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35 = 3 Life (John 2:1–4:54) After the Prologue and these opening acts of giving witness, John puts together a three-chapter arc (chapters 2–4) in which Jesus begins to describe himself and the life God is offering the world through him.1 Moving with his disciples from a wedding in Cana up to Jerusalem and then back to Cana, Jesus is confronted with various needs. He responds, and as he does so, he transforms the situations into pictures of the new life he is offering. “Come and see,” he had said to the curious. Now he offers them ways to see. Think of it this way, he says—giving the reader something to handle and work with as well, asking if we can make out what he is saying, asking if we are willing to trust him. Wedding in Cana, 2:1-11 Jesus first dramatizes the life he has come to offer almost casually, in passing . Three days pass from the conversation with Nathaniel, and Jesus and his disciples are at a wedding in Cana of Galilee, in the northern part of Israel, away from Jerusalem and the center of power. The mother of Jesus is there as well, and when she notices that the wine has run out, creating a serious problem for the host, she turns to her son and tells him. His reply has puzzled commentators: “Woman, what do I have to do with you? My hour has not yet come” (2:4). One can see why this is troubling. “Woman,” as Jesus uses the term, while not insulting (as it is to our ears), is certainly not intimate.2 It establishes a distance between mother and son that had not been present before. D. A. Carson points out that the idiom he uses, “What do I have to do with you,” means “What do you and I have in common,” which helps us 36 John in the Company of Poets see what is going on. The life that they had held in common is now at an end.3 But Jesus’ words also point forward, toward another life that will be initiated when his “hour” comes. That life will be held in common. The hour is not yet identified, but as the reader will discover, Jesus is using the term to point toward his crucifixion and resurrection—the hour in which his glory will be fully visible and the work he was sent to accomplish will be completed. His words to his mother locate us; we are in a space before his hour has come. As a number of commentators point out, we will be reminded of this exchange at the close of the Gospel, when Jesus speaks to Mary from the cross and uses exactly this term, “Woman.” There, his hour fully come, Jesus will reach out and embed her within another family.4 The cross from which he speaks is what they will have in common. Not yet understanding this, Mary nonetheless accepts the change in their relationship. Assuming, however, that events along the way might play a part in the unfolding of that hour, she again calls attention to the need at hand, trusting her son to make something out of the situation. “Whatever He says to you, do it,” she tells the servants. And Jesus acts, responding to the bridegroom’s need with what John calls the first of his “signs” (2:11)—a dramatic manifestation of his identity. (John will describe seven of these signs as the Gospel moves on: this one; healing the royal official’s son [4:46-54]; healing the man who could not walk [5:1-15]; feeding the 5,000 [6:5-13]; walking on the sea [6:16-21]; giving sight to the blind man [9:1-7]; raising Lazarus from the dead [11:1-44].) For the first time, the reader is drawn into the circle of those who are able to see. Out of sight of the headwaiter and the bridegroom, but in sight of the disciples, Jesus has the servants fill six stone water pots, “set there for the Jewish custom of purification, containing twenty or thirty gallons each” (2:6). The servants do so, to the brim, and Jesus directs them to draw some and take it to the headwaiter. He tastes the “water which had become wine” and, without knowing its source, pronounces it the best wine served on the occasion, kept inexplicably until the...

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