Water into Wine
Abbot Elfric explains the significance of Christ’s miracle at Cana.
990-994
King Ethelred the Unready 978-1016
Abbot Elfric explains the significance of Christ’s miracle at Cana.
990-994
King Ethelred the Unready 978-1016
St John tells us that at Cana in Galilee, the host of a wedding ran out of wine in the middle of the happy feast. Jesus and his mother were among the guests, and Mary prevailed on Jesus to change water into wine; and as tenth-century English abbot Elfric explained, Jesus hid a message in his miracle.
based on a translation by Benjamin Thorpe
See John 2:1-11.
WATER symbolises an understanding of holy writ, which washes its hearers from soiling sins. The stone water-jars are the hearts of holy elders, hardened like stone against the devil’s temptations.
At the marriage, wine was wanting, for at Christ’s presence the Old Testament dried up from fleshly observances, and was transformed into spiritual counsels.* For as much as wine is better than water, so is Christ’s lore, which he taught to his Apostles by his presence, better than the Old Testament, which he taught through Moses; for whereas Moses’s Testament was bodily, Christ’s is spiritual. The Old indeed was a shadow and sign; Christ’s gospel is truth, fulfilling spiritually everything that the Old Testament signified by its various precepts.*
Certainly, the Lord might have filled empty jars with wine, for he made all things from nothing. But he would rather turn cloudy water to ruby wine,* and make plain that he had come not to destroy the Law or the prophets, but to fulfil them after a spiritual understanding.*
based on a translation by Benjamin Thorpe
That is, observing the Law of Moses with its external duties had achieved all it could as a law of regulations externally imposed by authority, and needed to be turned into a self-imposed way of life freely adopted.
Hebrews 10:1: ‘For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect’.
St Cuthbert performed his own water-to-wine miracle: see Taste and See.
Matthew 5:17: ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil’.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.