On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus' mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 2 When the wine was gone, Jesus' mother said to him, "They have no more wine." "Dear woman, why do you involve me?" Jesus replied. "My time has not yet come." His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you." (3:1-2)
The signs begin at a wedding feast in Cana in which Jesus and His disciples had been invited to. How exactly His mother was involved besides her attendance is unclear, but this dialogue between Jesus and her is quite interesting. The wine running out in the middle of a wedding celebration back in those days was a very serious matter, even more than just a huge embarrassment to the bride and groom.
They have no more wine...Mary is here informing, but not demanding. Jesus doesn’t calls Mary, Mother, but dear woman instead. She let Him know of the crisis and He replied that His time had not yet come. Later He told his brothers essentially the same thing in Chapter 7, verse 8 when they prodded Him to go up to the feast to perform signs so that He would become even more famous. Jesus would not be led by His mother’s requests, but only by the Father. Only Father God will determine when his hour is to come and what he is to do and say until then.
Jesus was telling Mary, “It’s not time for Me to do open, spectacular miracles.” Okay. She neither insists that He do something, nor does she shut the door on the possibility that He will intervene. She turns to the waiters and probably whispers to them, “Whatever He says to you, do it.”
Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, "Fill the jars with water"; so they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, "Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet." They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and said, "Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now."
If Mary was in charge, or helping those in charge, and she told the servants to do what he says, if the outcome is embarrassment or failure, they could say, “Hey we’re just doing what we’re told to do.”
Jesus, as led by the Father, does meet the desperate need for more wine to become available at this celebration. He doesn’t proclaim what he’s about to do, and it appears that the servants, the disciples, His mother and Himself were the only ones who even knew of this great miracle. At least it was that way initially. The text doesn’t tell us whether the servants kept to themselves what they had just witnessed. It may have been only a matter of minutes or hours until the who town heard about what Jesus had just done. Or it could have remained a hidden miracle. We don’t know. We could speculate over quite a few things regarding this first of seven miracles, such as:
Did they run out of wine because Jesus and his disciples had been invited at the last minute?
If so, would that somehow have obligated Jesus to fix a problem He had partly caused?
Was Mary’s concern about wine being gone because she was somehow in charge and, or helping out?
Was she one of the few people there who even knew of the problem?
Did she expect Jesus to supernaturally intervene, or was she asking Him to dig deep into His pockets and quickly go to a nearby market and buy some wine?
These questions seem to have no answer. We could speculate all day and not come up with concrete answers. But there is one last question which needs to be asked which can be answered satisfactorily:
What does the sign of turning water into wine signify?
The best wine saved for last! It’s a famous saying used over and over in our society (along with many other Bible verses). But do we know what it means? In this first of his miraculous signs, Jesus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him. The Greek word for miraculous sign here refers to a miracle that points to something much greater than the actual occurrence. Through it, Jesus revealed His glory, His nature, His person.
Jesus did his first messianic sign at a wedding festival. Weddings were the biggest and most important celebrations among the Jewish people, lasting for days. They were such joyous occasions that the blessings of the coming messianic age were often described in the metaphor of a wedding banquet, such as in Jesus parables describing the kingdom of God.
The main significance of this sign is hinted at in the statement that the water had been placed in stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing. “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.” (Wright, p. 22) Jesus brings a transformation to Judaism as He becomes the fulfillment of all the scriptural ceremonies we read about under the Old Covenant, including ceremonial washings. The Old Testament ritual washings were shadows of things to come. Jesus fulfilled and replaced them with something much better, Himself. Turning water to wine symbolizes the replacement of Judaism and the Law with the Gospel in which grace and truth are communicated to us. But it is not just a matter of replacing one covenant with another, but the giving of a new nature to the recipients of the new covenant. “It is part of the evangelist’s agenda to present the faith that is centered on Jesus as a more powerful, life-giving, and universally accessible faith than Judaism. “ (Witherington)
The main reason why John chose to begin describing Jesus’ sign-miracles with this one was to simply tell us this: Jesus turned water into wine to show us that He can turn water...into wine. He can change the very nature of something. He can take H2O and make it into something altogether different and new. He can change the nature of both things and people. As believers, we are now miraculously partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust (2 Peter 1:4 NKJV). The Old Covenant, with its ceremonial washings, is replaced by the New, with better and greater promises such as those written in the book of Hebrews:
This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. (Hebrews 8:10)
The transition from old to the new covenant brings a radical change of heart, a change of our very nature. Keith Green’s song “hit the nail on the head” when he sang,
You...
turning the water to wine,
gave Your greatest sign
by changing lives like mine.
This, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed at Cana in Galilee. He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.
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