Father Stephen De Young: Chapter two, verse one:

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.

So, Cana is another one of these little villages. Cana is not a big city. Cana is a little village and when we read there’s a wedding, now Orthodox weddings will go a good 45 minutes, maybe even an hour depending on how long the priest goes on in his sermon.

Interlocutor: Which Cana is this? There’s a Cana in Lebanon.

Fr. Stephen: It’s in Galilee, so probably closer to the south of Lebanon.

And if you’ve ever been to a non-Orthodox wedding, sometimes they go 10, 15 minutes and that’s it, that’s the whole thing. They can be real quick and then they have a big reception and then it’s done. Weddings at this time in history were not like that. They were multiple day affairs where not just the family, it wasn’t just the family or even the extended family, the whole village would come together and celebrate the fact that these people were getting married for several days. Usually up until the next Sabbath because then they had to stop because of the Sabbath.

Interlocutor: So that’s the significance of the third day, it’s already been going on.

Fr. Stephen: Right, his mother’s already there, and now he’s going to go.

Now one other note here because we’re going to talk about this as we go through. We’re going to talk about the way the Theotokos appears in St. John’s Gospel because it’s somewhat different. He never refers to her by her name. He doesn’t talk about Mary. He refers to her as “Jesus’ mother”. We’ll see he refers to her as one other thing too, as we’ll see as we go through. But it’s “Jesus’ mother” and one other thing that we’ll see here in a minute, but he never refers to her by her name. And there is no story of really narrative of Jesus’ birth in St. John’s Gospel, right? He mentions the word became flesh but we don’t hear the story of his birth. So we’ll talk about this as we go through and we’ll see this is another one of his themes as he’s talking about the Theotokos, as he’s talking about the Lord’s mother.

Now both Jesus and His disciples were invited to the wedding. And when they ran out of wine, the mother of Jesus said to Him, “They have no wine.”

So it’s been going on for a while, as you might expect, they run out of wine and you can’t make wine quickly. You can’t just go make some more wine. So it takes time. So the mother again, we never hear her name. Just the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine”. Now, notice what’s interesting is she already believes that he can do something about this. Now, we know Jesus doesn’t have any money, so it’s not that she wants to go buy some wine. [Laughter] So we already see her faith reflected here.

Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does your concern have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come.”

So the immediate answer to her is, look, this is not a big deal. This happens at weddings. They go a while and they run out of wine. This is not a big decision.

Interlocutor: That’s rude. He calls her woman, and that’s…

Fr. Stephen: That’s where I’m going to go. Just a second.

Interlocutor: The way that comes across in English is disdainful. If I called my mother “woman”, boy, I would never forget. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. We’ll come back to that in just a second. But basically, his response is, “This is a trifling thing. My hour’s not yet come. This isn’t the time for me to reveal to everyone who I am because they ran out of wine at a party. This is a minor concern.”

Now, the title “woman”, this is what I was just mentioning. This is the other way that St. John refers to Jesus’ mother as woman. And you’ll see, it happens several times. The gospel, we read the word woman, and just like with the word Anthropos, it’s kind of disguised, but we forget Eve’s name wasn’t Eve when she was created. You have to read Genesis very carefully. When she’s created, God takes Adam, puts him into a sleep, like death. And then our kind of goofy English translations say he took one of his ribs, which isn’t what it actually says. The word this translated rib, there actually means side. And it means side in the sense that you’d refer to, like, the starboard and port sides of a boat. Or the dorsal and ventral side. It means a half a side, like…

So what it’s actually saying is that God takes Adam and pulls him apart, and from his half, from his side, makes the woman. When he wakes up…

Interlocutor: He takes mankind and makes two versions.

