Halfway through my studies my colleagues and I were sent to different parishes for five months practise. All the parishes were carefully selected to provide the best quality pastoral work except one. That one had a problem; a young priest had become ill and had had to be released from all his duties. So, the parish needed somebody to take over temporarily. That parish became my home- and workplace for almost half a year. My main duty was preparation of children for first confession and first communion. One part of the preparation was planning the celebration and decorations. You have to know that quite a common attitude at that time was this: a priest had the best idea about decorations, flowers and all those sort of things. It was just the job of parents to realise the priest’s plans. But I knew my limitations: I didn’t have the foggiest idea about many important things. But I knew that many people among the parents were skilful and talented individuals. I asked them to engage in the preparation. The parents quite soon declared some areas that they would be responsible for. A few months later, at the beginning of May, the first communion took place inside an austere and uncompleted, but beautifully decorated new church. That was a fantastic event.
I thought that was a revolutionary way of leading a parish. But I discovered that it was a model well described in the New Testament. One of those descriptions we heard in today’s second reading. Saint Paul listed different gifts: preaching with wisdom, preaching instruction, gift of faith, gift of healing and so on. In other places the Apostle made another list of different gifts or vocations. The key statement we find at the beginning of today’s passage: “these are all sorts of service to be done, but always the same Lord; working in all sorts of different ways in different people, it is the same God who is working in all of them. The particular way in which the Spirit is given to each person is for a good purpose”. When I started to work in our parish I realised, that you, as a community, are close to this model.
There are some people who seem to be rather like a customer, expecting everything to be done and ready at his or her coming. Those people would easily be disappointed or irritated if something in the parish community or celebration goes wrong. Today’s gospel speaks about a miracle. But when we look carefully at the text, we can see many people involved in making this miracle: Mary, Jesus, a steward, servants. Mary’s request we can call a prayer; then she tells the servants what they ought to do. However it seems to be pointless (the guests want to drink wine, not to have a bath) they have to work hard to fill up the jars with more than 130 gallons. The servants bring water in buckets from a well. They hadn’t known that the water would become wine. But they did their best. Eventually the steward has to decide on serving water that had become wine to the wedding guests.
Each of us has particular talents and skills; they are different, but using them together we become a useful and necessary part of a community: of the parish, the village, the town, the country and the world. When we recognize and involve our skills and talents we could come across the greatest miracle in the world: love that overcome evil.