Tractates 9

Yesterday we explained to your charity, from the Gospel reading which tells that our Saviour made wine from water at a wedding: first, according to the history of the deed, why he deigned to go; then, according to the spiritual understanding of the heavenly mystery, what "day" is, and which is the first day, which the second, which the third; what the meaning of the wedding is, who that bridegroom is, or who that bride; what the place was where that wedding took place; that it was not the first wedding to take place; and why the Mother of the Lord Jesus is said to have been there; then why the Bridegroom himself is invited to the wedding, and by whom; how the disciples too are invited with him; then what that wine was which they did not have, and what the failure of the nuptial wine was; and how, the Jewish people having been divorced for the adultery of idolatry, the church of the Gentiles was joined to the divine love. Hence, dearest ones, we must beware in every way lest we be violated again by any contagion of idolatry and deserve not only to be divorced but to be condemned for ever; since "if anyone violates the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy," says the Apostle, "and that temple you are." Take the more careful heed, lest, "as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your minds be corrupted from the chastity that is in Christ Jesus," as the same Paul warns, and we be thrust away from him who loved us and gave the pledge of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. Let us hold fast, then, the grace of the Holy Spirit, poured in by the generous gift of the heavenly Bridegroom, lest we return to our former poverty. It was of this poverty that the Mother of the Lord then said to him, in an enigma: "They have no wine."

But now let us hear with astonished minds what the Lord answered her. "Jesus said to her: What is it to me and to you, woman? My hour has not yet come." By the reasoning of the simple understanding it would be enough to show that the blessed virgin Mary is called "woman" on account of her sex, as is written in Genesis of Eve: "And the Lord cast a deep sleep on Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs and filled up flesh in its place. And the Lord God built the rib that he had taken from Adam into a woman" (and surely he formed her a virgin) "and brought her to Adam. And Adam said: This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken from her man." But perhaps someone of little faith and little prudence may say that the virgin Mary indeed conceived Christ not from a man but from the Holy Spirit, as the archangel Gabriel speaks to her in the Gospel; yet once Christ was born, she can no longer be called a virgin, since it is certain she gave birth; and that is why Christ did not say, "What is it to me and to you, virgin?" but "What is it to me and to you, woman?" Hear, then, the divine reasoning of our common hope and life. Christ is born not for himself but for us. For he is born who always was; he is born who in the beginning was both the Son of God and the Word of God and God. He was born of the Virgin near the end of the age so that the Word made flesh might dwell among us, yet remaining God, as he always was. The Son of God is born in man so that the world might at least in this way begin to behold its Creator; and he is born of the Holy Spirit from the Virgin so that he might re-form by the Holy Spirit, from the same mass, the man whom he had moulded from the slime of the earth. If we believe the Virgin's conception, we must believe her giving birth as well: both seem impossible to man, but for divine omnipotence it is a small thing. For what is great for God (to pass over his more sublime works), who made the earth from nothing, flesh from the slime of the earth, and woman from the flesh of man, in such a way that neither was the rest of the earth other than it had been, nor did Adam have less because God had taken something away, nor was the woman only what had been taken from the man? Adam, whole, recognizes his own bones and flesh in the woman, saying, "This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh"; and do you not want the Virgin, whole, to recognize as her son him who does these things? He who is believed to have been conceived without his mother's corruption, why should he not also be presumed to have been brought forth without corruption? The Virgin incorrupt brought forth what the Virgin untouched conceived. He could not violate integrity by being born who had come to restore nature to integrity.