Fr. Stephen: Man and woman. Yeah. And so that’s why when Adam wakes up, he looks at her and he names her “woman” and says, because she is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. And what immediately comes after that is therefore a man shall leave his father’s house and cleave to his wife, because the two are one flesh. Because what happens in marriage is those two that have been pulled apart are brought back together and reunited. But her name there is “woman”. It’s after the fall, after she gives birth to Cain, that they change that. Her name is changed to Eve, because Eva means mother, because she becomes the mother of all the living, it says in Genesis 3. So, woman was her name originally.

So we’re going to see Jesus is going to very frequently here, especially the beginning part of the gospel. We’ll see what happens as we go through, refer to her as woman, as like a name, as like a title. He doesn’t say to her Mary or Mother. He says to her “woman”. And it’s not a coincidence that this is coming just a few verses after the Son of Adam reference. But as I said, this is sort of our first tease in that direction. We’ll see what happens as we go through.

But notice:

His mother said to the servants, “Whatever He says to you, do it.”

So even though he said this is not a big deal…

Interlocutor: She ordered Jesus to do….

Fr. Stephen: Well, she hasn’t technically asked him to do anything. She just went up and said, “They have no wine. They’re out of wine.” And then he says, “Why are you bothering me with this? This isn’t the time for me to reveal myself.” And she responds by saying to the servants, “Whatever he tells you to do, you do it.”

And this says something important about the relationship between the Theotokos and Christ, because many of our, especially our Protestant friends, think that if we give any honor to the Theotokos, we’re somehow taking it away from Jesus, or any of the other saints for that matter. But what does the Theotokos always say? “Whatever he tells you to do, do it.” So, if what the Theotokos is about is about bringing people to her Son, then by doing that, you honor both her and Christ.

Interlocutor: And this also shows her faith again, because whatever he tells them to do is going to be the right thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And she doesn’t know what it is. He didn’t tell her he was going to do anything, right? But she says, just blanket, whatever he says. If he says to do nothing, do nothing.

Now there were set there six waterpots of stone, according to the manner of purification of the Jews, containing twenty or thirty gallons apiece.

So, because these are Jewish folks, they’re abiding by the law in Leviticus, before you eat, you have to wash. You have to clean yourself. When you come in from outside, you have to wash your feet. You have to do these ritual washings. Well, if you’ve got a whole wedding party that’s going to be doing that and it’s over a few days, they’re going to be coming in and out and doing these things, you’re going to need a whole lot of water standing by. So they have these six big… and these jugs are probably about this high. We found them archeologically. We found these water jugs in Galilee we’re about this high off the ground. So they hold a substantial amount of water.

Interlocutor: They’re almost oil drums.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so that’s sitting there by the door.

Jesus said to them, “Fill the waterpots with water.” And they filled them up to the brim.

So people have been using it. So they go, they fill them back up, fill it all the way up to the very top.

And He said to them, “Draw some out now, and take it to the master of the feast.” And they took it.

So the master of the feast is the person who’s putting on the wedding. So it probably would have been the groom’s father. Not necessarily, but that was usually who it was. If he wasn’t alive, it might be an uncle, somebody else. It’s the person who’s putting on the wedding who’s in charge of making sure everything happens. So they go over, they draw out some water. They just poured it in there. Now they take some out, right? And they’re told go over to the master of the feast, tell them to drink it. So they go and they do it.

When the master of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and did not know where it came from.

Now, notice how Saint John does this. He doesn’t actually tell us when it became wine, just somewhere in the process. By the time it gets to him, it’s wine. “He didn’t know where it came from.” He drinks this wine, he’s like, somebody bring a bunch of wine. Did somebody just show up with wine?

But the servants who had drawn the water knew,

So why does he throw in that comment that the servants knew? Well, because they tried to say this wasn’t just a mix up. This wasn’t just “Oh, they got confused.” That they all thought, “Oh, Jesus must have made this wine because nobody knew where it came from. But really, this guy had brought it.”

The master of the feast called the bridegroom.

So he calls the groom over and says, “hey”.

And he said to him, “Every man at the beginning sets out the good wine, and when the guests have well drunk, then the inferior. You have kept the good wine until now!”

