Why did Christ turn water into wine at the wedding of Cana?
Christ worked this 'first of signs' at this wedding to teach us a vital lesson about the Christian life.
Christ worked this 'first of signs' at this wedding to teach us a vital lesson about the Christian life.
In this piece, Father Coleridge tells us:
How the miracle at Cana reveals Christ’s responsiveness to prayer and the power of His Blessed Mother’s intercession.
Why its splendour shows God’s generosity and invites us to approach Him with faith.
What spiritual truths it teaches, including the transformation of nature by grace and a foreshadowing of the sacraments.
He shows us that Cana highlights the power of prayer, the richness of God’s gifts, and the lasting joy of His grace.
Water made Wine
From
The Ministry of St. John the Baptist
Fr Henry James Coleridge SJ
1886, Ch. XII
St. John ii. 1–11
Story of the Gospels, § 22
Second Sunday after Epiphany
Natural interpretation of our Lord's action
If our Lord had been an ordinary person, who had been asked by His mother or by a friend to grant an alms to the poor, or to do some other act of kindness or mercy, and who had answered the request in some such words as, ‘Leave it to Me, you need not urge Me, but it is not yet time,’ and then had immediately proceeded to do what He had been asked to do, it would hardly have been thought that there could have been reasonable ground for doubt that the petition made to Him had so far influenced Him as to lead Him to perform that work of mercy sooner than might otherwise have been the case.
It is only because our Blessed Lady is the petitioner in the case of the miracle at Cana, because our Lord is the Person Who performs the merciful work, and because that merciful work is so great a miracle and the beginning of His miracles in the office of the Christ, that certain people feel so much reluctance to admit the plain and natural meaning of the words of our Lord and of His Evangelist.
If, indeed, our Blessed Lady’s action in the matter was the action of authority, if she is supposed to have commanded her Son, as His Mother, to perform a work which belonged to Him in His character of the Messias, it would then be natural to see in the words of His answer to her something like reprehension, or warning, or, at the least, an explanation that there were certain spheres in which it was not her place to use any such authority.
But even this would not alter the subsequent circumstances of the history, as they are related by St. John, though it would make it less easily intelligible why, after having been forced to speak in a tone almost of rebuke, our Lord had gone on to do exactly what He was requested to do, or rather—insofar as our Lady’s request contained nothing at all as to the manner in which the want of wine was to be supplied—to do what He was requested to do in the most wonderful and supernatural manner possible.
Consolation as to prayer
We have seen, however, that there is nothing at all in our Blessed Lady’s request to her Divine Son which goes beyond the range of prayer—prayer which might conceivably have been made to Him by anyone present, if such a person had had as lively a faith in His power and as perfect a reliance on His mercifulness and considerateness as she had.
This being the case, what might otherwise be a difficulty becomes a source of wonderful and most consoling instruction. For, in some way and in some degree, though we are not distinctly told how far, our Blessed Lord did certainly hasten on the time of this great manifestation at the prayer of His Mother.
And in this He only acted as God has always acted from the first, as He Himself acted all through the time of His Public Life, and as He has acted continually in the history of the Church from that time to this.
That is, certain things have been done and granted by God in His providence and by our Blessed Lord in His Life and in His Kingdom, which would not have been done but for prayer, or they have been done sooner or in a more magnificent way than would otherwise have been the case, on account of prayer.
Prayer a recognised power in His kingdom
Prayer, intercession, the merits and pleadings and sufferings of the saints on earth, and the petitions of the saints in heaven, are a recognised force and power in the ordering of the history of the world and of each particular soul, though they are a force and a power the exercise and influence of which depend upon the will of man.
And thus there is a strict and natural fitness in the circumstances of this miracle at Cana, which, being the first of our Lord’s great manifestations of this kind, may well be considered as a typical instance in which all the influences which ordinarily guide the results in such cases must have their lawful place.
We are thus pointedly and plainly told that prayer has the power of modifying, influencing, hastening on to their execution, the decrees of God in relation to human affairs, and that, in particular, with regard to the whole system of miracles and preternatural graces which was now about to be inaugurated, prayer, if it is not always to be the moving power, is at least in ordinary cases to be the required condition as well as the occasion of the great bounties of God.
