Jesus the Messianic Wedding Planner?
Why Did John Write about Jesus' Attendance at a Wedding in Cana?
The Apostle John had the heart of a pastor. His writings in the New Testament reveal his heart clearly. John acknowledged that he wrote his gospel “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31 ESV throughout). John also wrote that Jesus did so many things that “were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). So, if John purposefully selected which events of Jesus’ life to record, why pick a story about a wedding that Jesus attended? This article will demonstrate that John included the story about the wedding in Cana (John 2:1-11) so that his readers would understand that Jesus fulfilled a prophetic type along the lines of the Old Testament prophet Elisha, a piece of evidence of the fact that Jesus was the Messiah promised in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Let us begin with a caveat regarding biblical interpretation. It bears emphasizing that the meaning of a text, any text, is the meaning that the author intended. On the other hand, there is a school of modern biblical criticism called postmodernism, the proponents of which ignore authorial intent as irrelevant in interpretation. To the postmodernists, the notion of objective meaning is unimportant. The text means whatever you, the reader, believe it means. Contra postmodernism, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. observed, “The text had to represent somebody’s meaning—if not the author’s, then the critic’s” (1967, 46). Hirsch explained that if interpreters “banish” the author from the determination of the meaning of the text, then they relegate the meaning of the text to the critic, which is absurd. Assume the postmodern hermeneutic is valid. Then the critic determines the meaning of the text. Then, the critic of the critic determines the meaning of the critic’s criticism. Then, the critic of the critic of the critic determines the meaning of that critic’s critic, and you can repeat this cringe-worthy loop until the end of time when there is no critic left. Thus, the “banishment of the author” (Hirsch 1967, 44) results in all communication becoming meaningless. If we want to avoid the conclusion that communication is meaningless, then we must assume that a text means what the author intended for it to mean, so in analyzing John 2:1-11, we should seek to determine what John intended for that passage to mean.
The first step in determining an author’s meaning is to analyze the author’s audience (Stein 2011, 12). Different interpreters over the years have come to different conclusions as to the audience of the fourth Gospel. Some suggested that John wrote a polemic to combat an early form of Gnosticism and thus wrote to the Gnostics (Logan 1991). Others proposed that the Gospel of John is evangelistic in nature, addressed particularly to nonbelievers (Carson 1987, 14). I agree with scholars such as Craig Keener that John wrote primarily to ethnically Jewish believers in Christ, specifically believers who had never met Jesus in person (Keener 2014, 247).
In 20:31, John explained that he penned his book so that the reader would understand who Jesus is, believe in Him, and have life in His name. Looking at this verse alone does not help the interpreter to draw a firm conclusion as to John’s audience; however, the evidence from this verse, taken with some other verses in the Gospel of John point to his audience being second-generation believers. John also wrote, “Jesus said to him [Thomas], ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (20:29-31). In the first part of verse 29, Jesus referred to what Thomas saw to cause him to believe; in verse 30 and the first part of verse 31, John referenced what he had written to cause the reader’s belief. In the second part of verse 29, Jesus called blessed those who have not seen what Thomas saw but who still believe in Him, and in the second part of verse 31, John referred to the same people to whom Jesus referred: namely, those who did not see and yet believe. John used a technique that Bible scholars call parallelism here to point to the fact that his readers were the same people Jesus was talking about, namely those who did not see Jesus in the flesh yet still believed in Him. John pointed his readers to Jesus’s words about them to strengthen their faith. For more evidence of John’s audience, consider Jesus’s prayer recorded in chapter 17. John specifically noted how Jesus included future believers in His prayer when He prayed, “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word” (17:20). Jesus, through John, is telling his congregation that everything Jesus said and did applies not only to those who were there (John and his contemporaries), but to future believers as well.
John’s audience was his congregation of second-generation Jewish Christians, and they would have immediately understood John’s point about the wedding in Cana (John 2:1-11). John wrote,
On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him. (John 2:1-11)
According to the text, on the third day of the week, Jesus, his mother Mary, and the disciples attended a wedding in Cana in Galilee, which was about ten miles down the road from Jesus’s home in Nazareth. At some point in the festivities, the party ran out of wine, so Mary brought the problem to Jesus. Jesus’s response to Mary here seems somewhat odd and is therefore important. “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come,” (v. 4) but apparently Mary perceived that Jesus was going to help because she commanded the servants at the wedding to be obedient to what Jesus told them. John continued by noting that there were exactly six jars there containing twenty to thirty gallons of water each. Jesus told the servants to fill the jars up to the brim with water. They did so, after which Jesus told the servants to take the jars to the host of the wedding reception. At that point, the water had become wine, and the host’s reaction here is also telling. He told the bridegroom, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now” (v. 10). John concluded the story by telling the reader that this was Jesus’s first miraculous sign. John stated that Jesus “manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him” (v. 11).
