As someone who can be the tiniest bit rigid about my plans and my time, one thing I love about Jesus is how willing he was to be interrupted. Several of my favorite gospel stories start with a formula: While Jesus was going about his business, something happened – a person was in need of healing, someone came forward with a question, crowds came upon him. The story of feeding the five thousand begins with Jesus alone in a boat, mourning the death of John the Baptist, until the crowds chased him down, interrupting his grief in spectacular fashion. And yet, he manages to do the loving thing despite his plans being upended.
Showing grace when interrupted is, if not superhuman, certainly not something I can do without a lot of intervention by the Holy Spirit, so it is one of the things about Jesus that seems the most divine to me. But maybe Jesus wasn’t always this way. The first time we see Jesus asked for help in John’s gospel, at the wedding feast at Cana, it certainly doesn’t seem like he’s happy to be interrupted.* Mary’s request is initially met with, if not annoyance, something decidedly less than enthusiastic engagement. “Why do you involve me? My hour has not yet come,” he says. He’s at the wedding to celebrate, not to be put to work.
What happens next is my favorite part of this passage: Mary acts if Jesus has never said a thing. Just completely ignores both his question and his protest. Instead she instructs the servants to do whatever Jesus tells them, trusting that he won’t just turn away. Was that just a hunch? Or faith? A mother’s intuition? I’m not sure. But somehow Mary’s response moves Jesus, and he gives instructions. This is still not the intimate, hands-on Jesus we see in later miracles – he doesn’t even get out of his chair. But he is roused to compassion; not the ultimate act of love that he is already anticipating, but helping nonetheless.
Perhaps Mary has shown him something new about his call that he had not understood. Perhaps the Jesus we know from later Gospel stories, who so gently touches everything that hurts, only came to be because Mary knew this kind of love existed within him even before Jesus himself did. The kind of love that doesn’t mind being interrupted, because every interruption is an opportunity for grace.
-- Erica Lloyd, Seekers Church
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“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will be constantly crossing our paths and canceling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions. We may pass them by, preoccupied with our more important tasks.… When we do that we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised athwart our path to show us that, not our way, but God’s way must be done.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, page 99.
