Day: January 18, 2026

“Thou hast kept the good wine until now”

“And the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee,” John tells us. The mother of Jesus was there along with Jesus and his disciples. But “the wine failed”. The mother of Jesus tells Jesus, “They have no wine.” So begins this extraordinary Gospel, one which is loaded with significance and meaning.

The story ends with its very opposite: an abundance of wine and not just your usual plonk, but “the good wine”, and the meaning of the whole event. This is, John tells us, “the beginning of signs” which “Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory”, with the additional result that “his disciples believed on him.”

It is an epiphany, to be sure, but of what? Two things at the very least, namely, who Jesus is and what that means for our humanity. This story concentrates several key theological elements that belong to the radical nature of epiphany. What is manifest is nothing less than the essential divinity of Christ, on the one hand, and what that means for the good of our humanity, on the other hand. “This beginning of signs” happened on “the third day” at a little country wedding in Cana of Galilee, the first miracle or sign that Jesus did: an act or sign that is what it signifies. What is that? Simply the real truth and meaning of all the miracle stories of the Gospel. They signify what God ultimately seeks for our humanity: our good found in and through our social joys. That is not simply of our doing but of God’s doing in the very midst of a humble human setting.

God is our highest good. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics argues that the highest good for our humanity is found in what comes closest to the life of the gods, a life lived in contemplation, a life lived in accord with virtue or reason. But he recognises as well that this highest good – which is in itself too high for us because of the great and impassible gulf between God and man – is rightly attended by other goods, such as pleasure and even usefulness though they rank far below his profound sense that happiness, which he even calls in a few passages, blessedness, is our summum bonum, the highest good, which it behooves us to seek. It is about an ethical orientation towards what is higher and beyond simply ourselves.

The Gospel story manifests for us what this means in the Christian understanding. In the background is the ancient Greek wisdom and teaching of Plato and Aristotle in terms of the ethical: a life lived in accord with wisdom and virtue which requires an understanding of what is good as distinct from what is evil and the idea of acting upon that understanding. But in the background, too, is an ancient Jewish saying, that “without wine there is no joy.” We lack, as both the Jewish saying and the philosophers suggest, the means of our happiness, our blessedness, our joy, our ultimate good.

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