lives. We live in a consumer society, one that only functions if people are led to believe that the way to happiness is through how much they can accumulate. “He who dies with the most toys, wins” say the bumper stickers. And so people toil away, so that they can spend, so that maybe they cannot feel the emptiness inside that is the foundational cause of our discontent to begin with.

But then it goes deeper. Society tells too many of us that we ourselves are "not enough." Not skinny enough. Not smart enough. Not tech-savvy enough. Not pretty enough. Not young enough. Not old enough. Not talented enough. Not rich enough.

And that extends outward. We are told that there is not enough to go around. We have to ruthlessly, zealously guard what little we have, because the scarcity mindset that runs our culture has convinced us that there is never enough.

But that’s where the miracle is. Jesus comes to us in our common struggles just like he showed up at that small town wedding, and assures us that, no, there IS enough. Every time we gather around God’s table, every time we share what we have with others and don’t worry about running out for ourselves, we participate in the abundant life and love of God, where there is always enough, and more besides. Where the best stuff is just as available at the end as it was in the beginning.

Just as Jesus turns water into wine, Jesus works within ordinary people, like you and me, because he knows we have the potential to be transformed by his gospel into the good stuff- the best- by God’s transforming love and call to each of us. We are enough—and Jesus chooses us to work his miracles in the world today. That’s more than enough.

This essay was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on January 13, 2022.