The words of Jesus to Mary at Cana, as any commentary, and the pertinent bibliography (1) it quotes, will testify, are far from being adequately or acceptably elucidated. Opinions offered must be taken with a treatment of the question of the role that the whole Cana scene plays in the total Johannine dramatization of the story of Jesus. Opinions will thus be placed somewhere between an "ultramarianist" perspective which would see Jesus advancing his "hour" at the (supposed? / presupposed?) request of Mary, and an "antimarianist" perspective which would see Jesus rejecting either the (supposed? / presupposed?) request, or the suppositions behind such a request, or even the person of Mary in making the "request".

Exegetes rightly question the presuppositions or even prejudices of commentators who push to either extreme, to the detriment of veritable exegesis and the promotion of eisegesis. But if it is correct procedure to question the "abnormal" presuppositions grounding aberrant commentary, perhaps there are, even many, occasions when a critical realism would demand that, without having recourse to methodological doubt, exegetes might consider questioning the "normal" presuppositions which must be implicit in any "normal" exegesis of any text, in order to attempt to broaden the range of heuristic, and hermeneutic instruments necessary for furthering their work.

In dealing with the exegesis of the words of Jesus to Mary at Cana, we might say that the "normal" (and hence acceptable) presuppositions are inherent in or are supported by both the text and the context. If heuristically we desire to question these presuppositions, then we have to question, once more, the text and the context.

Textual Considerations

to her / autei

The fact that Jesus is speaking to Mary. and hence answering her supposed / presupposed / implicit "request", is. of couses, strongly grounded in the use of the dative case of the feminine singular personal pronoun autei ["to her"]. This dative is accepted as a dative of address, and the person addressed can be none other than Mary, something underscored by the vocative gynai. Woman! The normality of this is so imperative that to question it may seem to verge on the borders of abnormality already accepted above as aberrant. If Jesus is not speaking to Mary, then who is he speaking to?

Nevertheless, the range of use of the dative case in Indo-european languages and of its functional equivalent in languages of the semitic, hamitic, and other groups [whether in declensional "case" form or in prepositional form] is far more extensive than the dative of address and, indeed, is so extensive that grammarians are driven to create terminology to deal with its variations.

The dative of address, then, is one of many uses, and, I would submit (2), a wider familiarity with the use of "dative functions" in a wider variety of languages, would increase our sensitivity to the nuances of its use in the language of the New Testament, whether that "language" is understood as the written Koin6 Greek of the text or the supposed / proposed Aramaic cultural mindset behind the text. Perhaps, then, for the sake of argument, and for the furtherance of the range of our heuristic tools, we might suggest that there is a "dative of instigation". The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines the verb "to instigate" as: "urge, incite...bring about". If (still very much in the realm of hypothesis) the autei of Jn2:4 could be taken as such a "dative of instigation", then the picture would change radically. But before proceeding further it is necessary to look at other words in the text.

Jesus said…

Bruno Snell, in his book on the making of the mind, quoted approvingly by Bernard Lonergan in Method in Theology (3) has demonstrated from a study of both language and painting the efforts of man to express experiential interiority in language which does not yet adequately possess all the panoply of a modern rational psychology. Could it be that the language of the New Testament is still at the stage of exteriorization, concretization of the rather more elusive and abstract concepts of interiority, whether that interiority is experienced in a more meditative mode ("Mary KEPT [syneterei. Lat. conservabat] all these things in her heart pondering {symballousa, Lat. conferens] them" [Lk 2:19]), or in a more spontaneous mode ("The Pharisees SAID in their hearts" [eipan en heautois'. Lat. dixerunt intra se]. [Mt 9:3])? Again, supposing this to be so for the sake of the hypothesis, and without for the moment further justification of all the details, then the whole passage would read something like [with variants in square brackets]:

"At Mary's instigation..."

["at the instigation of Mary's question"]

[or, much more simply: "at Mary's words"]

"Jesus reflected and said to himself:

"What has what you are saying to do with me?"

["What are you telling me in what you are saying?"]

[or, again much more simply: "What are you trying to tell me?" (4).]

Then the next words would become a reflective question (5): "Could it be that my hour has come?"

With the whole Johannine technique of "words of double significance" / "misunderstanding" / "inadequate understanding" in mind, we might find a great deal of light through a wider consideration of a distinction between "saying" and "telling" such as is implicit in the version offered here, a distinction implicit, almost even explicit, in many passages where the so-called "misunderstanding" technique is being employed or where symbolism is elucidated, or even straightforward speech is being explained, not only in Jn but in the rest of the New Testament as well [cf. Jn 3:26ff; 10:34ff: 13:22-30; 14:29f: 16:18ff, 29ff: 21:18f; 21:20-23].

If this all seems to fall into the temptation of "psychologizing" Jesus or Mary that Bultmann warns against in his commentary, still we have to risk the temptation in order to develop our understanding of the written objectifications of that human experience of inferiority which the Evangelists and their contemporaries were conscious of but did not always have an adequate psychological vocabulary at hand to express (6).

(1)Unfortunately, at the moment of writing I cannot have recourse to a library, and hence can offer no specific references to authors cited in passing nor demonstrate in greater detail the viability of many of the assertions or suggestions made here, by, for example, detailed study of grammatical, syntactical or lexical occurrences of the suggested "dative of instigation".　

Those familiar with the literature will be able to see what is based on the work of others.　

There is always the question of the literary genre of such an essay: has it any exegetical value, or is it pure fancy and eisegesis? Let us say it is musings on the margins of the Gospel, even mutterings on the margins of the commentaries!－or, more seriously, an essay in an illative search for coherent meaning, whose context is wider than the text which provokes it. Where both deduction and induction fail us in the resolution of a particular crux in interpretation, hypotheses may be suggested and worked on, perhaps more profitably, by a courageous use of the illative sense.　

[A simpler and more devotional form of this essay will appear in Progressio, the publication of the Christian Life Community. Readers who would like copies of that form of the essay may have one by contacting me. I hope that there will be further opportunites to elaborate some of explicit and implicit suggestions made here.]

(2)Although not in command, at the moment of writing, of all the evidence, I have enough familiarity with the standard Biblical languages, European classical and modern languages, (including the less widespread languages of, for example, the Celtic group) and with non-European languages such as Chinese and Japanese, to make the suggestion at least as, but something more than, I hope, an educated guess.

(3)In the context of the present tentative suggestions, it would be worth exploring at longer range the relationships between inferiority and theory as realms of meaning, dealt with in Method in Theology, especially in what concerns their verbal objectification, and then elaborating the findings of such exploration in the form of heuristic and hermeneutic instruments.

(4)Or again, in a rather more colloquial form, current in certain places and situations: "What do I hear you telling me? / "Do I hear you saying ...?

If we prescind from, or discard, the colloquiality, the cultural frame and the modernity of this last suggestion, we are reasonably close to what is being suggested here.

(5)By "reflective question", I mean, of course, something quite different from the understanding of the sentence as a question discussed and rightly dismissed by Raymond Brown in his commentary.

(6)It does not seem a satisfactory solution to suggest that Mary's words, and hence, perhaps by implication, Jesus' words also, are only [?] part of the story-telling technique, as would appear to be Bultmann's solution, unless one elaborates this further in terms of the narrated narrative being the objectively expressed correlative of a lived narrative or "story", at least as far as that lived narrative or "story" is understood by the "literary" narrator. This same point was made, in reference to the Mary's words to the angel [Lk 1:33], though in very different terms, in an article by Auer in Revue Biblique over 30 years ago, "L' Annonce a Mane".