Frederick Buechner, American writer and theologian makes the following observation concerning this week’s text from John: “Like so much of the Gospel of John, the story of the wedding at Cana has a curious luminousness about it, the quality almost of a dream where every gesture, every detail, suggests the presence of meaning beneath meaning, where people move with a kind of ritual stateliness, faces melting into other faces, voices speaking words of elusive but inexhaustible significance”.

Buechner also points out that it is on the third day of Jesus’ public ministry that the wedding takes place; the third day that Jesus comes to change the water into wine and in the way of dreams the number threecalls up that other third day when just at daybreak, in another way and toward another end, Jesus came and changed despair into rejoicing at Easter. John may just be using this first sign as a sign–post , as we are about a month away from setting our feet once again on the journey that will lead six weeks later to empty tomb.

In the teachings of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, back in the fourth century, he posed a rhetorical question knowing that there was only one right answer, he says, “at the wedding feast at Cana, three days into his public ministry, Christ changed water into wine and shall we think him less worthy of credit when he changes wine into his blood?” Excellent question on any occasion when we gather at the Lord’s Table— “shall we think him less worthy of credit when he changes wine into his blood?”

The miracle of the wine shattered the boundaries of their conventional world, and the disciples are, as a result, willing to entertain the possibility that this boundary breaking marks the in-breaking of God.

The wine steward tried to reshape the miracle to fit his former categories, while the disciples allowed their categories to be reshaped by this extraordinary transformation of water into wine, and so they “believed in him” (2:11) as the revealer of God, John tells us. Can it be any less for us today?