528 Lars Kierspel a) The Mother of Jesus While the faith of the royal official is emphatically mentioned (4,50.53), there is no corresponding comment for Mary. Moloney finds in Mary’s words “Do whatever he tells you” (2,5) the “key to the narrative” (7) and the cause of the disciples’ faith since they were able to see Jesus’ sign only because of her command to the servants (8). Moloney’s emphasis on Mary’s mediatorial faith in John 2 might reflect a renewed confessional confidence among Catholic Biblical scholars in contrast to the previous generation. Raymond Brown, at least, insisted that “the evangelist does nothing to stress the power of Mary’s intercession at Cana” and that her words to the servants in 2,5 “stress the sovereignty of Jesus and not Mary’s impetration” (9). Various observations buttress this conclusion. (a) Finding Mary’s faith as the key to the narrative means to argue from silence. Not only has, as Moloney himself observed, “the verb pisteuein ... not been applied to the response of the mother of Jesus in 2,1-12” (10) but the text also makes no connection between Mary’s command to the servants and the disciples’ ensuing faith. Most commentators would understand the text’s silence to mean that Mary’s symbolism as a disciple and witness is, at best, a “subordinate theological motif” (11). (b) On the other hand, Moloney underemphasizes the narrator’s explicit comment about “the disciples [who] believed in him” (2,11). While he observes here that the narrator “slows down the action to make a comment for the reader on the manifestation of the glory and the faith of the disciples” (12) he nevertheless wants to make Mary’s (7) Ibid., 83. (8) MOLONEY (Belief, 91-92) expresses the tight causal connection this way: “Because the mother of Jesus, despite the rebuke that her son directed toward her, trusted completely in the efficacy of the word of Jesus, the disciples have come to see the sign, the doxa, and they have come to faith”. (9) R.E. BROWN, The Gospel According to John (AB 29-29A; Garden City, NY 1966-1970) I, 103. While Schnackenburg finds in Mary’s response (2,5) an expression of “faith”, he observes that the author’s interest is “eher ein marianisches als ein mariologisches” and locates the key to the most important meaning of the miracle in 2,11, the revelation of Jesus’ glory. R. SCHNACKENBURG, Das Johannesevangelium (HThKNT; Freiburg 1965) I, 336, 341. (10) Ibid., 91. Moloney then adds without offering any support that “the implied reader meets it in association with the disciples (v. 11)”. (11) So BROWN, The Gospel According to John, I, 107. (12) MOLONEY, Belief, 79.