He says, “Look, this is wedding planning 101. You put out the good wine first and then once everybody’s drunk then you could just put out garbage because they’re so drunk and they won’t know. They’ll think it’s great.” He says, but now, this has been going on three days and this is the best wine I’ve had. Why’d you save this and wheel it out now? That doesn’t make any sense.”

This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory; and His disciples believed in Him. After this He went down to Capernaum, He, His mother, His brothers, and His disciples; and they did not stay there many days.

Now, a couple of things, it says “This manifested his glory.” Now, when St. John was talking about glory before, he was talking about the glory of God that’s in Christ. Now, turning water into wine is neat and impressive. But why is this such a big deal? Because it doesn’t say… And this wasn’t the first time we started thinking maybe there was something special about Jesus. This is manifesting his glory. Glory is the only begotten of the Father. We just heard in the reading tonight, the prophet Elijah, right? There’s the oil that never ran out. So this isn’t that outlandish of a miracle, as miracles go.

Interlocutor: Is this foreshadowing the Eucharist?

Fr. Stephen: Well, there is a little bit of a connection there, but also it’s the symbolism of the wine itself, because what was Jesus at? What kind of party was it this wine was at? It was a wedding feast. And one of the main symbols that’s in Jewish literature at this time and that we see Jesus refer to, especially in the other Gospels, but we see Jesus referred to, as an image of the kingdom, is an image of a wedding banquet, a wedding feast. He talks about this wedding feast. And so the idea was, we just talked about how marriage in Genesis is the man, the two that are separate now coming back together and in sort of the mindset when thinking about the end of the world, when God returns, when God visits his people, God creates everything in Genesis in pairs, you’ve got the light and the darkness, the heavens and the earth, right? You’ve got the sea and the dry land, the water above, water below, man and woman, right? Everything’s created in these pairs.

Well, what do you see in marriage then, as we just talked about? You see the pair coming back together and being made one. And so the image, as they thought about what’s going to happen, when God returns, is that these things that are now two are going to become one. So heaven and earth are going to become one.

Interlocutor: And man and God…

Interlocutor: Are going to become one. And so the reason it’s described as a wedding feast is that the kingdom is going to be a celebration of this happening, of these coming together.

And that imagery is all through the New Testament. We’ll see it again when we get into St. Paul’s Epistles, in Ephesians when he talks about marriage and he says this is a mystery of Christ and the Church, how they’re brought together and are one. So that image.

And so, this new wine, this new life coming out of this wedding feast is not just a miracle, but it’s a symbol of the fact that Jesus now having come is beginning this wedding, the kingdom, the consummation of things is starting to happen now in Jesus.

Interlocutor: In ways that not everybody will see the full significance.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And whether they see or not is going to depend on the state of their soul.

Also notice this is the beginning of signs. This is one of the peculiarities in the Gospel According to St. John. He doesn’t talk about miracles. The other gospels talk about Jesus doing miracles. He does miraculous healings; he does this and that. St. John uses the word “signs”, and he’s picked up that word = from the Torah, the Pentateuch, where it’s used, beginning with when Moses goes into Egypt, he works signs. When his staff becomes a serpent, he puts his hand and it comes out leprous. Those are called signs. And the ten plagues are called signs. And what happens as they then go into the wilderness, like the snake, which is going to be referred to, these are all called signs. It’s sometimes translated in English, signs and wonders, but they’re called signs. And the reason the word sign is what is a sign? Well, a sign is a symbol that indicates something beyond itself.

So, Jesus doing miracles isn’t just an expression of his power, but it’s a sign to the people who see it that something else is true. And so this is what we were just sort of talking about with this miracle of the wedding. It’s not just, “Oh, he has the power to turn water into wine”, but Him doing that at this wedding feast is a sign that now this new age is coming, is beginning. This new time is beginning.