Apparent rebuffs to prayer
Thus, the lesson which we learn from this incident in the miracle before us is the same as that which is taught us by the case of the Syrophoenician woman who pleaded so urgently and with so much ultimate success for her daughter.1
Hers was a case beyond the range of the direct mission of our Blessed Lord, and yet His mercifulness went beyond the bounds which were set to it in order to obey, as we may say, her faith and her prayer. In this case, it is the time that is anticipated; in hers, it is the limit that is enlarged.
And in each case, we have the same encouragement and the same beautiful lesson about what seem to be unfavourable answers that we receive when we pray, namely, that they are in truth invitations from God to pray more earnestly and more faithfully, to act as our Blessed Lady acted, as if we had received a promise that what we ask should be granted, in the same spirit as David of old, the man after God’s own Heart in this and other respects, who, though he had been told from God that the child of his sin was to die, nevertheless fasted and prayed as long as the child’s life lasted, saying, ‘Who knoweth whether the Lord may not give him to me, and the child may live?’2
The stone jars
The details of the miracle now performed have already been quoted from St. John. The servants received their instructions from our Blessed Lady to obey our Lord in everything; and then He turned to the largest vessels that could have been within reach, as if to make the miracle more splendid by the abundance with which the deficiency of wine was to be supplied.
There were six large stone jars or vessels, placed probably near the entrance of the house to furnish that plentiful store of water which was needed for the daily life of the Jews.
The measure which St. John gives of the contents of each would, at the lowest computation, amount to from ten to fifteen of our gallons. They were empty,3 and our Lord bade the servants set them up and fill them with water.
The ruler of the feast
When this was done, He bade them draw from them and take the liquor to the ruler of the feast, probably a friend who had the charge of the arrangements and who presided at the banquet. He tasted it, and it was wine of the choicest flavour, so that in his delight he sent for the bridegroom and complimented him upon its quality.
He had done a strange thing, he told him. It was usual to give good wine first, and then inferior; but he had done just the reverse, he had kept the good wine for the last. At the time at which he spoke, he was ignorant of what had passed, our Lord, as it seems, being at another part of the table; perhaps, as Ludolph suggests, He had practised on this occasion what He afterwards recommended to others, to go and sit in the lowest place, or perhaps He was quietly conversing or teaching apart from the chief body of the guests.
Lessons from our Lord’s miracle—largeness and perfection of the gift
When it is remembered that our Lord, according to the constant teaching of the Fathers and the uniform belief of devout Christians, teaches us by His acts as well as by His words, and that every circumstance of His actions is full of significance, it cannot seem wonderful that the various parts of this great action of His which we are now contemplating should have been considered by Christian contemplatives as having each their own moral or spiritual meaning.
For instance, the circumstance of which notice has already been taken, the largeness and munificence of the gift now bestowed upon the entertainers of our Lord, His Mother, and His Apostles, has been dwelt upon as showing how abundantly God repays any who give Him something or do something for Him.
Again, it is characteristic of the gifts of God that they should be most choice and perfect in their kind, and that they should be bestowed in overflowing copiousness, as in the oil multiplied for the widow at the prayer of Eliseus, or again, as when the five loaves and the fishes were multiplied by our Lord for the people in the wilderness, and there remained basketsful of fragments of what had been bestowed in this miraculous manner.
There has been the same characteristic to be noted whenever the saints of God, in fulfilment of our Lord’s promise, have had the gift of imitating Him in His miracles of this kind, as well as that of following Him in His virtues. God loves a cheerful, large-handed giver, and He is Himself the model and pattern of magnificence in giving.
He loves those who are not content with good works or services to Him which are just such as to pass muster and attain the end at which they are aimed, but who strive, by purity of intention and exactness and perseverance to the very end, to make what they do for Him and offer to Him as perfectly beautiful and precious as by the help of His grace they may.
And so, when He goes out of His ordinary manner in dealing with His children, showering upon them preternatural gifts and favours, everything that comes from Him at such times has a celestial perfection, a completeness, and a priceless excellence.
Use of something common
It is also noted that now, as on other occasions in the course of His Life, our Blessed Lord took something common and ready to His hand to bring out of it the great wonder which He intended to perform.
He might have created the wine in the vessels instead of using water. He might have called bread in abundance into being when He fed the multitudes in the wilderness; but He did not do so.
