Canter Bridge

Contrary to an attractively sentimental reading, John’s account of the miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee is not about Jesus’ common touch, Mary’s maternal affection, or the Master’s interest in the details of our lives (the embarrassment of an under-stocked wine cellar on wedding day, for example).

The event is, for the writer of the Fourth Gospel, neither a personality profile in narrative format nor what we might call a simple ‘miracle’ nor even a ‘problem’ now shifted to the ‘problem solved’ column. It is a sign. Indeed, it is for the writer nothing less than the first of Jesus’ signs.

The impact on Jesus’ disciples is so violent that the narrator dares the observation that ‘they put their faith in him’ as a result. John does not say that the disciples’ faith was strengthened by what occurred in the Galilean village that day but that—in a manner of speaking—it began there:

On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, ‘They have no more wine.’ ‘Dear woman, why do you involve me?’ Jesus replied. ‘My time has not yet come.’

His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’

Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water’; so they filled them to the brim.

Then he told them, ‘Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.’

They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom asideand said, ‘Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.’

This, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed at Cana in Galilee. He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.

In defense of a sentimentalist reading, we do see Jesus’ at his relational best here. He joins the extended family at the nuptials that would have convened them for a happy occasion, he cares enough to salvage a situation which in an honor/shame context might have set one’s teeth to aching with embarrassment. Good grief, he even allows the drinking to run its scheduled course when it might have been cut short and people returned to their spreadsheets and window cleaning four days earlier than planned.

Yet presented by an infinity of possible solutions to the absence of wine, John’s narrative has Jesus fill ‘six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing’ with miraculous wine.

Just verses after the Johannine Prologue’s enigmatic observation that ‘the Law was given through Moses … grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’, John turns to a gently phrased story about the progress of redemptive drama on a needy couple’s wedding day.

In the light of present-day sensitivities, it is important to notice John’s rather nuanced presentation. On the one hand, Jesus employs the very implements of Jewish purification when he might have snapped his fingers at the cosmos and said ‘More wine now!’ On the other, he turns the purifying water—quite common stuff, really—into remarkably good wine.

A good gift is made better. Grace overflows grace. Messianic portents take shape alongside a young couple’s palpable relief. Disciples begin to believe.