JESUS: The Wedding At Cana, by Brant Pitre

From Jesus the Bridegroom

Jesus and the Wine of the Messiah

First, by performing a miracle in which he provides miraculous wine, Jesus is beginning to reveal his identity as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah.

In order to see this clearly, it is important to emphasize not just the miraculous nature of the transformation of water into wine, but the amount of wine produced.  According to the Gospel of John, Jesus goes far beyond just solving the problem of the lack of some wine for the wedding guests at Cana.  In carrying out the miracle, he specifically instructs the servants to fill to the top the six stone jars used for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.  If we do the math, it totals up to somewhere between 120 and 180 gallons of wine!  Even in our own day, when wine is cheap and accessible, that’s a lot of wine.

From an ancient Jewish perspective, the sheer amount of wine provided by Jesus would call to mind the fact that in Jewish scripture, one of the marks of the future age of salvation is that it would be characterized by superabundant wine:

In that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen.  The mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.  (Amos 9:11, 13)

And in that day the mountains shall drip sweet wine and all the stream beds of Judah shall flow with water; and a fountain shall come forth form the house of the Lord. (Joel 3:18)

Indeed, according to ancient Jewish tradition outside the Bible, one of the ways you would know that the Messiah had finally arrived would be the miraculous abundance of wine:

And it will happen that the Messiah will begin to be revealed.  And on one vine will be a thousand branches, and one branch will produce a thousand clusters, and one cluster will produce a thousand grapes, and one grape will produce a liter of wine. (2 Baruch 29:1-2)

When Jesus’s miracle is interpreted in the light of these ancient Jewish expectations of the superabundant wine of God’s banquet, and ancient Jewish hopes for the future, we can see that in providing hundreds of gallons of wine for this small country wedding at Cana, Jesus is signaling to those who have the eyes to see that the ancient Jewish hope for the superabundant wine of the age of salvation is beginning to be fulfilled in himself.

Jesus Takes the Role of the Bridegroom

Second, by agreeing to provide the wine for the wedding, Jesus also begins to reveal that he is not just the Messiah, he is also the Bridegroom.

As a guest, Jesus was not responsible for providing the food and drink for the wedding party.  This would have been the duty of the bridegroom of Cana and his family.  This is another reason that Mary’s implicit request is so odd.  The logical person to whom she would naturally bring the problem would be the host, the bridegroom himself.  But she doesn’t.  She goes to Jesus with the problem, and he solves it.  However, because he does it secretly he leads the steward of the feast to react to the miracle in a way that reveals its deeper meaning:

When the steward of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, “Every man served the good wine first, and when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine; but you have kept the good wine until now.”

Although we don’t know much about the details of the office of “steward of the feast,” he seems to have been the ancient Jewish equivalent of a kind of headwaiter or modern-day wedding caterer.  (In Greek, his name is architriklinos, which literally means, “ruler of the table.”)  It would have been his responsibility to oversee the quality and purity of the food and drink at the wedding banquet, something very important to Jews because of the Biblical laws of ritual purity.  When the steward at Cana tastes the water that has become wine, he does not call Jesus over to thank him because he has no idea that the wine was provided by him,  Instead, the steward calls the bridegroom (Greek, hymphios) – whose name is never given – in order to praise him for having saved the “good wine” for last.  The irony is that is was the bridegroom’s responsibility to provide the wine, but it is Jesus who has actually done so.

In light of the steward’s reaction, all of the pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place.  When Mary implicitly asks Jesus to provide wine for the wedding, she is not just asking him to solve a potentially embarrassing family problem.  In a Jewish context, she is also asking him to assume the role of the Jewish bridegroom.  As New Testament scholar Adeline Fehribach puts it: When the mother of Jesus says to Jesus, “They have no wine,” she places him in the role of the bridegroom, whose responsibility it is to provide the wine.

If Mary’s implicit request is not just about the wine at Cana, but also about the wine of Jewish prophecy, then the implications of Jesus’s action run even deeper.  For, as we have seen already, in Jewish scripture, it is God himself who provides the wine of the banquet of salvation.  And even more, in Jewish scripture, it is God who is referred to as the Bridegroom of his entire people, (e.g., Isaiah 62:4-6).  When we combine the prophecies of the wine of YHWH with the prophecies of YHWH the Bridegroom, Jesus’s actions at Cana lead us to conclude that by transforming the water into wine and assuming the role of the Jewish bridegroom, Jesus is also beginning to suggest that the prophecies of the divine bridegroom are being fulfilled in him.  In the words of Adeline Fehribach:

An ancient reader would have realized that Jesus’s action of providing quality wine in abundance from the purification jars illustrated that he, in fact, accepted the role of the bridegroom, but that he was no ordinary bridegroom.  The sign Jesus performed illustrated that he was accepting the role of the messianic bridegroom and that, as such, he was assuming the role of Yahweh, the bridegroom of Israel.

In other words, by means of the miracle at Cana, Jesus is beginning to reveal, in a very Jewish way, the mystery of his divine identity.

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