Christ fulfilled the fullness of the law, and the wedding is a great picture of the 5th commandment.

To then turn that into intercession that can even be applied to us through his mother is quite the leap.

10andBOUNCE said:

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Christ fulfilled the fullness of the law, and the wedding is a great picture of the 5th commandment.

To then turn that into intercession that can even be applied to us through his mother is quite the leap.

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To deny what it obviously is by the plain meaning of the text is equally an apologetic leap intended to avoid what's staring you in the face.

It's obviously about a need for a key element of the wedding feast and how at his mother's prompting he miraculously turns the lack of wine into an intoxication of grace.

Mary simply informs Jesus of the dilemma "They have no wine" and that is her intercession. She entrusts even that small embarrassment to Him. It is worth noting the simplicity of her prayer: she does not dictate a solution, she does not demand a timeline. She simply presents the need and trusts that he will respond to her.

After what some mistakenly characterize as a rebuff, she goes with perfect trust to the servants and tells them, "Do whatever he tells you." These are, remarkably, her last recorded words in the Gospels. Everything she needed to say about faith, about surrender, about how to approach her Son is contained in that one command.

Re: the supposed rebuff, the "mother of Jesus" appears only twice in the Gospel of John: in this passage and at the foot of the Cross (John 19:25-27). John deliberately connects the two scenes. In both, Mary uniquely fulfills the role of mother.

The title "Woman" echoes Genesis as it is the same word used for Eve. This is John painting Mary as the New Eve, alluding to a new creation in which Christ is the New Adam and Mary is the New Eve. By calling her "Woman," Jesus is not pushing Mary away. He is crowning her with a cosmic identity.

To understand Mary's intercessory role at Cana more deeply, it helps to look at the Old Testament. In ancient Israel, the Gebirah, the Queen Mother, held a unique intercessory role before the king. In 1 Kings 2:19-20, when Bathsheba approaches King Solomon, he rises, bows, and seats her at his right hand. When she makes a request, Solomon says he will not refuse her.

This is precisely the pattern at Cana. The Wedding at Cana reveals Mary's unique intercessory role as the New Eve and Queen Mother. The Queen Mother doesn't have power in herself. Her power comes entirely from her relationship to the King. She brings petitions to the King. Mary's intercession is always under, through and toward Christ, never apart from Him.

In the same way she models perfect discipleship with her fiat to the Angel Gabriel, Mary at Cana gives us the perfect model of intercessory prayer: recognize the need, bring it to Christ, trust completely, and point others to Him. She adds nothing to Christ's power. She diminishes nothing of His glory.

So, yes, Jesus is honoring his mother exactly as we would all expect him to do, but it is dismissive to say that is all that is happening here. He is honoring his mother by addressing in a miraculous manner some earthly needs that she brings to his attention, and in doing so, he is initiating his public ministry.

Going deeper into the question of whether this is merely a good Jewish son following the 5th Commandment, what is the Wedding at Cana? Weddings are a consistent biblical symbol for the mystical union between God and his people. Throughout scripture we see that God wants to "marry" his people, Israel, because he loves them. God wants to fill them with his own life "consummating the marriage" in a manner of speaking. So what is the fulfillment of this prophetic desire? Quite simply it is the Incarnation, when a divine nature and a human nature came together in the unity of a divine person to form a marriage between God and Israel. Jesus is the wedding of heaven and Earth, the marriage of divinity and humanity. He is the bridegroom and the Church is the bride in him.

The most intimate union is achieved between God and the world. And at the wedding at Cana, at the prompting of his human mother, Jesus publicly "outs" himself and miraculously changes 180 gallons of water into the wine of the divine life, an intoxication of grace. When we are infused with the divine life and married to God, that life never runs out.

The reason the wedding at Cana is here in scripture is not merely to show us that Jesus was an obedient Jewish son. It is showing us how God's longing for the love of his chosen people is now being opened up to everyone by grace and he wants us to drink freely of his wine of divine life. The Old Covenant and the New Covenant.

The six stone water jars were specifically for the Jewish rites of purification. Their number, six, may symbolize the incompleteness or imperfection of the Old Covenant purification system. As Jesus transforms the water used for external purification into wine, He can be seen as changing the Old Covenant purification system and enabling the internal purification of believers.

This is not a rejection of Israel's covenant. It is its fulfillment and superabundance. The prophets like Jeremiah spoke of how God would write a new covenant in the hearts of His people (Jeremiah 31:33). This New Covenant would be greater than what came before, as the wine of Jesus is superior to the previous wine and is made freely available to all the guests at the wedding.