The Gospel reading for the Second Sunday of Epiphany (January 14) is John 2:1-11, the wedding at Cana, in which Jesus spurns his mother’s appeal to rescue the situation and nevertheless saves the day anyway.
Jesus says to Mary, “Gynai, ti emoi kai soi?” — a cryptic question, literally “Woman, what to me and to you?” (rendered clumsily but probably accurately in NRSV as “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me?”). What follows immediately — “My hour has not yet come” — may shed some light on what’s going on. This encounter between son and mother could well be an adult version of the 12 year old Jesus in the temple at Jerusalem saying, “I must be about my father’s business, but you are not the one who keeps my appointment book.”
Mary, however, seems to have at least some clue about her son’s calling when, undeterred by Jesus’ offputting and maybe driven by a mother’s wish to enhance his reputation, she says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
Jesus, notwithstanding the curt reply to his mother, directs the servants to refill six big stone jars with water. These jars, the Gospel reports, were for Jewish purification rites — washing before eating and so on — and presumably had been drained dry. The servants oblige, straining under the weight of six or eight gallons of water in a stone jar and grumbling all the way about what hauling water has to do with providing more wine. Then, directed by Jesus, they draw some water out and take it to the steward to sample.
The steward, who has no clue about what’s gone on in the back room, takes a sip. He marvels that the bridegroom has reversed the custom of serving good wine first and then bringing out cheap stuff when people are drunk enough not to taste the difference. What the bridegroom thought about the face-saving miracle or what he may have said in response we are left to guess. He might have said, like Orson Welles in that old wine commercial, “We serve no wine until its time.” But who knows?
John’s Gospel has no spoken parables, those tales told by Jesus to evoke, provoke, perturb, and subvert. Throughout the Fourth Gospel, however, we keep running into acted parables which work much the same way. In either case, spoken or acted, parables tempt us to allegorize. The wedding at Cana is no exception: wedding, bridegroom, wine, and water brim with allusions to Old Testament themes and beckon us to allegory land. Wine and water — surely baptism and eucharist are somehow meant — baptism first, then communion. Empty jars = Judaism gone dry? Filled ones = Christianity? Servants = the apostles taking the good news to the world. There is no end of possibilities. In John’s Gospel one can never be sure. Of such stuff many a sermon has come — and gone.
Well and good, but I’ll resist the path of allegory for now. The report of the wedding reception ends with this: “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” Acted parables, no more than spoken ones, do not explain everything, but they do call forth a response. John calls the water/wine switcheroo a “sign” (semeion), a pointer to something, the first of Jesus’ signs, meant to disclose Jesus’ doxa or “glory” and evoke the disciples’ faith (see John 1:14).
Before Jesus’ “hour” arrived, his full disclosure as suffering Messiah, came signs, hints, and hunches. Could the disciples have believed if Jesus had revealed the whole truth all at once? That may have been too much to take — like looking directly at the sun at noon. But at a wedding, a party, some good wine mysteriously derived and bottled in bulk sufficed to stir their sense of taste and smell and sight and find themselves in the divine presence — the “glory” — and begin to believe.
Jesus pushed back Mary’s attempt to make him the main event at someone else’s party. For the most part the guests, maybe having over-imbibed already, never knew or bothered to ask what transpired under their noses. Jesus stayed in the background. Some, not all, saw enough to convince them and believed.