Going of John 2 (Wedding Feast at Cana) the other day, I was struck by an NAB footnote to verse four:
Some of the apocryphal account are pretty funny, depicting a boy Jesus making birds out of clay, killing a town bully and then resurrecting him after being scolded, that type of stuff.
It's easy to see why John could be a bit skittish about the wedding feast. It seems a bit trivial. In fact, the footnote mentioned above is attached to Christ asking his mother why he should bother performing this particular miracle: "Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come."
The footnote softens the tone, suggesting that the more literal translation is "What's it to you and me?"
In part, Jesus' reluctance separates the narrative from wacky apocrypha...but then it rather begs the question. Could the early audiences be put off by such a story. That, after all, seems to be John's point. It's like he's saying, "bear with me people...there's going to be a pay off."
And perhaps the payoff is why this story could be recognized by the early Church as canonical and not apocryphal.
While I'm sure someone could come up with an interesting allegorical reading about Jesus making clay animals in the backyard, the story seems more invested in the literal rather than the figurative. That is, it reads like a pulp fiction version of the Bible. The story just doesn't compel a reader to go deeper.
The Wedding Feast at Cana, however, reads more literarily...that is, it reads more figuratively. Reading the story, especially in the context of John, you get the sense that it isn't really just a story about Christ's first miracle. It is a foreshadowing of the Last Supper. It sets up Eucharistic imagery. It anagogically foretells the post-apocalytpic wedding feast of Revelation.
The context of the miracle, the wedding feast, fits into the rest of the Messianic narrative in a more compelling way than other domestic or more or less frivolous miracles in apocrypha do.
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