Mary, the Mother of Jesus
John 6:30–35 (D-R)
30 They said therefore to him: What sign therefore dost thou shew that we may see and may believe thee? What dost thou work?
31 Our fathers did eat manna in the desert, as it is written: He gave them bread from heaven to eat.
32 Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen, I say to you; Moses gave you not bread from heaven, but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.
33 For the bread of God is that which cometh down from heaven and giveth life to the world.
34 They said therefore unto him: Lord, give us always this bread.
35 And Jesus said to them: I am the bread of life. He that cometh to me shall not hunger: and he that believeth in me shall never thirst.
John 1:1–3 (D-R)
IN the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God: and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made.
The first three words are taken verbatim from the very first line of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), and the mention of creation two verses later continues this allusion.
New Creation Week
John connects the beginning of his Gospel to the creation story in another, subtler way: he narrates a succession of seven days, paralleling the seven days of creation in the first chapter of Genesis. While he never explicitly tells us he is doing this, he tips us off by marking the days that pass in his account. After he recounts John the Baptist's testimony about his identity, he says that the next story happened “the next day” (John 1:29), and he does this two more times (John 1:35, 43).
If we consider everything before the first instance of the phrase “the next day” to be the first day, the three that follow get us to day number four. Then, the very next story happens “on the third day,” which gets us to day number seven.
Finally, on the seventh day we get to the wedding at Cana, which calls to mind the first married couple, Adam and Eve (Genesis 2:21-25), the only human characters in the creation stories of Genesis.
The New Eve
With all these points of contact with the Old Testament's stories of the world's creation, John is subtly telling us that Jesus' ministry inaugurated the new creation, the restoration of everything that Adam and Eve messed up by eating from the forbidden tree. Moreover, while the final story in his new creation week takes place at a wedding, John never says who the bride and groom are. Instead, the only characters whose identities we know are Jesus and his mother, and that is highly significant.
Since the wedding setting calls to mind Adam and Eve, the world's first married couple, this mysterious lack of any other identifiable characters tells us that Jesus and Mary are themselves the new Adam and Eve of this new creation. Jesus is the head of the new humanity, just as Adam was the head of the old, sinful humanity (Romans 5:12-19; 1 Corinthians 15:22, 45), and just as Eve played a key role in our Fall by eating the forbidden fruit and then giving it to Adam, so too did Mary play a key role in our redemption by giving birth to our savior and by prompting him to perform his first miracle and thus begin his public ministry (John 2:11).
Once we realize this, we can understand why Jesus calls his mother “woman” in this story. In the creation accounts, Eve is called “woman” more often than she is called “Eve” (for example, Genesis 2:22-23), so in the wedding at Cana, the name clearly harkens back to her. By calling his mother “woman,” Jesus is confirming for us that she really is the new Eve, his counterpart as the new Adam.