And so to the people who are paying attention and who are in tune with this, they will see this and know and know the significance and know that, okay, this is who…

Interlocutor: At this point, Nathaniel has just seen something more than being seen under a fig tree. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Already. This is the beginning.

Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

Now, that little phrase is important, the fact that he said the “Passover of the Jews”, because what other Passover was there?

Interlocutor: Well, later on there’s the resurrection of Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Which shows us that already at the time the Gospel According to St. John was written, Christians were celebrating the resurrection of Christ as Pascha, as Passover. That that had already happened. So he has to say “the Passover of the Jews was drawing near”, because otherwise, if he had just said Pascha was drawing near, the Christians who heard it might have thought, oh, Jesus is about to go to his crucifixion. Because that connection had already been made in the church by this time. As we said, this is probably around 85 AD. So this is within 50 years of when Jesus rose from the dead. Already, Christians now think of Pascha as the celebration of Christ’s resurrection. This is not a later thing. This is almost immediate.

So the Passover of the Jews is at hand, is approaching. And Jesus went up to Jerusalem and we talked about here also, I think, the first night we talked about the fact that one of the differences between St. John’s Gospel and the other three is that the other three present Jesus ministry as just sort of one throughline. And it only talks about him going to Jerusalem for Passover the last time. Whereas St. John presents to us that Jesus’ ministry went on for three years. And so there are three Passovers. This is the first one.

So, he goes to Jerusalem. And this was common, in the Book of Deuteronomy, in fact, I don’t say this too much because it might stop giving at the church. But what it says in Deuteronomy you’re supposed to do with your tithe is you’re supposed to take the money and when Passover comes, you’re supposed to go to Jerusalem with it and use it to buy food and strong drink and celebrate with your friends and eat and drink it before the Lord. [Laughter]

But we do that to a certain point because I haven’t been here for Pascha yet, but a lot of places at Pascha they have a pretty big feast, yes, with some strong drink. They eat and drink before the Lord. Yeah. Okay, so Jewish people come from not just from Galilee and Judea, but all over the Roman world, if they could, if they had the money, would come to Jerusalem for the Passover, because remember, at this point, it’s focused around the sacrifices in the temple and that’s the only place you’re allowed to do sacrifices. So everybody has to come, to really celebrate, they have to come to Jerusalem.

And He found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers doing business.

So there’s actually two different groups here. There’s money changers and there’s people selling animals. The money changers were there because there was a basic problem with Roman money. Roman money had engraved on it the emperor’s face and/or one of the pagan gods. Well, from a Jewish perspective, that was a graven image. Remember, the emperor was worshipped as a god, so that was idolatry as far as they were concerned. So you couldn’t take that money and put it in the temple, right? So if someone was going to give money to the temple or they’re going to go and buy sacrifice in the temple, they had their own temple coins and so they would have a money changer. And so you would come with your Roman denarius and they’d give you a shekel, you’d exchange it and then you could go and give the shekel in the temple.

So, they had these money changers who were doing that. And let’s just say they didn’t do it for free. They weren’t just doing it out of the kindness of their heart. They were making money on the deal. On the exchange rate. It’s all controlled by Rome, the shekels are only good in the Temple. Nobody else wants them. And you’re not allowed to bring Roman money into the Temple. So they sort of have their own little economy in the Temple because of that.

Also, we have the people who are selling animals. And the reason for that, again, if you’re having to travel from very far away by boat or you’re having to walk 30 miles to get to Jerusalem, it’s kind of rough, if you’re dragging a goat or a sheep the whole way, dragging it after you, yeah, that could be difficult. So what they would do is rather than try to drag an animal with them, they just bring money, buy it there, and then offer the sacrifice there. But once again, the people there aren’t doing this out of the kindness of their heart.

Interlocutor: You start out with 100 denarii, and by the time you’ve changed your money and bought your animal, you’ve got, say, 75 denarii to buy at the animal with.

