JESUS: Water Into Wine, by N. T. Wright

From John, Part 1

On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee.  Jesus’s mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.

The wine ran out.

Jesus’s mother came over to him.

“They haven’t got any wine!” she said.

“All right, mother,” replied Jesus, “but what’s that got to do with you and me?  My time hasn’t come yet.”

His mother spoke to the servants.

“Do whatever he tells you,” she said.

Six stone water-jars were standing there, ready for use in the Jewish purification rites.  Each held about twenty or thirty gallons.

“Fill the jars with water,” said Jesus to the servants.  And they filled them, right up to the brim.

“Now draw some out,” he said, “and take it to the chief steward.”  They did so.

When the chief steward tasted the water that had turned into wine (he didn’t know where it had come from, but the servants who had drawn the water knew), he called the bridegroom.

“What people normally do,” he said, “is to serve he good wine first, and then the worse stuff when people have had plenty to drink.  But you’ve kept the good wine till now!”

This event, in Cana of Galilee, was the first of Jesus’s signs.  He displayed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.

After this, he went down to Capernaum, with his mother, his brothers, and his disciples.  He remained there for a few days.

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One of the first events I ever organized was a treasure hunt.  It was during the school holidays, when I was about ten or eleven.  I invited all my friends from neighboring houses and streets to come and join in.

With my mother’s careful help, I planned each of the clues in cryptic rhyming couplets, and worked out the different things people would find as they followed them.  I remember feeling nervous as fifteen or twenty children poured out of the house, eager to follow up the clues they had been given.  Would they understand them all right?  Would they get bored and give up?  Would some be much better at it than others?  I needn’t have worried.  The event was a success, and everyone had fun.

John’s Gospel is planned as a kind of treasure hunt, with careful and sometimes cryptic clues laid for us to follow.  Now that he’s set the scene with the opening stories about John the Baptist and Jesus’s earliest followers, he gives us the first clue, telling us that it’s the first one so we know where we are.  He will tell us about the second one, too, two chapters later; from then on, we’re on our own, and he wants us to use our initiative and imagination in following the clues to the very end.  I won’t spoil it for you by telling you the answer at the moment, but if you wanted to sit down and read right through the gospel you might be able to work it out for yourself.

The word he uses for “clue” is “sign.”  He is setting up a series of signposts to take us through his story.  The signs are all occasions when Jesus did, you might say, what he’d just promised Nathanael that he would do.  They are moments when, to people who watch with at least a little faith, the angels of God going up and coming down at the place where Jesus is.  They are moments when Heaven is opened, when the transforming power of God’s love bursts in to the present world.

That’s why it simply won’t do, despite what some people have said, to see the things that Jesus did, and the stories about them in this gospel and the other ones, as pleasant but imaginary legends – things that didn’t actually happen but which “illustrate” some supposedly deeper, more “spiritual” truth.  The whole point of the “signs” is that they are moments when Heaven and Earth intersect with each other.  (That’s what the Jews believed happened in the Temple.)  The point is not that they are stories which couldn’t have happened in real life, but which point away from Earth to a Heavenly reality.

Whatever people today may think actually happened – and the more you get to know about Jesus the more you realize that this sort of thing was precisely what you should expect with him around – we should be in no doubt that what John badly wants to tell us is that with these events the life of Heaven came down to Earth.  That’s why one of the motto texts for the whole gospel is the Word became flesh.

The present story has all the elements that we shall come to know well as we work through the gospel.  It is about transformation: the different dimension of reality that comes into being when Jesus is present and when, as Mary tells the servants, people do whatever Jesus tells them.

This is one of only two occasions we meet Jesus’s mother in this gospel, the other being at the foot of the cross.  This is important, because Jesus’s strange remark, My time hasn’t come yet, looks on, through many other references to his “time,” until at last the time does come, and the glory is revealed fully, as he dies on the cross.  That event, for John, is the ultimate moment when Heaven and Earth meet.  That is when it takes all the faith in the world to see the glory hidden in the shame: the creative Word present as a weak, dying human being.

But events like this one point on to that moment.  The wedding is a foretaste of the great Heavenly feast in store for God’s people.  The water-jars, used for Jewish purification rites, are a sign that God is doing a new thing from within the old Jewish system, bringing purification to Israel and the world in a whole new way.

The wedding itself, in the town where Nathanael came from, would probably involve almost the whole village, and several people from neighboring ones too; which is why Mary, her son, and his friends were invited.  Running out of wine was not just inconvenient, but a social disaster and disgrace.  The family would have to live with the shame of it for a long time to come; bride and groom might regard it as bringing bad luck on their married life.  Though Jesus hereafter addresses himself to other kinds of problems, we are already witnessing the strange compassion which comes where people are in need and deals with that need in unexpected ways.

The transformation from water to wine is of course meant by John to signify the effect that Jesus can have, can still have today, on people’s lives.  He came, as he says later, that we might have life in all its fullness.  You might want to pray through this story with your own failures and disappointments in mind – remembering that transformation only came when someone took Mary’s words seriously: Do whatever he tells you.

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