Today is the story where we find out that Mother Mary is not Latina or Italian! Son of God or not, if I had told my mother or grandmother “woman,” they would still be finding pieces of my rear end.

‘On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee.’ (“What might “on the third day” stand for in John 2:1?”) In context, then, the third day after leaving Judaea, way down south, where Jesus had been involved in the movement associated with his cousin John the Baptist and had undergone the what we now know is baptism into the waters, with extraordinary effect, at John’s hands.

The journey on foot up the Jordan valley to Galilee takes about two days, so this makes sense. Cana – Khirbet Qana – is nine miles north of Nazareth on the road into the hills, west from the Sea of Galilee, so most likely there was time to stop and pick up our Mother Mary. As we read, ‘The mother of Jesus was there, and Jesus himself and his disciples had also been invited to the celebration’. In this period, it seems, Jewish weddings took place on Wednesdays and the celebrating lasted for seven days.

Naturally, the wine ran out (perhaps some of those invited, had not contributed anything), was about to cause humiliation, a minor disaster, for the newlyweds. Mary gets her Son’s attention to the redness of the groom’s face, an expression, we can suppose, of a natural response. ‘They have no wine.’ Her Son refuses to help with the issue at first. Was it for family situations such as this that he had been set apart for his mission as the Christ, the Lamb of God, the Suffering Servant who was to actualize the Messianic promises? His hour had not yet come, he tells her, replying with a seeming roughness, ‘Woman’.

Consider speaking from a son to a mother, that way of talking to her has no present parallel in Hebrew or Greek. That should alert us to the fact that something more is going on here than meets the eye. The phrase ‘my hour’ has in this Gospel-book a technical significance: it means the time of the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ. In particular, it means the moment of the Crucifixion, the power and glory hidden in the Cross being manifested in the Resurrection. And at the Cross the Son will say the same word to his mother in the same way as he does at Cana. He will look down from the Cross and call out, ‘Woman’ – not just to gain her attention, but to tell her she will be the mother and protectress of the infant Church. She is the Mother of the Messiah, and her place now is in the struggle against the satanic serpent as prophesied in Genesis to the Mother of all the living: she whom the Fall narrative indeed calls ‘the Woman’, the first Eve. Mary appears at the Cross’s foot to be given new offspring in the shape of the beloved disciple who stands here for all Christians: it will be her task to protect these offspring in the ongoing contest between Satan and the followers of Christ.

So back to Cana, then: there is no rudeness here, but a revealing of the significance of an internal problem in the light of the destiny she is to share with her Son in the plan of God.

Yet, he agrees to do something. She says to the waiters, ‘Do whatever he tells you’. The spiritual assurance the grace of her Immaculate Conception gives her allows her to rely on a response. The generosity of God can embrace things as small as local disappointments as well as things as large as the salvation of the world, and in any case this little domestic drama is, as it happens, filled with symbolic possibilities which the Messiah now exploits in his first ‘sign’. The result is one hundred and twenty gallons of what an enthusiast found to call quite excellent wine.

The Church of course accepts the possibility of miracle. Creation, we say, is not a completely closed system, but is open to its Creator at a range of points. It should be said, however, that the miraculous element is not in itself the climax of this story. The climax is the disciples’ belief of what the miracle symbolizes. The abundance of this splendid wine symbolizes the unheard of, profuse, generosity of God that is now, in Jesus, to be crucified. This overwhelming generosity became incarnate in him, and the story marks the moment when the change began to drop. ‘What Jesus did at Cana in Galilee marked the beginning of his signs; thus, he revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.’