Interlocutor: That would be a very high estimate of what you would end up with [Laughter]. The other thing we need to know about this time is that the Temple also taxed the Jewish people. The Romans, generally, because the Jews were not Roman citizens, according to Roman law, they were non persona in Latin. They were nonpersons. They were not human, they were not people. They looked at them sort of like animals that were running around on the land that they had. Anyone who wasn’t a Roman was in that category, if you were not a Roman citizen. When they took over an area, they wanted the natural resources, they wanted the ports, they wanted those things. They didn’t care about the people. So, for example, King Herod’s title is Ethnarch, King of the People, king of the ethnos. They said, okay, you can rule over those peasants. All the resources and everything, the roads, all that belongs to us, but you can have the people. Well, they took the same approach with the Temple. They weren’t going to fund the Temple. So they basically told the chief priest, “Well, tax your people, get it from them to support the Temple.”

And the Temple priests had taken advantage of this. Now, in the Torah, in the law that they were supposed to be following, every family in Israel was given a piece of land the exact same size to work and to farm, and they could do whatever they wanted with it, if they were going to be lazy and not work it well, you know, they wouldn’t have any food, right? And if they went into debt and sold it all off, well, then they wouldn’t have any land. But every 50 years there was a year of Jubilee and all the land was supposed to revert to the original owners. So if I was bad at business and I lost all my land, my son wouldn’t be punished for it, right? I would be in poverty, but my son would get the land back and he could get a new start and if he was more industrious, he could continue. So you wouldn’t have generational poverty, it wouldn’t go on and on and on.

One tribe got no land, the Levites, because God said, “your inheritance is the Lord”, they were to serve as priests, and the priests got a portion of what was offered to the temple. This is still how we do it today. The people would come and make offerings and the priests would get their food and get from that. So they didn’t have their own land because they were supposed to not be out farming, they were supposed to be in the temple, worshipping God.

This had been reversed by this point in history. In the first century, the chief priests owned 70% of the privately owned land in Judea, and Galilee also. 70% of what was not owned by the Romans was owned by the chief priests and their families and passed down from generation to generation. They were supposed to own nothing and it was supposed to all go back to the people originally, because they used the temple tax, they would put this tax on and say, “You need to give this to support the temple. This is a tax you’re paying to God.” And if they couldn’t pay it, they’d say, “Well, okay, you could give us some of your land, we’ll take that as payment.” And so over time… and the people who originally owned the land were now tenant farmers working on land that the chief priests owned and still being taxed, it’s still being taxed by them.

So, it is not just the money changers and the people selling the animals, but the whole temple has become the center of this economic corruption by the priests who are there getting rich; they’re getting rich off the backs of the Judean people.

Interlocutor: For those of us who read Renaissance history, that sounds very familiar.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] So this is what Jesus finds. He’s come to Jerusalem for the Passover, he’s come to the temple, the place where God is to be worshiped, and this is what he finds. He finds all this commerce going, all these people trying to enrich themselves at the expense of others.

The image that Ezekiel uses is God talks to the leaders of Israel and he says it’s like he left them as shepherds, like he said, I want you to be the shepherds, these are my sheep, I want you to take care of them and watch them and protect them. And then he came back and they had killed and eaten all the sheep that they were supposed to be protecting, they’re supposed to be caring for. So, yeah, that’s the dynamic that’s going on.

And so this is what Jesus finds.

When He had made a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers’ money and overturned the tables.

So this is, again, a place where our mental image sometimes of Jesus, that he’s very soft and quiet, isn’t really who Jesus is. We talked about Jesus is how we know who God is. So how does Jesus react when he sees his people being oppressed and exploited and treated this way? He gets justice for them, and that justice if you’re on the wrong side of it. Looks a whole lot like wrath, looks a whole lot like punishment, because he’s whipping them, driving them out, turns over their tables. So the money all pours everywhere, and you could assume people were probably grabbing it very quickly.

And He said to those who sold doves, “Take these things away! Do not make My Father’s house a house of merchandise!”

