Why Did Jesus Turn Water into Wine? The First Sign at Cana and What It Showed

Jesus turned water into wine because the wine ran out at a wedding in Cana and his mother asked him to help. John, the only Gospel that tells the story, gives the deeper reason in one line: with this first miracle Jesus “manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him” (John 2:11).

Yet the glory was shown almost in secret. The guests drank and never knew. The man running the feast tasted it and did not know where it came from. But “the servants which drew the water knew” (John 2:9). The first sign of Jesus was seen most clearly by the people carrying the jars. The whole story takes eleven verses, John 2:1–11, and it was real wine: John uses the ordinary Greek word for it.

“And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there” (John 2:1). Jesus and his disciples had been invited too. During the feast the wine ran short, and his mother told him, “They have no wine” (John 2:3). He answered, “Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come” (John 2:4). She turned to the servants all the same: “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it” (John 2:5).

Nearby stood “six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece” (John 2:6). Jesus told the servants, “Fill the waterpots with water”, and “they filled them up to the brim” (John 2:7). Then he said, “Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast” (John 2:8). The governor, the man in charge of the meal, tasted “the water that was made wine” without knowing where it had come from, though the servants knew (John 2:9).

He called the bridegroom over and told him: “Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now” (John 2:10). John records no prayer over the jars and no touch. He never describes the moment of change at all. By the time the cup reaches the governor, the water is simply wine.

John answers in the verse that closes the story: “This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him” (John 2:11). The Greek word behind “miracles” is sēmeion, a sign, something that points beyond itself. Thayer’s lexicon lists this verse among the wonders “by which God authenticates the men sent by him”. Near the end of his Gospel John tells us why he wrote such signs down at all: “these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name” (John 20:31). Cana is the first of them. The others, and why John calls them signs, are gathered in Bible verses about miracles.

The need itself was ordinary. A village wedding ran out of wine, and Mary brought the problem to her son. The answer came quietly, known to the servants and the disciples and hardly anyone else. God’s glory is not too grand for a family’s ordinary need. Turning stones into bread, sometimes named alongside this miracle, belongs to another story. In the wilderness the tempter told Jesus to “command that these stones be made bread”, and he refused (Matthew 4:3–4). He would not make bread to prove himself, and he made wine for a family’s feast.

Cana saw a second sign as well. Jesus “came again into Cana of Galilee, where he made the water wine”, and a nobleman begged him to heal his son, who lay dying in Capernaum. Jesus told him, “Go thy way; thy son liveth”, and the fever left the boy at that hour. John counts it: “This is again the second miracle that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judaea into Galilee” (John 4:46–54).

The wedding at Cana is in John’s Gospel only. Matthew, Mark and Luke do not tell it, and only John names Cana at all: at the wedding, at the healing, and as the home of “Nathanael of Cana in Galilee” (John 21:2).

No. “Woman” sounds cold in English, but Jesus speaks to his mother the same way from the cross, while he is providing for her: “Woman, behold thy son!” And to the disciple he loved: “Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home” (John 19:26–27). He speaks so to the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:21), and to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb: “Woman, why weepest thou?” (John 20:15).

Albert Barnes, in his Notes on the Bible, granted that the word “seems to imply reproof”, but judged that “it is evident that no such reproof or disrespect was intended”. The question “what have I to do with thee?” is sharper. In the Old Testament it is said in moments of anger (Judges 11:12; 2 Samuel 16:10), and Barnes allowed that here it might be, at most, “a mild reproof of Mary for attempting to control or direct him in his power of working miracles”. Mary did not hear a refusal. She told the servants to do whatever he said, and he acted. Her trust is the hinge of the story.

What did “mine hour is not yet come” mean?

In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ “hour” is the time of his death and glory. When men try to arrest him, they cannot, “because his hour was not yet come” (John 7:30). In the last week of his life he says, “The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified” (John 12:23), and at the Last Supper John writes that “his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father” (John 13:1). At Cana that hour is still ahead, and the wine is a first taste of it.

Augustine tied the wedding and the cross together. In his Tractates on John he has Jesus say, in effect: “But think not that I deny you to be my mother: Mine hour is not yet come; for in that hour I will acknowledge you, when the weakness of which you are the mother comes to hang on the cross.” The Catholic Catechism makes the same link from Mary’s side. At Cana she “asks her son for the needs of a wedding feast; this is the sign of another feast”, and it is “at the hour of the New Covenant, at the foot of the cross” that she is heard (paragraph 2618).

About 470 to 710 litres, or roughly 125 to 190 US gallons. Each of the six jars held “two or three firkins apiece” (John 2:6), and the servants filled them “up to the brim” (John 2:7). The King James “firkin” translates the Greek metrētēs, a liquid measure of “about 39.39 litres” by Souter’s reckoning, and the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia treats it as equal to the Hebrew bath. Think of it in bottles: somewhere between 630 and 945. A family that had run dry now had more than it could pour.

Amount	Litres	US gallons	75 cl bottles
One firkin	about 39	about 10	about 52
One jar (2 or 3 firkins)	79–118	21–31	105–158
All six jars	473–709	125–187	630–945

These figures are worked out from Souter’s 39.39 litres and rounded, so treat them as approximate. At two firkins a jar you get the lower figure, at three the higher.

