Marriage at Cana

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Marriage at Cana

The Marriage at Cana is an event reported by the Gospel of John but not by any of the Synoptic Gospels. John reports that Jesus was attending a wedding in Cana with his disciples for the Jewish rite of purification, and when the hosts run out of wine, Jesus' (unnamed) mother tries to persuade Jesus to help out with a miracle. According to the evangelist, Jesus becomes annoyed at the suggestion, but Jesus' mother persists, telling the servants to obey Jesus. Jesus orders the servants to fill the empty containers with water. The servants bring the filled containers to the chief waiter, and he tells the bridegroom that it is the best wine of the evening.

This is then the first miracle of Jesus mentioned in the Gospel of John, and occurs immediately after Jesus has told Nathanael at [John 1:50] that "You shall see greater things than that". Describing the miracle, John uses the Greek word semeion meaning sign, or ergon meaning work, instead of the term for miracle which the synoptics normally use: dynamis - meaning act of power (Brown 339). The event is the first of the seven miraculous signs by which John attests Jesus's divine status, and around which the gospel is structured.

This could be seen as the Gospel of John's deliberate fulfilments of prophecies in the Old Testament, such as [Amos 9:13-14] and [Genesis 49:10-11] about the abundance of wine that there will be in the time of the messiah (Brown 340), and the messianic wedding festivles mentioned in [Isaiah 62:4-5] (Brown et al. 954). Some Christians see the event as having genuinely been foretold, while more critical scholars see John as deliberately creating or twisting events to fit the prophecies. A number of scholars have argued that John's account of the Cana Wedding also reflects the Synoptic Gospels' parable of the Patch and the Wineskins.

The story has had considerable importance in the development of Christian pastoral theology, since the facts that Jesus was invited to a wedding, attended and used his divine power to save the celebrations from disaster, are taken as evidence of his approval for marriage and earthly celebrations, in contrast to the more austere views of the Pauline Epistles as found, for example, in [1 Corinthians 7]. It has also been used as an argument against Christian teetotalism, and in Roman Catholicism, the Wedding at Cana is one of the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary. A small minority of modern readers have asserted that the wedding was originally Jesus' own, often identifying the bride as Mary Magdalene, and that the original account in John had been edited in order to suppress this fact; this idea is not taken seriously by most scholars, and remains a subject confined to fiction (e.g. The Da Vinci Code) and the fringes of academic research (e.g. Holy Blood and Holy Grail).

Marriage at Cana

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