The First Of His Miraculous Signs

The First of His Miraculous Signs

When the master of ceremonies tasted the water that was now wine, not knowing where it had come from (though, of course, the servants knew), he called the bridegroom over. “A host always serves the best wine first,” he said. “. . . But you have kept the best until now!” This miraculous sign at Cana in Galilee was the first time Jesus revealed his glory. And his disciples believed in him.

John 2:9-11

Minister and storyteller Frederick Buechner was born on this day, July 11, 1926. He is the author of more than thirty critically acclaimed books, including A Long Day’s Dying, Godric, Listening to Your Life, and The Sacred Journey. The New York Times has called him the finest Christian writer in America. But it’s his book Whistling in the Dark, originally published in 1988, that we’ve come to appreciate for the way he describes marriage:

They say they will love, comfort, honor each other to the end of their days. They say they will cherish each other and be faithful to each other always. They say they will do these things not just when they feel like it but even—for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health—when they don’t feel like it at all. In other words, the vows they make at a marriage could hardly be more extravagant. They give away their freedom. They take on themselves each other’s burdens. They bind their lives together in ways that are even more painful to unbind emotionally, humanly, than they are to unbind legally. The question is: what do they get in return?

And here’s his answer:

They get each other in return. . . . They both still have their lives apart as well as a life together. They both still have their separate ways to find. But a marriage made in Heaven is one where a man and a woman become more richly themselves together than the chances are either of them could ever have managed to become alone. When Jesus changed the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, perhaps it was a way of celebrating this miracle of commitment and the transformation it fosters.^a

He’s saying that the married couple never has to face the world alone. You have each other with whom to get through the night and wake to the day. And as married individuals you have the opportunity to become better versions of yourselves than on your own.

We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.

—Benjamin Franklin

^a 72