Literally says “an emporium”.

Interlocutor: That’s interesting because I’m used to the translation, “den of thieves”.

Fr. Stephen: That’s in St. Matthew’s Gospel

Interlocutor: The house of merchandise here. I mean, this is kind of different because it seems to be condemning commerce.

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s definitely condemning religion for profit. That people are trying to make a profit out of the worship of God.

Then His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for Your house has eaten Me up.”

So as they’re watching this happen in front of them, they remember this passage in the Scriptures.

So the Jews answered and said to Him, “What sign do You show to us, since You do these things?”

So notice the Jews don’t just outright show up and say, “How dare you?” They don’t say, “How dare you do this?” They see him doing this and how do they interpret it? They say, well, “What is he doing here?” Because he’s kind of ceremonially cleaning out the temple. Now, notice it doesn’t say the money changers. It doesn’t say the chief priests. Right? These are just the regular people who are there. These are some of the people who have been being oppressed. So they’re saying, “Okay, does he just not like money?” They’re hinting at, “Is this the beginning of something? Is something happening? So give us some kind of sign to let us know,” because remember, a sign is a pointer to let us know what this means and what happening here?

Jesus answered and said to them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

Jesus makes this comment to them, right? He says, if you destroy this temple in three days, I’ll build it up.

Interlocutor Now, if you were puzzled before, you’re really puzzled.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because they said they want a sign. He says, okay, “I’ll give you a sign,” right? “Destroy this temple, and I’ll build it up in three days. So that’ll be a sign to you about what’s going on.”

Then the Jews said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?”

And it wasn’t finished yet, by the way, Herod was still building. So they don’t understand what he means, right?

But He was speaking of the temple of His body. Therefore, when He had risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this to them; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had said.

St. John is horrible about spoilers [Laughter}.

So the disciples, they didn’t get what he was talking about either. They were like, “Huh?”. This is a repeated thing in all the Gospels. The disciples are all kind of clueless about Jesus. But they remember this afterwards.

Now, it’s not just here that he’s predicting that he’s going to rise on the third day, but remember what this is saying. He’s referring to his body as the temple. We talked about this. Remember the word that St. John used back in the prologue when he said the “word became flesh and tabernacled among us”, right? The tabernacle, and then the temple was the place where God lived in the midst of his people. And so when Jesus says “this temple”, and he’s standing in the building, and he’s not talking about the building, he’s talking about his own flesh, his own body, he’s saying this building isn’t where God lives, that Jesus is where God lives. Jesus is where God is found. So it’s a bigger statement than that, right? This is no longer the temple. Jesus is the temple. And we’re going to see he’s going to come back to this idea when he’s talking to the Samaritan woman, when he talks about God not being worshipped in the temple anymore, but being worshipped in spirit and the truth, he’s going to come back to this idea that Jesus is now the place where we find God, not a building or a tent.

Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the feast, many believed in His name when they saw the signs which He did. But Jesus did not commit Himself to them, because He knew all men, and had no need that anyone should testify of man, for He knew what was in man.

So what this is saying is Jesus did these miraculous signs because they would see these signs. Lots of people came around, right? Big crowds. We saw this in the other Gospels too. Big crowds following him around. Now we also know where this is going, and we know that all those crowds that loved Him when he was doing miracles later on are going to want to kill Him. And so what St. John is saying here is when all those crowds came and were following Jesus because of the miracles, Jesus didn’t commit Himself to them. Jesus knew what was really in their hearts. He wasn’t fooled by them coming. “Oh, you’re so wonderful, oh, we love you.” Why? Because Jesus knew all men. Why? Because he created all men. We were told in the prologue. And so he knows who’s coming to Him and what’s actually in their heart when they come to Him and speak to Him. Just as he picked the disciples because he knew them already. These other people who now are showing up, he knows exactly who they all are and what they really want, what they really think. Well, since we hit the end of chapter 2, this is probably a good place to stop.