How could the wedding at Cana have anything to do with Nathaniel's change of mind several days PRIOR to the subsequent miracle, no matter HOW amazing it was?
There are several words plays at work. 'Play' is here the operative word, because in the later episode to which I referred, John 6.6-7, the mood is the same, one of conviviality:
Then Jesus, when he looked up 6 and saw that a large crowd was coming to him, said to Philip, “Where can we buy bread so that these people may eat?” (Now Jesus said this to test him, for he knew what he was going to do.)
'Test' here is the same as the word translated 'tempt'; so e.g. in Mark 1.13 πειραζόμενος - refer to Satan tempting Jesus. Time mood is playful as it is in all three of these 'eucharistic' miracles.
But the real word plays in this text engage 'seeing' and 'good'. I said previously that the 'fig tree' image refers back to the second creation story. Here is the serpent, (not Satan note), testing the man and the woman:
The serpent said to the woman, “Surely you will not die, for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will open and you will be like divine beings who know good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the tree produced fruit that was good for food, was attractive to the eye, and was desirable for making one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some of it to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. 7Then the eyes of both of them opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. (emphasis added).
Now look and see how remarkably the same compact between seeing and the value judgement, good, plays out in the Nathanael-Jesus exchange:
Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. 4Philip found tNathanael and said to him, “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus vof Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” 4Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!” Nathanael said to him, “How do you know me?” Jesus answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” Jesus answered him, “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these.” 51And he said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” (The Greek for you is plural; twice in this verse)
The miracle story is about what exactly - erotic love, for which the trope is wine, since it is not only 'good' - “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” - but intoxicating, in both senses of the word, good and bad. ... etc.
Do you begin to see why I said what I said? How else do you interpret the context of the story? This refers to the calling of young - virile obviously - men to discipleship. They weren't bloodless aged exegetes living in their dotage. The context frames the whole issue of sexual appetition-satisfaction in relation to discipleship. Something very similar occurs in the early stages of Mark:
Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, ‘Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’ Jesus said to them, ‘The wedding-guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.
‘No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.’
The only other time we hear of Nathanael is in John chapter 21, which tells us he was from Cana in Galilee, the mise-en-scene of the miracle/wedding. Was It Nathanael's own wedding? Very probably?
So finally,what was going on under the fig-tree, given the plural You, and everything else I have laboured to point out? Use your imagination. What startles me is the absence of psychological awareness that the exegetes to whom I referred bring to the text. There are many ensuing narratives which comply with this hermeneutic, the last of which is the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman, in which the figure six recurs twice. (Six is a fundamental hermeneutical cipher in the 'miracle' story, just as Nathanael is the sixth disciple called, if we include Mary the mother of Jesus, who is listed as present at the wedding. Nathanael is most often identified with the Bartholomew of the synoptic lists, the sixth figure in the same.)
Now do you get it? The miracle is 'sexual love' - a miracle in the given sense that we all respond to it in the same way, the way imagined in the miracle narrative, and a miracle also because by means of it the word is made flesh.
