The Wine at Cana

Second Sunday after Epiphany, Year C; John 2:1-11

This story of abundant wine-making was traditional on the Second Sunday after Epiphany in the old Western lectionaries, but now appears only in this third year of the cycle. Scholars seem to find the passage a bit befuddling, appropriately enough perhaps. given all the wine. Some of this has to do with its curious place in the narrative, as the “first of Jesus’ signs,” yet performed when his “hour has not yet come.” This untimely manifestation may also help explain why there is no accompanying discourse, as there is for most “signs” in John.

The absence of explanatory material leaves the story at the mercy of interpreters, since having been called a “sign” it does of course seem to “mean” something. Barnabas Lindars even called it “a miracle story in which the miracle itself is unimportant.”¹ The suggestion that the miracle is unimportant seems however to be an admission of its opacity or even embarrassment to subsequent readers, whose experience of the sign—of food and drink—is so different from that of the original readers (on which more below).

Jesus’ “signs”—a characteristic of John’s Gospel—convey something beyond themselves about Jesus’ identity and mission, and about the nature of faith in him for the reader. It can be tempting however to treat them as mere ciphers or disposable, as things that have to disappear in order for their meaning to be understood. This sort of interpretation-by-eradication would mean valuing only what is supposedly “spiritual,” over the material world and its life in which the signs—and Jesus’ ministry—take place. This however is not adequate to John’s Gospel, or to anything. For John it is crucial that “the Word became flesh” and that “all things were made through him.” The signs themselves are not to be dismissed, and have to be considered more than superficially.

These signs then must have substance: a number of them are healings (4:46-54, 5:1-11), the most spectacular a resurrection (11); to suggest these are not inherently significant is clearly false. Closer to today’s story however is the Sign of the Loaves (John 6), which of course gives rise to a long discourse about Jesus as the bread of life. This perhaps underlines that we do not have a “wine of life discourse” (although we do have a “true vine” one). Are these two signs about ephemeral things, food and drink, more “disposable” or “meaningless” than the healing stories?

Bread of course can be a symbol as well a food, but as such can be rendered vague. One modern book on the spirituality of bread suggests it means “connection, calm, remembrance, peace, justice,” and “meaning” (sic) itself —whatever that means. Only people who don’t rely on bread as staple food, or realize hunger is widespread, would imagine that story isn’t first about bodies and hunger, and only then also about who Jesus is for us, even when we are full. In that case Jesus is explicitly critical of those who “had their fill of the loaves,” but who go no further; I think however that John would have found it hard to imagine a readership whose preoccupation with their “spirituality” would dissolve the compassion and power of Jesus feeding the hungry into a lesson about “meaning”—but here we are.

Wine however isn’t bread, and the challenges of this sign are perhaps greater as a result. While quite unique in the Gospel tradition, this narrative does sound rather like some of Jesus’ parabolic statements in the Synoptics having come to life, as C. K. Barrett notes.² The reign of God is a wedding banquet (Matt 22, 25); Jesus with the disciples is like a bridegroom whose presence demands festivity (Mark 2:19); the arrival of Jesus’ message is like new wine contrasted with what was there before (Mark 2:22). These variously picture (in the Synoptics) or enact (in John) a celebration with good things on offer.

Wine also has positive associations in earlier biblical tradition. The abundance of wine was already a familiar image in scripture, part of divine provision and redemption (see Amos 9:3-14; Jer 31:2). Yet in a quest for the “symbolism of wine” we may miss that the Old Testament quotes to this effect are not primarily about revelry and festivity, or just about the aesthetic or culinary, but about plenty and provision. God provides what is needed for life to exist and flourish.

The missing piece in most commentary on the Cana story is serious attention to the social and economic world of the Gospel, and in particular its foodways. Wine in this world is not a symbol, or even a treat, but a foodstuff. Modern westerners may think of it only as a luxury and an intoxicant, which can lead to the assessment of its parabolic or historical appearance in Jesus’ story as “meaningless.” Yet for the ancients in Galilee, Judea and the Levant generally, as well as in Italy, Asia Minor, and Greece, it was an effective (and of course pleasurable) way of storing the food value of the vines that were an important part of subsistence agriculture. Wine was food.

The idea of turning water into wine is not biblical, but has important contemporary parallels such as in the cult of Dionysus, themselves rooted in observation from agrarian practice. The first readers of this text knew that vine-growers labored to produce a valuable harvest from the land, the vines themselves, and from rain which was also divine gift. The depiction of water turning to wine was not a juxtaposition of two alien substances, but something more like removing the intermediate time and labor that lay between water and wine. Augustine of Hippo, in a world much more like Jesus’ and John’s, wrote “the one who made wine on that day at the wedding in those six jars, which he had ordered to be filled with water, does the same thing every year in the vines” (Tract. on John 8).³ The unconditional instruction from Jesus’ mother (2:5) seems to hint that in this hands, things will become what they should be.

Wine was not just a luxury or the preserve of the wealthy; the poor also drank wine, if of lesser quality, and perhaps less often. This was a world in which finding sustenance was for most people a daily concern, and wine was important to that. The biblical tradition of God’s provision of abundant wine was celebratory, but in the sense of celebration known to those whose very life, not just their mood or sense of well-being, depended on that provision.

The wine at Cana is far from trivial, let alone meaningless. It is a provision for life, as well as for celebration (at a wedding too, which I don’t have scope to consider sufficiently here). In both respects then, as sustaining life and as giving joy, the abundant wine points beyond itself to the nature of God’s activity in the person of Jesus who gives both what we need and what we hope for.

Just like the later story of abundant bread on the Galilean hillside, this untimely sign presents Jesus as one who cares for his people with a kind of effective abundance. In both cases the temptation to think that this miraculous provision was the end of the story would be a mistake; but the core of the symbol is not that Jesus is the glass of wine that makes life’s fine meal more palatable, but that Jesus is the one in whom God’s promise of sustaining as well as enlivening God’s people is fulfilled.

1. The Gospel of John. New Century Bible Commentary. London: Marshall, Morgan, and Scott, 1972, p. 123.

2. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John; an Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text (Second edition; Philadelphia: Westminster, 978), p. 189.

3. Trans. E. Hill OP.