These Jars

In the women's group at my parish, we've been reading Walking With Mary: A Biblical Journey From Nazareth to the Cross over the past few months. I read the entire book before our study started because I couldn't put it down, and I had a revelation that was so profound – and so counter to what I had always understood – that I stopped in my tracks, re-read the passage, let the implications of what I had just learned slowly sink in, and wept because it was so beautiful. Here is how author Dr. Edward Sri sets up the scene of the wedding at Cana:

“Let’s consider how Mary’s command ‘Do whatever he tells you’ has profound effects on the servants, inspiring them to trust Jesus in a radical way. Just put yourself in the servants’ shoes. Jesus tells them to take the six stone jars for the Jewish rites of purification, fill them up with water, and draw some out to present to the steward of the feast. These stone jars would have been used for the ritual washing of hands. Astonishingly, Jesus tells the servants to fill up these very jars with water and then present this water to their boss so that the contents can be served to the guests. This would take a lot of faith! Imagine what the servants are thinking: ‘Fill up these jars? With water? And serve it to the guests? How is this going to solve the problem?’ From a merely human perspective, Jesus’s plan does not make any sense. Yet, first and foremost, Jesus is asking the servants not to understand His plan but to trust Him.”

The phrase “these jars” caught my eye. What was so special about them? Their presence in the story seems like nothing more than a minor detail – they’re just a prop on the stage.

But this is Dr. Sri who’s writing here – if he mentions something, it’s important.

So I went back and reread what he tells us about the jars:

• They were used for the Jewish rites of purification.
• They were used to hold water.
• They were used for the ritual washing of hands.

Then I went to the Bible to read what the account in the gospel of John says about the jars; it tells us only that they were used for the Jewish rites of purification, as our text tells us. Then we learn that the servants follow Jesus’s directives to fill the jars with water, draw some out, and take it to the steward of the feast. So far, this is pretty straightforward.

But there’s a hint in the next verse that points to something unusual about the use of these jars:

“The steward of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from.”

You could read that last phrase in one of two ways –

The steward assumed that the bridegroom had held this new wine in reserve somewhere but didn’t know where this storage place had been.

OR

The steward didn’t know that the wine had been carried to him directly from the stone jars intended for use in the Jewish rites of purification.

If you read it the second way, as I do, the steward didn’t assume the wine had come from the stone jars. Why would he? They were used to hold water, not wine. The fact that the steward does not realize exactly where the wine came from is, in John’s telling, worthy of emphasis.

Obviously the high point of this event is that Jesus turns water into wine. But the kind of vessel in which He accomplishes this miracle is deeply significant, in a way that I had never grasped until Dr. Sri pointed it out.

It’s easy to relegate something seemingly mundane – such as a stone jar – to the background of the story, based on assumptions about it that we may not even be aware of.

For instance, I had always assumed that these six stone jars had held all of the original wine; I’d never heard it taught any other way. Once the jars were empty, Jesus simply performed a holy parlor trick of refilling them with water which He then turned into wine. They were convenient containers that stood ready for any use that presented itself – water, wine, whatever.

Except that they weren’t.

These stone jars had not been “repurposed” as wine vessels for the wedding at Cana. They were – first, foremost, and always – intended to hold water used for washing in the Jewish rites of purification.

Jewish law was very strict about not mixing certain things. One did not mix meat and dairy. One did not mix linen and wool. And one did not switch out water for wine in jars used for purification.

It wasn’t completely earth-shattering for Jesus to direct the servants to fill the jars with water – that was what the jars were intended for. The servants might have thought it was a little odd to be tinkering with water when wine was what was needed – but they did it anyway, trusting, as Dr. Sri notes, without hesitation. Transmuting water into wine would have been earth-shattering on its own, no matter what container was used. But what I found the most earth-shattering in this passage is this: the water residing in a vessel used for purification was transformed into a new creation – wine, a symbol of Christ’s blood, which purifies and transforms us into new creations.

It’s not just about water-into-wine – it’s also about wine-into-blood, and how in consuming one we consume the other. It’s more than a domestic miracle – it’s a living portrait, at once completely literal and deeply symbolic, of how Jesus transforms not only material things but our very hearts.

Something that I came to understand on my journey into the Church -- and that I love to point out every time I see another example of it – is that the story of our creation, fall, and redemption is an epic of the highest order. Over the course of time many powerful, sweeping stories of mortals and heroes, of brave deeds and tragic falls, of sacrifice and redemption, have been written by human authors – the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Arthurian legends, Beowulf, and in our day the tales of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. But though they have much to offer the reader, they pale in comparison to the story that God not only wrote but chose to incorporate us into. It has all the elements of a classic story: plot, backstory, setting, theme, protagonist, antagonist, conflict, characters, point of view, foreshadowing, metaphor, symbolism. These last three are particularly on display at the wedding at Cana.

Until I read this book, I had seen the wedding at Cana strictly in terms of the miracle Jesus performed. This is earth-shattering – but it’s not the whole story. Only now do I see that He didn’t just generously and miraculously provide a wedding with wine – He generously and miraculously provided each of us a beautiful, poignant illustration of His death, our redemption, and the re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice in the Mass. To me, this is a story as beautiful as a painting by da Vinci, a sculpture by Michelangelo, a concerto by Bach. God is the consummate Storyteller – with the added bonus that every word of His story is true.

#Cana #Jesus #BlessedVirginMary #Eucharist #Catholic