At a wedding in Cana in Galilee a mother said to her son, “They have no wine.” You can almost hear the son saying, “And this is MY problem!” Mary does not tell Jesus what to do — start a GoFundMe page? send his drinking buddies to the wine store? — all that she does is point out the problem. What lies beneath her observation is that the problems of others do impact you, they do require a response from you. Jesus was able with his power to do something about it. I suspect if Mary were here with us today she would say: “they don’t have enough to eat,” “they are living in the cold,” “they have been uprooted from their homes and are refugees,” “they are the victims of war.” She doesn’t tell us what to do about these things but she wants us to know that they have a claim on us. We might not have divine power but we must use what power we have to make this world look a little bit more as God intends it to be.
