How often are we like Mary the mother of Jesus? We want, we expect her Son to do what we think needs to be done right now. Not later, not eventually, not in God’s good time but right now!
The first scene is very early in Jesus’s public ministry and is the occasion for what will be His first public miracle. Miracles are those things which God does which are outside of the natural laws as we understand those laws. The event is a wedding celebration in Cana, a small village on the main trade route between Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee and the western coastal plain of Judea. It was also just a few miles north of Mary and Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth.
Jesus doesn’t respond to Mary in the way you might expect—after all, He has the ability. He has already begun to gather disciples around Him and wouldn’t a miracle get His public ministry off to a bigger start? Yet when Mary points out the perceived need to be met, He doesn’t spring into action.
Our second scene is much later in His life, just before one of the three annual festivals when the masses journeyed to Jerusalem for celebrating God’s faithfulness. Jesus is ministering in the north, the region of Galilee, is recognized as a healer, wise speaker and by his growing multitude of disciples as unlike any who had come before—maybe even the Messiah.
Suffice it to say that His brothers were not among his disciples ‘for not even his brothers believed in him.’ Their ‘encouragement’ appears to be for him to show himself off in a larger venue than Galilee. Jesus acknowledges the worldliness of their encouragement to draw a crowd on a bigger stage and says that’s not the way He ministers nor what He seeks. ‘My time has not yet fully come.’
The last occasion is in the final week of His life and He needs no prompting for He know His time:
So what is it that restrains or prompts Jesus regarding actions? There is a pattern of being ‘led by the Holy Spirit’4 and ‘doing the will of My Father’5 which are noted throughout the span of His life. His time was not His own in the sense of responding to His perceptions. Yes, He did meet needs but often the presented need was not what He first addressed. As you read through Jesus’s life, notice the number of times where He talks to seekers drawing out the less apparent inner needs before meeting the more obvious needs. He did turn the water into wine,6 He did ‘also went up to Jerusalem, not publicly but in private’7 and He did make that final trip to Jerusalem before being crucified, dead, buried and then ‘taken up’ into the presence of God the Father. Each time, His walk was in pace with the will and times of God to complete all in God’s fullness of time.
Today’s question is, “Are we aware of God’s timing, being more responsive to Him than to what we see? Are we trusting His perception more than our own?”