How does Christ’s 1st miracle @ Cana of Galilee connect with the rest of Scripture?
1.) The first clue that we should look for connections with earlier Scriptural accounts, in this event at Cana is found in the story’s opening words – “on the third day.” This points us to what has gone before in John’s Gospel. Let us briefly set this Wedding Miracle up by considering how we got here.
The Cana event marks the conclusion of a series of events that begin in John’s first chapter. John begins his Gospel with a kind of recapping of the creation story found in the Bible’s first book.
This is brought out in John’s first words of His Gospel. “In the beginning…” Of course these are the first words in Genesis as well. (compare John 1:1 / Gen. 1:1).
John is thus giving us a new creation story. John’s beginning words identifies Jesus as God, the One through whom all things were created and who is now going to be revealed as THE New Creation.
And just as God’s first work in Genesis was the creating of light and the separating of light from darkness so, in John’s account the Lord Christ, is described as a light shining in the darkness (Cmp. Gen. 1:3 w/ John 1:5).
Similarly, John, in purposefully building His parallel account to Genesis tells us in his Baptismal account of Jesus that the Spirit rested on Jesus. This strikingly echoes the Genesis account where the Spirit, in His creative work hovers over God’s creation. It seems that John is suggesting that the Lord Christ is God’s promised New Creation (Cmp. Gen. 1:2 w/ John 1:32).
There are more parallels between the first creation account and this new creation account in John’s Gospel. Notice John’s Genesis-like repetitions of “the next day” (see 1:29, 35, 43). On the first day, John the Baptist is introduced, on the second day Jesus is baptized. Days three and four describe Jesus’ calling of disciples. The point to observe is that John’s is describing a seven-day “inaugural week” of creation, paralleling what we find in Genesis.
So, John wants us to see the coming of Jesus into the world as the long anticipated new creation. In this new creation, a new people of God is to be born by faith in Jesus and the power of water and the Spirit in Baptism (see 1:12, 29-34, 3:5)
This, thus, brings us to Cana, which is the on the seventh day of John’s new creation account – that is, on the third day after the calling of Nathaniel on the fourth day. On this Seventh Day — the day that was the pinnacle of creation in Genesis wherein creation was completed, sanctified and perfected — the New Creation as brought in and by Christ begins to reveal the reality of the new Creation with the Miracle at Cana.
If this is accurate, (and I think it is) there is the tightest of connections between John’s Gospel and the Old Testament… between the 1st Miracle at Cana of Galilee announcing the arrival of Jesus the Messiah and the new creation that Jesus brought with him and the OT account of the first creation.
