The Sixth Day

God made the world in six days. His Spirit moved on the face of the water, and He said “let there be Light.” It intrigues me that in John's “beginning”, after the first Word, and six reverberating “days”,^[1] Jesus creates wine from water at a wedding feast. And he tells his mother about his coming “hour” (2:4). The last instance of the word “hour” in John's gospel is at the cross, when Jesus forms his mother and his beloved disciple into a new family (19:27). So that time, in John's treatment, is oriented between re-echoed creation and the cross. It is also, intriguingly to me, oriented in two scenes involving Jesus' mother (addressed by Jesus as “woman”), and the claims of kinship, jars, water, and wine.