‘Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding seventy or one hundred litres’ (John 2:6).
In Sunday’s Gospel, the water jars at the wedding feast in Cana were not for drinking but for purifying whoever had touched a corpse (Numbers 19:11–22). We can imagine the shock of the servants when Jesus told them to offer this water to their master. Yet they obeyed him, just as they had carried out his order to fill the jars. They had done so completely, right up ‘to the brim.’
