Chapter One

You have kept the good wine until now

The Setting

We begin with a wedding (read John 2:1-11). There was a marriage feast in Cana, a small town among the rolling hills of Galilee in northern Israel. Cana was situated along the Via Mare, a major thoroughfare of the region, about 25 miles from the Mediterranean Sea. The inland region of Galilee provided abundant harvests of grain and fruits; Cana being known for its terraced gardens and pomegranate trees. It was some 30 miles to the shores of the great Lake of Gennesaret; also known as the Sea of Tiberius or the Sea of Galilee. To us, these distances aren’t much more than the distance across a city’s suburb, but people then didn’t travel very far, most often just on foot, or perhaps with a donkey to carry the luggage. It was probably springtime, after the latter rains, but before the Feast of Passover, when weddings were traditionally celebrated. As a week-long event intended to commemorate the new life of the married couple, the entire town would take part in the celebrations.

The village of Cana was only about 5 miles away from Nazareth, the town where Jesus grew up. The mother of Jesus was invited to the wedding, and there is some conjecture that one of Mary’s sisters was the mother of the bride or groom. As a cousin, Jesus also was invited; and out of respect for his position as an itinerate Rabbi, he was able to bring his disciples along. Remember, Mary had a cousin named Elizabeth, the mother of another famous cousin; John the Baptist! There are a lot of relations mentioned in the New Testament that may seem incidental, but when considered together, we get a picture of family and community life as a backdrop to the greatest stories ever told.

At this early stage in Jesus’ ministry, he had not yet chosen twelve out of the many who followed him. There are five men mentioned in the later part of chapter 1; two followers of John the Baptist, John (who does not name himself, and would later tell his brother James), as well as Andrew, who went and told his brother Simon Peter, and also Philip and Nathanael.

After the wedding, they traveled to Capernaum, a Jewish community and a major fishing village on the Sea of Galilee. Not all towns in Galilee had a majority Jewish population. Capernaum and Magdala, a few miles to the south along the lakeshore, were primarily Jewish. Bethsaida, a few miles to the north where the upper Jordan river comes into the lake was a mixed town. One of Herod the Great’s sons had built up the little fishing village with new grand Roman buildings trying to make it spectacular, but the Jews were not really impressed. About 20 miles south of Capernaum was the newly built capital of another of Herod’s sons, Antipas, who figures into the gospel story with John the Baptist and the trial of Jesus. No Jews would live there because it had been built over a cemetery! And upon the hilltops across the lake several of the towns of the Decapolis (which literally means ‘ten cities’) could be seen. They were Grecian cities granted independence by Rome with mixed populations.

The Background

With such a stark difference between the traditions of the Jews and the worldliness of the Greeks and Romans, we can imagine that religious life in a peaceful agricultural village like Cana would involve strict adherence to established practices and laws. A commonly overlooked aspect of the story of Jesus turning water into wine (spoiler alert! But you already knew that …) is that six stone water pots were used, each holding 20 to 30 gallons. That’s a lot of wine! But it’s not how much wine they could hold that is significant. There along a wall, they stood empty; but what were they used for? They were used to fill a ritual bath, a “mikvah”, which was used for ceremonial cleansing. Nearby, there would be a series of steps cut in the ground descending into a stone tank. It would be filled with fresh water drawn from a running source; no still or stagnant water could be used. Anyone ceremonially defiled would descend into the tank on the right, submerse themselves in the waters, and return up the steps on the left ceremonially purified. It was a very popular religious act of the time; though the practice did not have its basis in any commandment of the Law of Moses.

The Event

As a sibling, Mary would have been concerned for all her sister had to care for regarding the wedding. Imagine the anxiety of preparing for daily festivities for an entire week! Perhaps Mary was the first to notice that the servants had no more wine to serve. Obviously, she would want to spare her sister the embarrassment should anyone find out that the wine had run out. The story only indicates that she was observant, not that she was told about the situation, or asked to do anything about it. She saw it as an opportunity, however, and asked Jesus to do something about it. But why? What did Mary expect of Jesus?

Their dialogue may seem to us to express some ‘attitudes’, but literally, in Greek, the conversation reads, “Wine they have not.” To which Jesus replies, “What, to me and to thee, woman?” He wasn’t putting his mother off, he was simply saying, ‘but we are guests, and it’s not our business’. But Mary must have known that Jesus could do something about it or she wouldn’t have brought it to His attention. Sensing that she truly expected him to act, His reply, literally, was “not yet is my hour come.”

Consider for a moment; Mary had pondered in her heart all the events around His birth, and she watched Him grow, found Him in the Temple with the teachers at age 12, saying, “did you not know I must be about my Father’s business?” Perhaps she thought, ‘my son is 30 years old and making disciples, … isn’t this the time? He can do whatever he wants, why not do something now?’ Both Mary and Jesus must have had a vision of what the Messiah should be. But sometimes while waiting on a vision, the necessity of the moment interrupts, and what is done at that moment actually turns out to be the very thing that leads into the vision! So, she left it with Jesus while implicating Him to the servants, who must have been standing nearby listening.

The Sign

The servants filled the stone jars to the brim with water and then carried a sampling to the man in charge of the festivities. Jesus had changed the water into wine. By changing the water in the jars to wine, Jesus made the jars themselves impure, they could no longer be used in the purification rituals. Water symbolizes cleansing, but wine symbolizes abundant life. Jesus came to give us life, not dutiful religious activities. What Jesus teaches about our spiritual lives is that the thing that matters most is the life within and the fruit that it bears. Later in His ministry, he would tell his disciples, “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abides in me, and I in him, the same brings forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.”

Those first disciples had only been following Jesus for a few months. They listened to Jesus’ words and their eyes and hearts were opened. Then came that first miracle, and as John says at the end of this story, “this beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and revealed His glory; and His disciples believed in Him.”

The Conclusion

Jesus had made over 150 gallons of the best wine anyone has ever tasted! The servants knew it, Mary knew it, and His disciples knew that it was water that went in, and wine that came out. There wasn’t any showmanship, no fanfare; He didn’t bring any attention to Himself, or to the miracle. It wasn’t openly shared what Jesus had done; imagine if it had! When He later fed five thousand people with bread and fish, they wanted to take Him and make Him a king. This was done quietly, not openly, so that He could ‘reveal His glory’. And His disciples believed in Him. The glory of God is revealed in the abundance of the inner life, not through the outward rituals of religion. John had a chance to witness the extraordinary amidst the ordinary, and that caused him to believe in something, in someone, eternal. Interestingly, it is John who records another wedding event when he saw the vision of the Great Marriage Supper of the Lamb at the end of the Book of Revelation. For John, the ministry of Christ begins and ends with a wedding. Our salvation extends far beyond this life; He truly saves the best for last.