Cana Jars

Essa Grayeb, on January 31, 2008, said:

The Marriage at Cana or Wedding 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. When the hosts ran out of wine, Jesus' mother told Jesus, "They have no more wine." Jesus replied, "Dear woman, why do you involve me? My time has not yet come." Jesus' mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you" (John 2:3-5). Jesus ordered the servants to fill the empty containers with water. When they had done so, Jesus told them to draw out some of it and take it to the chief waiter. After tasting the water that had become wine and not knowing what Jesus had done, he told the bridegroom that he had departed from the custom of serving the best wine first by serving it last (John 2:6-10). This was the first miracle of Jesus and it was performed to reveal his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him (John 2:11).

This miracle of Jesus mentioned in the Gospel of John, occurs immediately after Jesus has told Nathanael at John 1:50 that "You shall see greater things than that". To denote Jesus' miracles mentioned in his Gospel, 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".[1] The event is the first of the seven miraculous signs by which John attests Jesus's divine status, and, around which he structures his Gospel.

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, and the messianic wedding festivals mentioned in Isaiah 62:4-5. Some Christians see the event as having genuinely been foretold, while skeptics 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 New Wine into Old Wineskins.