John’s historical account of the wedding in Cana would have immediately reminded his original readers of the Elisha narrative in 2 Kings 3:5–13. I’m not going to include that passage here. You can look it up if you want, but here is the general idea. The passage begins with the rebellion of Moab. King Mesha of Moab rebelled against Israel, and Jehoram, the evil king of Israel, asked Jehoshaphat, the good king of Judah, to help him quell the rebellion. Jehoshaphat acquiesced, and Jehoram came up with this brilliant strategy to march their forces through the wilderness of Edom to fight the Moabites. They travel a seven-day “circuitous” (2 Kings 3:9) route through the wilderness until they ran out of water (sound familiar?). Jehoram figured they were going to die of thirst, so Jehoshaphat recommended that maybe they could ask a prophet for help. Someone informed the kings that the prophet Elisha was around, so the kings went to Elisha and requested his assistance. At first, Elisha acted like he was not willing to help them. However, after Jehoshaphat, the good king of Judah reasoned with Elisha, Elisha agreed to help because he loved Jehoshaphat. Elisha prayed, and God filled a dry riverbed with water so that everyone could drink.
There are three distinct ways that the narrative of Elisha’s water miracle parallels John’s narrative of Jesus’s wine miracle. First, like the revelers who set out to have a wedding feast without enough wine, Jehoram led the armies through the desert without enough water. Both parties had a plan, but neither was fully prepared. Second, neither Jesus nor Elisha seemed eager to help right away. Jesus and Elisha both supplied reasons why they did not want to get involved. Finally, on account of someone they loved, they helped anyway. Elisha helped for the sake of his friend King Jehoshaphat, and Jesus helped for the sake of his mother Mary. What do these parallels tell us about John 2:1-11?
John used this typology to illustrate the theme of his Gospel: Jesus is the Messiah. But, what does Jesus’ resemblance to Elisha have to do with His role as the Messiah? Maybe not much if you are a modern American, but the Jews were trained to look for the Messiah to come at any time. The ancient Jews knew the Scriptures well. They understood that they were awaiting a Messiah who would be a prophet par excellence. According to Moses, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen” (Deuteronomy 18:15). This passage became one of the most important messianic passages in the Hebrew Bible. One of the ways John demonstrated that Jesus was that great prophet like Moses was by showing his readers this parallel between Jesus and Elisha, the prophet with a double portion of Elijah’s spirit.
In conclusion, the comments of the “master of the feast” about the new wine tell the reader about Jesus’s role as the ultimate prophet (Klink 2005, 10). Similar to how the latter wine was the best wine, the latter prophet Jesus was greater than all who came before Him. Jesus is a prophet like Elisha but even greater because He is the Messiah. John wanted his readers to understand that Jesus is the Messiah and the eternal Son of God, that by maintaining faith in Him, they might have life in His Name.
Reference List
Carson, Donald A. 1987. “The Purpose of the Fourth Gospel: John 20:31 Reconsidered.” Journal of Biblical Literature 106, no. 4 (December): 639–651. https://search.ebscohost.com /login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0000799487&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Fee. Gordon D. 1991. Gospel and Spirit: Issues in New Testament Hermeneutics. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. 1967. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Keener, Craig S. 2014. The IVP Bible Background Commentary New Testament. 2nd ed. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic. EBSCO eBook.
Klein, William W., Craig L. Blomberg, and Robert L. Hubbard, Jr. 2017. Introduction to Biblical Interpretation. 3rd ed. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
Klink, Edward W III. 2005. “What Concern Is That to You and to Me?: John 2:1-11 and the Elisha Narratives.” Neotestamentica 39, no. 2: 273-287. https://search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001551702&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Logan, Alastair H. B. 1991. “John and the Gnostics: The Significance of the Apocryphon of John for the Debate about the Origins of the Johannine Literature.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 14, no. 43 (July): 41–69. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct= true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0000845140&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
McDowell, Josh, and Sean McDowell. 2017. Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
Minear, Paul Sevier. 1977. “Audience of the Fourth Evangelist.” Interpretation 31, no. 4 (October): 339-354. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db= rfh&AN=ATLA0000762674&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Stein, Robert H. 2011. A Basic Guide to Interpreting the Bible: Playing by the Rules. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.