The Hour for Wine
Sermon at Pusey House on the Eve of St Mark's day
The true vine, our Lord Jesus Christ, yields fullness of joy. So the gospel for Saint Mark’s Day starts and ends, and it makes sense. Vines do bring joy; they bring wine. This is why they symbolise a new covenant and a new creation, something richer and stronger than the water of the old.
We hear nothing in Scripture about vines until Noah. They must have existed earlier, for Noah to have carried their seed in the Ark, ready for the second creation from the second void, the flood he famously traversed. But they are not mentioned earlier, and certainly there is no suggestion that Adam and Eve ever made or enjoyed wine. The first fruits were taken and eaten, not processed and drunk. They were pristine, unmanufactured products of God’s creation: the work of creation, or sub-creation, when it came to grape and wine, would fall to Noah, in a second creation and second covenant.
It did not go well. Wine, like the fruit of the fatal tree, or the city and technology of Cain, was a good thing in itself; but perhaps, like those other goods, it was a good taken illegitimately, stolen before the time was ripe. St Irenaeus sees the sin of Eden as one of immaturity, humanity seizing with their own young hands something they should have waited to receive, when they and the fruit itself were ready. That pattern is repeated in the second paradise, a new garden planted on a new mountain. The vines are a God-given good, but their harvest is taken in illegitimate excess. Noah got drunk, and his nakedness (whatever that ancient euphemism really means) caused the fall of Ham: a new fall for a new creation. The pattern continues because the hour had not yet come.
When, then, was the appointed hour for wine?
The first sign is at Cana, but even there the Lord confesses the hour has not yet come. Water turns to wine, by the gallon, but on that one limited occasion for that limited guest list. Our Lord warns of the hour later when he speaks of new wine and new wineskins. But now He speaks of Himself as the vine, and we know that the hour is nigh. For the visceral realisation of Noah’s binge comes only when our Lord is pressed on the Cross and pierced, and the disciples make the connection with what he used to say, that those who do not drink His Blood have no life in them; and with what he said just the night before: this is my Blood of the New Covenant.
These words invoke, word for word, those the Lord gave to Moses at the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb. But Noah is as much a type of Christ as Moses. For the same words also evoke the second great ban, the prohibition placed on Noah in the second covenant, against eating the flesh of beasts with its blood. Blood is not kosher. In His words and the mysteries we celebrate this evening, Our Lord appears to break that ban. He does not. He lifts it, because the time is right. The hour is come. And in His sacrifice, the offering of His Body and Blood, we see the reason for that ban. It is not an arbitrary test, any more than the ban on the fruit of the forbidden Tree. It is, rather, the key to the ultimate purpose of all Creation.
A new wine for the New Covenant, and for a new Creation which will last: the blood of Christ is the true wine, pressed from the true vine. It is the cup Wisdom mixed beyond time, into which the temporal flow of our water is mixed and absorbed. This is the wine to get drunk on, and now is the hour: drunk as the Apostles were accused of being at Whitsun; drunk as Noah, but with the opposite effect. For it is the wine on which God Himself is drunk, like a giant refreshed by wine, who smites his foe in the hinder parts (Ps. 78:65–66). Our King welcomes us to a drinking-hall which leads not to the failings of carnal lust, but to that place of which Solomon’s lover said, he brought me into the house of wine, and his banner over me was love.
As Living Temple and Body of Christ, God’s Holy Church is both that drinking house, and the vine which feeds it. Our Lord calls you and me its branches, each branch a vein of one body flowing with one blood, uniting each twining limb with one another and with our Head and root. The covenant with Noah banned the drinking of blood because, just as the fruit of the tree of knowledge would be fulfilled by the fruit of the tree of the Cross, which we receive under the form of bread, so the fruit of Noah’s vine would be fulfilled in the cup filled from the pierced side. The respective bans on fruit and blood were not placed absolutely, certainly not arbitrarily, but so that they might be lifted when the fruits were ripe. So the eating of our Lord’s Flesh and the drinking of His Blood do not destroy but fulfil the Law, indeed the very earliest instances of it, not a jot or tittle spilt.
The Incarnate Lord upon the Cross gives the Law its sense and meaning. For while we, trapped in time as we are, may see the Lord’s sacrifice as a fulfilment of older types, in the metaphysical order of reality the crucified Logos is prior, His sacrifice offered eternally in heaven. History gives us the horizontal beam of the cross; but it is the higher ontological reality which gives it its vertical dimension. The forbidden fruit, Noah’s vine, the Passover lamb and cup, and the Song’s house of wine did not just anticipate the Eucharist. Their strength is not annulled by it. Rather, their strength comes from it, and always did, because it is the eternal reality of which they are types, and in which they participate. The sacrificing Lamb is ever at the heart of the cosmos, revealing Himself at the interstice of time and eternity as the Crucified One.
That was how St Mark, whose feast we celebrate this eve, knew Him. But he knew Him first as a living man, and in a way which curiously echoes and inverts the type of Noah. In a garden, not of grapes but of olives, the night before our Lord boarded the wood of the saving tree, when the guards came to seize Him, a young man fled, and his linen tunic got caught, leaving him naked. Tradition identifies that young man as St Mark. In Eden, the Father clothed His children to cover their shame; in the vineyard on Ararat, Noah’s nakedness shamed one son, and the others regained the covenant by covering it; in the olive grove of Gethsemane, the image of the Father remains covered, and it is a trusted son who flees unclothed for shame. St Mark was not yet ripe or ready to be clothed in glory. Later, St Paul found him still unready to walk as far as the Cross demands (Acts 15:38). But he too had his time for ripening into maturity, restored in the end to the Apostle’s side (2 Tim. 4:11). In time, he bore the fruit of the gospel as first Evangelist of the Lord, as bishop of Alexandria, and at last the fruit of a death which participated in Jesus’ own.
Though separated from St Mark in time, we participate in the same timeless reality, through the same mysteries he celebrated. We may be unready, unfruitful, ashamed by the immaturity of our sapling faith. But God knows our hour, and invites us to drink of the same cup as St Mark and all the martyrs. That one cup joins us in one blood pressed from one vine. The Precious Blood abides in us, that we may abide in Him, and through that shared infusion, in one another. By Him we are made consanguineous: Jew or Greek, male or female, apostle or prophet or evangelist. We sup together at the feast set before us with Saint Mark, Saint John, and all the saints, unto the edifying of the whole body in love. May our joy in them, in one another, and in Him be complete.
