Ordinary Miracles
Homily for Sunday, January 19, 2025: Second Sunday of Ordinary Time
Do you have a favorite movie about the life of Jesus?
There are many to choose from, some better than others or suited to different tastes. Most recently my wife and I have been watching the Chosen series which is popular and very well done.
Though I find that it, like most every other dramatization I’ve seen of the life of Christ, tends to do one thing that always strikes me as not quite right. I feel that these movies and shows never quite get the right tone for the miracles.
Maybe it’s in part the nature of the medium; everything tends to be a lot more showy with big set-pieces, changes in music and lighting to telegraph to the audience that something big is happening! Jesus strikes a religious-card pose, the crowds gasp and look on in wonder.
And I certainly enjoy those kinds of movies – the big special-effects blockbuster spectacles – up to a point. But after a while it becomes too much. After a while I want something small. I enjoy the ordinary stories of regular people without earth-shattering consequences at stake.
And I find that, usually, the Gospel descriptions of Jesus’s miracles are more like that. Today’s Gospel reading is a good example.
As someone who has done some film and theater directing in the past, I look at this passage and imagine Jesus and his disciples all seated at a table at this wedding celebration. Sitting casually, hanging out, enjoying the company and the festivities. And in my staging of this scene, Jesus never gets up from that table.
His Blessed Mother comes to him: they have no wine.
He shakes his head. It’s not my problem. Not yet my time.
She gets up from the table, stops a passing waiter. Do whatever he tells you, she says.
Jesus sighs and gives some instruction. Fill those jars with water. Draw some out and bring it to the headwaiter.
And then, the Gospel tells us, the headwaiter tastes the water that had become wine. When did this happen? The text doesn’t tell us. But somehow, in the course of the waitstaff going about their jobs and doing what Jesus tells them to do, somehow when nobody is paying attention, water becomes wine.
I have to wonder how many people at that wedding feast went on celebrating, went on drinking, partying, never realizing the miracle that had happened in their midst.
It’s a suitable meditation, I think, for Ordinary Time. As we leave behind the Christmas season and look ahead toward Lent and the preparation for Easter, we can take a month or so to remember that God often does his best work in the most ordinary of ways.
How often, in our own lives, in our own prayers and petitions to God, how often do we hope for the Hollywood miracle? Looking for clouds to part, a ray of light to shine down on us, the background orchestration swells… and while we wait for all that we might just miss the small subtle miracles happening all around us.
Often, it’s just ordinary people doing their ordinary work of the moment that brings the Lord’s miracles into being.
This is what St. Paul is telling us in the second reading. Different spiritual gifts, different forms of service for each of us, all from the same Holy Spirit. God gives each of us our own gifts, our own talents, our own tasks to do in this life. Maybe something as simple as drawing a taste of water from a jug and bringing it to the headwaiter. A seemingly simple, unremarkable, ordinary kind of task.
As he enumerates the different gifts of the spirit, St. Paul mentions “Mighty Deeds,” and that’s probably what we usually think of when we think of miracles. Like raising Lazarus from the dead – some things the Gospel does give the Hollywood treatment.
We might read about these too in the lives of the Saints – levitation and bilocation; taming wild beasts; even saints who were beheaded then carried their head for six miles and preached a sermon before giving in to death. We’re told that we’re all called to be Saints, but if these kinds of things are what’s expected of the saints it might seem intimidating.
That’s why we pause now to remember the miracle of the ordinary – what St. Therese of Lisieux called little things done with great love. Ordinary saints, like Therese’s parents - Saints Louis and Zelie, whose miraculous Mighty Deed was to raise their daughter to be a Saint. Or Saint Theresa of Calcutta and Dorothy Day, whose devotion to Therese and her Little Way led them to do more than they ever would have thought.
As we go about the rest of this day, the week ahead, we can pause to reflect on Christ at work in our lives. We can recall the words of his Blessed Mother, telling us to do whatever he tells you.