So Jesus came again into Cana of Galilee. — He returns to the place where He had manifested His glory and knit to Himself in closer union the first band of disciples. This thought is present to the writer as the reason why He went there. It was the place “where He made the water wine.”
And there was a certain nobleman. — The margin shows the difference of opinion among-our translators as to what English word gives the true idea of the position of the person who is in the text called “nobleman.” The Greek word is an adjective formed from the word for “king,” and as a substantive occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. It is frequent in Josephus, who uses it in our sense of courtier, or for a civil or military officer, but not for one of the royal family. The king, whose “king’s man” is here spoken of, was almost certainly Herod Antipas, who was left the kingdom in his father’s first will, and is called “king” by St. Matthew (Matthew 14:9) and by St. Mark (Mark 6:14). The person here named may therefore be a “royalist” or “Herodian” (comp. Matthew 22:16; Mark 3:6), but in a domestic incident like this the reference would be to his social position rather than to his political opinions. Perhaps “king’s officer” represents the vagueness of the original better than any other English term. It is not improbable that the person was Chuza, and that his wife’s presence in the band of women who followed Christ (Luke 8:3) is to be traced to the restoration of her child. For the position of Capernaum, see Note on Matthew 4:13.