Jesus attends a wedding with his Mother and disciples in Cana. The reception runs out of wine and Mary asks Jesus to do something about it. What could he possibly do? What does she know about him? He says his hour is not come yet, but he tells the servants to fill six stone jars that are thirty gallons each with water. Then they are to take some out to the master of the feast, and it had become wine. The quality is so good that he sends compliments to the bridegroom for keeping the best for last. It’s a surprising miracle, not a healing, not a prophecy, it’s 180 gallons of top tier wine from water.

Then the Passover came and they traveled to Jerusalem and encountered the tables of money changers and animal being sold for sacrifices. He made a whip of chords and chased them out and turned over the tables dumping coins on the ground. “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”

Here we see Jesus separating worship and commerce by force. So many churches have been ruined by financial failures, and the gospel message has been twisted by greed. Jesus’s approach is abrupt and unconditional. Mixing of money and ministry is his least lenient subject.

The religious leaders ask for a sign to justify his actions and Jesus tells them to destroy the temple and he will rebuild it in three days. They say it took 46 years to build. Later, the disciples realize he was talking about himself. 

These two stories are more extreme than how we have seen Jesus up to now. He made a horse trough’s worth of wine for a party and trashed the area outside of the temple with his bare hands. We cannot draw a line too tightly in our understanding of him or his message, if we don’t include these incidents. As most scholars time John’s gospel the last to be written, perhaps he included them intentionally to fill in gaps of the record so we’d get a broader picture of his character. Jesus’s ministry started with a celebration and cleared the temple right away, bookending his second one during his last week of life in the books of Matthew, Mark and Luke.