John 2:1-11

This past fall, I attended my best friend’s wedding. Over two decades, I’ve come to know him and his family pretty well.

And if at the wedding I had pointed out that wine had run out . . . well, I can guarantee that I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you today.

Today’s Gospel lesson, the wedding at Cana, serves as a point of transition at the beginning of John’s Gospel. It caps off the prologue and calling of the first disciples and initiates the “book of signs,” John’s narration of Jesus’s miracles and teaching. Looking both backward and forward, the scene marries themes of identity, creation, and abundance.

It is striking that, in this first of Jesus’s miracles, Jesus himself is not the first-named figure. “There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there” (Jn 2:1). Almost parenthetically, we learn that Jesus and his disciples have also been invited. What’s going on here?

The wedding at Cana is the third in a series of episodes where we encounter Jesus obliquely through the perspective of other characters. First, John the Baptist and his disciples see Jesus coming from afar (Jn 1:29). Next, the disciples themselves approach Jesus. In each, they spend more time talking about Jesus than with the man himself. Finally, we meet Jesus’s mother; Jesus may perform the miracle, but his mother drives the action in today’s scene.

What each of these episodes has in common is Jesus’s identity—who is this man? We as hearers of the Gospel have learned who Jesus is from the Prologue: he’s the eternal Word who took on humanity. And now we learn how other figures see Jesus: “Here is the Lamb of God”; “this is the Son of God”; “Rabbi”; “We have found the Messiah”; “You are the King of Israel” (Jn 1:29, 34, 38, 41, 49).

What John and his disciples have done is named Jesus. In naming him they have attributed to him the web of history and expectations that they have built up in their own minds and hearts, in their hopes and dreams. And in doing so, they have invited Jesus to name them in return. It is significant, I think, that Jesus’s first action in John’s Gospel is an act of naming: “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (Jn 1:42). Jesus will continue this process of naming throughout the Gospel: he will name his disciples his friends (Jn 15:15), he will name his own mother and the Beloved Disciple mother and son to each other (Jn 19:26), and, in the series of “I am” statements, he will even name himself.

This act of naming is a creative one. “You shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give,” Isaiah writes of Zion. “You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married” (Is 62:2, 4). The new name both effects and reflects a changed reality.

If there is no act of naming in the wedding episode, there is yet the expectation that underpins such names. What, after all, did Jesus’s mother think Jesus could do about the lack of wine? What does she know? What is her history? She may not say “Son of God” or “Messiah” or “King of Israel,” but her statement carries with it a comparable weight of expectation.

And if there is no act of naming in this episode, there is yet an act of creation. A recent commentary on this story notes that, compared to other “gift miracles,” such as the multiplication of the loaves, the wine miracle is unique in not having “a small amount of existing material that is . . . simply multiplied.”[1] Further, from the text, we have no idea how the change was effected: there is no prayer or blessing, no physical contact; we don’t even know at what point the water waschanged. I’d like to suggest that we can see Jesus’s miracle at Cana not simply as an act of transformation, of water into wine, but one of creation, the working out in our world, in history, at a wedding in a small town in Galilee, of the cosmic mystery that the Word engaged in at the beginning.

At the culmination of questions of naming and identity and expectations, Jesus, then, in a miraculous act of creation, shows who he in fact is—the creating Word. But this “first sign,” this first revelation of a new creation, does even more than that. It’s not just that Jesus creates wine, it’s that he creates wine in abundance. What was previously lacking now fills jugs to the brim, and is of the finest quality. Jesus’s establishment of a new creation is not just enough, or sufficient, but vastly beyond what is expected, encompassing all, welcoming all in. His very being is evidence of this—“God so loved the world,” with a love that “reaches to the heavens” (Ps 36:5), “that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16)—and so is his mission: “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. . . . I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:9, 10).

We may not be attending weddings anytime soon, but we are, each of us, called to take the lessons of the wedding at Cana to heart. Each of us is invited to name Jesus—to find our own name that best expresses the needs of our hearts—and to be named in return, to be created anew. And we do not participate in a new creation that is impoverished, but one that abounds with gifts beyond counting or imagining—both at the end, when we will “feast at the banquet prepared from the foundation of the world,” and in the here and now.

Now, this may seem too optimistic. I am aware of, as are most of you, and I would be remiss to neglect mentioning the change in our own country that is taking place and will reach a milestone tomorrow at the presidential inauguration. And whether you are hopeful or apprehensive of what the next years hold, we cannot close our eyes to all that seems to be going very wrong around us. Where is God’s love in a world beset by war and violence? Where is God’s promise of abundance in a world beset by famine and poverty?

I think Saint Paul gives us a way forward. The abundance of the gifts of the Spirit, of this new creation established through Jesus Christ, are given to us “for the common good” (1 Cor 12:7). In the here and now, in this world that God so loves and that we see crying out in so much need, God gives us gifts to stand up and be God’s agents. The lesson, I think, of the wedding at Cana is not just that Jesus revealed himself as God, but that, as followers of Christ, we have been equipped by God to respond—even if in only small and seemingly inconsequential ways. God has equipped us with gifts so we can follow in the way of loved embodied and established by God. God has equipped us to respond when someone comes to us, saying, “There is no wine.”

Amen.

[1] J. Beutler SJ, A Commentary on the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI, 2017), 80.