If anyone, weighed down by earthly thinking and hampered by a fleshly sense, follows faith in this fact with a slower step and hesitates with an unbelieving heart about the omnipotence of God, let him learn from the Gospel of John that the same God after his resurrection twice came in to the apostles where they were gathered in the house for fear of the Jews, with the doors shut, and that he truly came in. And lest he be thought to be not in true flesh but a phantom, he presses his hands and other limbs on the doubting apostle Thomas to be handled. Likewise in the Gospel of blessed Luke, having come in, he solemnly assures all the disciples together: "Handle me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have." O wonderful faith! The doors were not unbarred, and he himself, inside, with a true body, is not only seen by the apostles' eyes but handled by their hands! The truth of a wonderful deed, whose reason faith alone attains, proclaims the omnipotence of its author; nor will the deed be denied because the littleness of the human mind has not grasped the greatness of the divine work. By the same power of his divinity, then, by which after the resurrection he could enter a house bodily with the doors locked, he entered the lodging of this world through an inviolate woman, preserving even in being born the enclosure of virginal chastity. This also is especially fitting for solving the question: that the Apostle records that Christ was "born of a woman, made under the Law, to redeem those who were under the Law"; so that she, though a virgin, is called a woman by the truth of her sex, not by loss of her integrity, just as God, the Son of God, is proclaimed to have been made under the Law for the dispensation of our salvation, though he himself is the giver of the Law. All this I would say for the blessedness of Mary, since Christ called her "woman": she who by a divine birth was so made a mother that she remained a more sacred virgin.

But as for his saying, "What is it to me and to you? My hour has not yet come," this answer does not seem to me to fit Mary's suggestion sensibly, unless the Lord is said to have spoken spiritually in a mystery: so that, since the wine of the Holy Spirit could not be given to the Gentiles before the passion and resurrection of Christ (as the evangelist testifies, "the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified"), he rightly answered his mother then, at the beginning of the signs: "What is it to me and to you, woman? My hour has not yet come"; as if he said: "Why is your suggestion so premature, woman, when the hour of my passion has not yet come, in which, having completed all the powers of teaching and of divine works, I have resolved to die for the life of believers? After my passion and resurrection, when I return to the Father, then the wine of the Holy Spirit will be given them." Therefore the most blessed one herself too, recognizing the deep mystery of this answer, understood that her suggestion had not been received with disdain for the present, but was deferred then in mystery according to that spiritual reason. Otherwise she would never have commanded the servants, "Whatever he tells you, do it," had she not, full of the Holy Spirit after the divine birth, not only known the force of Christ's answer but also foreseen the whole order of the wine to be made by him then from water. For what could be hidden from the mother of Wisdom, the one who had contained God, the most worthy seat of so great a power?

The truth of the deed having been established historically, we shall now pursue the figures set out spiritually. For as you have understood the bridegroom and the bride, the day and the days, the wedding and the place, the want of wine and of which wine, so also take the mother of the Lord figuratively as the people of the holy patriarchs and prophets and of all the just, from whom the same Lord is declared in the Gospel to have drawn the origin of his flesh. For "the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, son of Abraham" and of the rest who follow, is written. This mother of the Lord, then, the generation of the patriarchs and prophets, interceded for us Gentiles with the eternal Son of God, her own son according to the flesh, that he might give us in our need the joy of the heavenly wine. And these words are like those which the apostles heard when they made a suggestion for the Canaanite woman, a Gentile: "It is not good to take the children's bread and give it to the dogs," that is, to the Gentiles, who, formerly placed in superstition, had been accustomed like dogs to lick the unclean blood of victims sacrificed to idols, barking with rabid mouth against the Lord God whom they did not know. For we Gentiles were once dogs, and the Jews were once children; and therefore the Lord did not wish to take the children's bread and give it to the dogs. But after the heavenly bread himself came to his own and his own did not receive him; after the same Lord of ours is recognized by the Gentiles, once dogs, and the children were to bark against him with blaspheming mouth; after, when Pilate resisted pronouncing that Christ, who was believed to be their king, should be crucified, they cried out together, "We have no king but Caesar": God complains of them again through the prophet thus: "I have begotten sons and raised them up, but they have despised me." "But they will return at evening," as the prophet says, "and will suffer hunger like dogs." For the Jews themselves too will be converted, late at last, that is, at the evening of the world. For it is written: "Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant will be saved"; and the apostle Paul declares that the people of the Jews has been struck with blindness until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in. They will be converted at the consummation of the age, and will suffer hunger for the word of God like those dogs that longed to be filled with the crumbs falling from their masters' table. The Gentiles, then, once dogs, are adopted as sons, and the sons are compared to dogs; for all unbelievers are beasts, not by nature but by their ways, since "man, when he was in honour, did not understand; he was compared to senseless cattle and became like them." So although the Jews had committed, with greater wickedness, things like those of the once sacrilegious Gentiles, yet Christ, who loved them no longer for their own merit but for that of the just fathers, still called them sons, though now unworthy, so that he might convert them; and in his fatherly kindness, being merciful, he did not wish to abandon them. He did not wish to withdraw from them quickly the heavenly bread, the prince of life, and lend it to the Gentiles, until the persistent faith of the Gentiles should refute their faithlessness, and until he himself, coming in the flesh, should teach and instruct them; should strike them with the benefits of his healings; should judge them by his divine powers because they proved ungrateful; should condemn them because they neglected to be turned to faith; and so at last, their wickedness having been completed in his passion, he should pass after his own resurrection to the Gentiles, to whom he would give himself as the bread of life, and to whom he would offer through the water of baptism the cup of the Holy Spirit.

