THE WEDDING FEAST AT CANA

SECOND SUNDAY OF THE YEAR | 19 JANUARY 2025 | JOHN 2:1-11

Coming as close to the beginning of John’s gospel as it does, the wedding feast at Cana is, from a literary point of view, a strange opening: weddings are usually happy endings. But John chooses to begin his gospel in this way because the ‘happy ending’ has already happened: and everything else in his gospel is to be viewed through the prism of that happy ending. The wedding feast at Cana thus complements the gospel’s majestic prologue, setting before the reader the import and thrust of the entire gospel.

The happy ending is, of course, Jesus Himself, risen and glorified: the miracle at the wedding feast is a sort of anticipated resurrection story. That’s why it begins with the words, “On the third day”, already established code by the time this gospel was written, for the ‘day of resurrection’. In John’s understanding, this cheering account of Jesus producing wine from water (and, incidentally, thereby saving the groom’s reputation by ensuring the party didn’t end early), firmly fixes the perspective that underpins his whole gospel and, indeed, the Gospel, the Good News, as such. Why else would John go to the trouble of registering two salient details about the wine, namely, its quality and quantity? Pitchers of water such as these, intended not for drinking but purification rites, were a standard size. What therefore resulted from Jesus’ benign intervention was, in more familiar terms, a breathtaking 88 cases or 1,066 bottles of the first-century Palestinian equivalent of Château Pétrus.

John speaks of this miracle as the first of the ‘signs’, the signs, that is, by and through which Jesus discloses his glory. He goes on to say, here and throughout the rest of his gospel, that those who witnessed these signs “saw and believed”. Their eyes were opened and, as a result, like the water, they too were transformed. Two miracles, in other words, take place: the transformation of water into wine and the transformation of the disciples’ lives through the gift of faith, by which the glory of God’s love is borne in upon them (and us), represented on this occasion by the gift of an endless supply of seriously good wine.

But John is making another crucial point. The transforming, life-changing glory of God doesn’t appear only on the clouds of heaven in splendour, or within the confines of the Temple or, by extension, from within a ‘churchly’ existence. The glory of God is disclosed first and foremost from within our everyday experience, from within the whole of created reality, but especially from within our relationships, even at an otherwise insignificant village wedding feast.

Notice also that this transformation takes place in response to his mother’s plea. The wedding feast at Cana is one of only two stories in John’s gospel that involve the mother of Jesus. (Interestingly, John never calls her ‘Mary’.) One, this one, comes at the beginning of the gospel, the other at the end, at the Crucifixion. Both involve enigmatic dialogues, and both stress the unique relationship which Jesus has with his mother, as we all do with our own mothers. The upshot of both is powerfully to affirm Jesus’ humanity.

And there’s a further layer of symbolism: the water turned into wine wasn’t just any old water, but specifically, we’re told, the water prescribed by the Law for ritual purification. John’s point here is that Jesus Himself is the Law’s fulfilment: Jesus is God, Love Itself, not a means to an end, as are saviour figures in many religious traditions, but the end itself, God-with-us.

Life in abundance, therefore, is to be found not in the Law, not in any law, but in what is called, metaphorically, by Jesus himself the ‘New Law’: “A new law, I give you, love one another, as I have loved you.” This ‘law’, the ‘law’ of the Spirit, as John (and Aquinas) calls it, is written in our hearts, not on tablets of stone. Accordingly, “He who abides in love, abides in God.”