Some holy writers think that in this He paid a kind of reverence and homage to the creative power of His Father—not taking it into His own hands, though His power is the same with that of His Father, leaving it to Him to be the Creator of all as He is the First Person in that Ever-Blessed Godhead, the source and origin of all being.
Or, we may add, our Lord chose in this also to be dependent upon His Father, taking the creatures which He had made and making them, as it were, the seeds and germs out of which He wrought what He desired. There may also have been other reasons.
Indeed, great as would have been the miracle if, in the cases of which we are speaking, He had created what He had need of out of nothing, it might still have seemed more like a magical illusion than it could when the water which the servants knew that they had drawn from the well or fountain was turned into wine, or when the five loaves and two fishes of the lad were taken from his basket and multiplied so as to feed the crowds.
Change of substance
Another circumstance, which is certainly unusual in our Lord’s miracles, and therefore may be thought all the more significant, is the change of one substance into another, and this so perfectly that the ruler of the feast and others like him could bear witness to the excellence of the wine which had before been water.
Holy writers see in this the symbolical character of the miracle, inasmuch as our Lord came not to destroy but to fulfil—to take up what had already been taught, revealed, and practised, and transform it into something more noble and more worthy of Himself.
This He did with the Law, changing it into the Gospel, with the whole of the Old Testament institutions, making all things new and more sublime, full of grace and overflowing with spiritual riches. Instead of circumcision, He was to give baptism, instead of external purification, interior cleansing, instead of temporal rewards, an eternal kingdom, instead of carnal sacrifices, the pure oblation of the Immaculate Lamb, instead of legal rites, Christian sacraments.
Use of the element of water
Some authors also dwell on the manifold use made of the element of water in the Old Testament for the wonderful works of God, as in Egypt, the Red Sea, and the Jordan, and suppose that it was now chosen to be the subject of a still higher miracle because our Lord had just sanctified it by His own touch in His Baptism.
Others see in it an image of the weakness and instability of our human nature, which is to be transformed by grace into something noble and divine through His Incarnation.
And, inasmuch as our Lord’s miracles looked both forwards and backwards—preparations and foreshadowings of His great permanent wonders in the Christian sacraments—we can hardly help seeing in this change of water into wine an anticipation of the great wonder of the change of bread and wine into the Precious Body and Blood of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, just as the later miracle of the feeding of the five thousand foreshadowed other features of the same sublime mystery.
Spiritual meaning of the words of the ruler of the feast
The words of the ruler of the feast to the bridegroom were probably uttered in all simplicity, and may have been recorded by St. John to attest the completeness of the miracle.
Still, they sound to us as if they had a parabolic meaning, as if the speaker unconsciously prophesied of the characteristic feature of our Lord’s dealing with us as the Spouse and Master of our souls.
It is the distinguishing mark of earthly joys and goods that they are soon exhausted: the first taste of them is the sweetest, and they pall upon the appetite, however highly valued they may be at first, they soon become insipid by use, and at last, if forced beyond satiety, they become disgusting. The world begins well and ends badly, nothing that lacks the transforming touch of divine grace can truly please or hold the soul. On the other hand, God begins with what seems hard and stern—commandments, rules, limitations on our liberty, and restraints upon our nature.
‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,’ and He first trains us in holy discipline. But He raises us higher and higher; He gives us new tastes and perceptions, and when we come to enjoy spiritual delights, they are like the good wine which was kept to the last.
At first, the Cross is hard to bear, humility is difficult, and it is painful to conquer and subdue ourselves; but once the soul finds the sweetness of these things, no other sweetness can compare.
And if this is so in this life—if the yoke and burthen of our Lord are even now easy and light to those who take them up courageously—how much more is it true in the next world, the last and greatest gift our merciful God has in store for us, the last and the best.
From Fr Henry James Coleridge, The Ministry of St. John the Baptist
See here for Fr Coleridge’s discussion of the identity of the bridegroom at this wedding:
Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:
Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel
His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible
He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.
If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.
But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.
Will you lend us a hand and hit subscribe?
Read next:
Follow our projects on Twitter, YouTube and Telegram:
St. Matt. xv. 21-28
2 Kings xii. 22.
κÎιμεναι