The Third Day

by REID, A. | Category: N/a | Jun 2006

Writing late in the first century, the Apostle John recalled the third day of his close acquaintance with Jesus of Nazareth.

The occasion was a wedding in Cana of Galilee to which he and his new Rabbi had been invited. He does not tell us who the bride and bridegroom were on that happy occasion, but their wedding was favoured by the presence of Christ, the ultimate Bridegroom.

The idea of Christ as the Bridegroom was mooted by John the Baptist to his disciples when they cited the growing ascendancy of Jesus. John�s reply to these disciples was: �"You yourselves can testify that I said, �I am not the Christ but am sent ahead of him.� The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom�s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete."� (John 3:28-30). So John the Baptist likened himself to the attending friend and Jesus to the Bridegroom.

When he wrote the Revelation, John the Apostle depicted the scene when the ultimate Bridegroom would be united to His bride in the memorable vision of the marriage of the Lamb. It, too, will be a time of joy, indeed, of unparalleled rejoicing. �"Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready"� (Rev.19:7).

The joyous wedding in Cana could have gone so terribly wrong had it not been for the presence of the true Bridegroom. A social disaster occurred that could have spoiled the happy day: the wine ran out. In response to His mother�s request, Jesus commanded that the servants fill six stone water jars that normally held water for ceremonial washing. Although possibly a tradition of the elders (see Mark 7:3,4), the idea of ceremonial defilement and the need for ritual cleansing were rooted in the Law of Moses. The changing of this water into wine John calls �� the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed �� (John 2:11).

As with all the signs selected for his gospel, John chooses this one for its deeper significance. Beyond the more obvious witness to Christ�s deity, we may see that the age of the Law had failed to bring deliverance to its adherents and was represented in the jars of water, but with the coming of the true Bridegroom a new age was being brought in. The newly created wine, which claimed attention by its quality, represented the new age that would result from the incarnation and redemptive work of Christ. So the new age would be superior to the old as the wine was to the water.

This miracle on the third day of his experience of Christ must also have resonated with John for another reason: �He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him� (John 2:11). Until that third day those first followers had hailed Jesus as the Messiah, the one Moses wrote about in the Law; but with that first sign, John, the gospel writer, saw a flash of glory he had never seen before, the glory that he spoke of so fulsomely in his prologue: �We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth�. So, contrasting the old age with the new, John concludes, �For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ� (John 1:17).

(Bible quotations from the NIV)

REID, A. | Jun 2006
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