Yes, by the plain sense of John’s Greek. The word in Mary’s “They have no wine” and in “the water that was made wine” is oinos, the ordinary word for wine. Thayer’s lexicon lists John 2:3 alongside Ephesians 5:18, where Paul writes, “be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess”. The governor’s remark points the same way. Behind his “when men have well drunk” (John 2:10) is a Greek verb that Thayer defines as “to be drunken”. He was describing the custom of bringing out the poorer wine once the guests had drunk freely, and he judged Jesus’ wine the best of the day.

Churches that use wine at the Lord’s Supper and at weddings read the story as being about wine. The Catholic Catechism sees in it the Eucharist to come: “The sign of water turned into wine at Cana already announces the Hour of Jesus’ glorification” (paragraph 1335). At an Orthodox wedding the priest reads John 2:1–11, and then, in the words of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia, “In remembrance of Christ’s first miracle, therefore, a cup of wine is shared by the Bride and Groom as a sign of unity with each other and with Christ.”

Churches that ask their members not to drink give two answers. The first is that Jesus made fresh grape juice. Ellen G. White, who helped found the Seventh-day Adventist Church and whose writings Adventists accept as inspired, wrote: “The wine which Christ provided for the feast, and that which He gave to the disciples as a symbol of His own blood, was the pure juice of the grape.” She pointed to Isaiah, “As the new wine is found in the cluster” (Isaiah 65:8), and called Jesus’ gift “a wholesome and refreshing drink”.

White lived from 1827 to 1915, the century in which the temperance movement urged total abstinence and Methodists moved from wine to grape juice at the Lord’s Supper. In 1869 Thomas Welch, a communion steward at the Methodist Episcopal church in Vineland, New Jersey, found a way to pasteurise grape juice so that it would not ferment. In 1880 his church’s Book of Discipline directed: “Let none but the pure, unfermented juice of the grape be used in administering the Lord’s Supper, whenever practicable.” Some people at the time also claimed that the wine of the Last Supper had been unfermented; the United Methodist Church’s own history page calls that “not a widely held understanding today”.

The second answer does not rest on Cana at all. The Southern Baptist Convention’s 2006 resolution on alcohol never mentions the wedding. It expresses the Convention’s “total opposition to the manufacturing, advertising, distributing, and consuming of alcoholic beverages” and grounds it in the harm drink does, beginning from “biblical warnings that alcohol use leads to physical, mental, and emotional damage”.

Nothing in the story asks anyone to drink, and Scripture condemns drunkenness plainly (Ephesians 5:18). Paul also praises giving up wine for the sake of another believer: “It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak” (Romans 14:21). Whether Jesus himself drank wine has its own answer in did Jesus drink wine?, and what wine stands for across Scripture is traced in wine in the Bible.

John tells us what they were for. They stood there “after the manner of the purifying of the Jews” (John 2:6), for the washing Mark describes before meals: “except they wash their hands oft, eat not” (Mark 7:3). At Khirbet Qana, one of the places proposed for Cana, excavators have found a Roman-period synagogue and several miqva’ot, Jewish ritual baths.

John does not explain why Jesus chose those jars, and Christian readers have found meaning in them. Augustine read the water as the Scriptures of Israel and the change as Christ opening them to his disciples: “When, however, He turns the water itself into wine, He shows us that the Old Scripture also is from Himself, for at His own command were the water-pots filled.” He found a meaning in the number too: “the six water-pots signify the six ages”, the ages of the world from Adam to his own day, which he said were “not without prophecy” (Tractate 9 on John). The water was not thrown out. It was filled to the brim and changed.

No one knows for certain. The Biblical Archaeology Society counts at least five proposed sites, and two are named most often. Most pilgrims go to Kafr Kanna, about six kilometres northeast of Nazareth, where the Franciscans keep a church blessed in 1881. The Custody of the Holy Land says Kafr Kanna has been “the site most visited by pilgrims” since the 17th century.

The other is Khirbet Qana, “the ruins of Cana”, about 14 kilometres from Nazareth, where digging began in 1998. Archaeologists there found a cave complex that Christians used for worship from the Byzantine period to the Crusades. Pilgrims scratched “Kyrie Iesou”, “Lord Jesus”, on its walls, and a shelf above a makeshift altar held two stone vessels. “There was space for another four,” writes Tom McCollough, who has co-directed the excavation, and he judges Khirbet Qana the strongest candidate for John’s Cana.

John does not say, but a feast is one of Scripture’s own pictures of the age to come. Isaiah promised that “in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees” (Isaiah 25:6), and Amos a harvest so rich that “the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt” (Amos 9:13). Bible Hub’s topical lexicon, on the Greek word for wine, sets Cana beside these promises and calls the miracle a sign of “messianic abundance”. The Bible itself ends at a wedding: “Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9). The Catholic Catechism links Cana to that feast, saying the sign “makes manifest the fulfillment of the wedding feast in the Father’s kingdom” (paragraph 1335).

Christian marriage services still remember Cana. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer calls marriage a “holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee”. The Orthodox service ends with a prayer to God, “Who when You were present in Cana of Galilee blessed the marriage there”.

So every Christian wedding stands a little in Cana, and every one looks ahead to the supper of the Lamb. The governor of the feast said more than he knew when he tasted the wine and told the bridegroom, “thou hast kept the good wine until now” (John 2:10).

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• Why did Jesus perform miracles?
• What did Jesus eat? Bread, fish, wine and the Passover in the Gospels
• Is drinking alcohol a sin?
• Prayers for alcoholics: for someone who drinks, and for staying sober
• The Orthodox wedding ceremony: the betrothal, the crowns and the common cup