Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Wedding at Cana
John 2:1-12
1 The third day, there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there. · WEB
The first sign is worked on a social embarrassment, and only the servants know it happened.
The third day, there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee. Jesus' mother was there John 2:1.
The first sign in this Gospel is not a healing or a raising. It is wine at a party, and the problem it solves is embarrassment.
That is worth registering before anything else. A village wedding lasted days and the host's obligation was absolute; running out of wine would be remembered and repeated for years, and there was no remedy once the shops were shut. Nothing was at stake except a family's standing in a small town, and it is where he begins.
When the wine ran out, Jesus' mother said to him, "They have no wine" John 2:3. She does not ask. She states the situation, which is a form of asking that expects to be understood.
"Woman, what does that have to do with you and me? My hour has not yet come" John 2:4.
The address sounds cold in English and was not; it is the ordinary respectful form, and he uses it again from the cross when he provides for her John 19:26. What is being refused is not the request but her standing to make it — a mother's claim on a son, which is being quietly set aside because the work he is starting does not run on family authority.
My hour is this book's phrase for the cross, and it recurs through eleven chapters as not yet until it becomes the hour has come John 12:23. So the first time he declines to act, he declines by referring to his death — which makes the wine at this wedding an anticipation of something rather than an isolated kindness.
His mother said to the servants, "Whatever he says to you, do it" John 2:5.
She is undeterred and she does not press him. She turns and instructs the staff, which is faith of an unusually practical kind, and it is the last recorded thing she says in Scripture.
Now there were six water pots of stone set there after the Jews' way of purifying John 2:6.
The detail is exact and it is the sign's meaning. Stone, because stone did not contract uncleanness. Six of them, holding twenty or thirty gallons each — well over a hundred gallons in total. And their purpose was ritual washing, the endless rinsing of hands and vessels that kept a household observant.
What he fills is the machinery of purification, and what comes out of it is the wine of a wedding feast.
"Fill the water pots with water." So they filled them up to the brim John 2:7. Nothing is added and no gesture is made. The only instruction is to fill them, and then to draw and carry.
The ruler of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and didn't know where it came from (but the servants who had drawn the water knew) John 2:9.
The parenthesis is the writer's, and it is one of the best sentences in the chapter. The master of ceremonies has no idea; the men who carried the buckets know exactly. Throughout this Gospel the people who find out are the ones who did what they were told.
"You have kept the good wine until now!" John 2:10. He congratulates the bridegroom, who is as mystified as he is, and in doing so states the sign's point better than he knows: the order of the world is that things start well and decline, and here it has been reversed.
This beginning of his signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him John 2:11.
Revealed his glory is the prologue's word John 1:14, and it has been revealed at a party in Cana , a village nobody had heard of, in an act the guest of honor never noticed. That is how glory works in this book, and it is why the last of it will look like an execution.
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