Now let us see to which servants this mother of the Lord Jesus says, "Whatever he tells you, do it," and what was commanded and what was done. With the Lord Saviour himself enlightening the eyes of our heart, he who is the light co-eternal with the eternal light, we have recognized that, besides blessed Mary, his mother in the proper sense, the people of the holy patriarchs and prophets is also his mother by reason of Christ's origin, and that it performed an embassy to him for our poverty. Now let us note to which servants she speaks: "Whatever he tells you, do it." By servants I do not take only those who, according to the event, were serving then at that wedding banquet; but according to the meaning of the spiritual banquet I understand that the servants of the New Testament are first the apostles, then the apostolic priests, whom both the Law and all the teaching of the holy prophets urge to carry out with ready obedience whatever the Lord Jesus has commanded them. What is commanded by him to the servants, the following words tell. Meanwhile, listen to what the evangelist says in between: "There were there," he says, "six stone water jars set for the purification of the Jews, each holding two or three measures." Although this wedding took place in Galilee of the Gentiles and had the figure we have spoken of, it was nevertheless conducted then by Jews; and there truly were there six water jars set for the purification of the Jews, each holding two or three measures. For the Jews had this custom, that before they entered the synagogue, or when they returned home from the public places, before they dined, they washed the skin of their body with water. The measure of water sufficient for washing the body was either two measures or three, according to the size of their bodies. I cannot, as I pass, spare the unclean purification of the Jews. They wash defiled bodies, and as soon as they are washed they defile them; they are always washing, always impure; and, as the saying goes, they wash a brick: that brick which they had prepared in Egypt for Pharaoh the devil, offering themselves as weapons of iniquity to sin for the building of hostile cities. For they are of earth and in no way made firm by the fiery heat of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, until they melt away into death, they do not cease to wash their brick, only to defile it. Rather, in the manner of swine, they return from the water to the mire. These are the swine which the angry Lord handed over to the legion of demons, to be cast headlong into the lake and slain by a perpetual death. Flee the example of uncleanness, you newly baptized, lest you become sharers in the punishment. The apostles, following the divine sentence, decreed one baptism for us; for he says: "Whoever drinks of this water will not thirst for ever." You have been washed once in saving baptism; do not go back from the font into the mire; keep the cleanness that has been given you. What has once been lost cannot be repeated.

But now let us see what those six stone water jars, holding two or three measures each, are among the Gentiles by allegory. In each man six things are reckoned to be present: the sight of the eyes, the hearing of the ears, the smell of the nostrils, the speech of the mouth, the touch of the hands, the walking of the feet. All these, when we were Gentiles, were stone in us and dead, as the holy prophet David testifies in cursing: "The idols of the Gentiles are silver and gold." He deliberately kept silent about the other cheaper materials of metals, so that in condemning the precious ones he might much more condemn the cheap. Let us declare, then, in what sense the idols of the Gentiles are blamed, even when they had makers rich enough: they will be senseless metals, "silver and gold, the works of men's hands. They have a mouth and will not speak; they have eyes and will not see; they have ears and will not hear; they have nostrils and will not smell; they have hands and will not feel; they have feet and will not walk." And what then? "Those who make them will become like them, and all who trust in them." So when we trusted in idols, these six senses in us were, according to the prophet's sentence, deadened and of stone, without their proper office, without fitting motion; but when we turned from dead images to the living God and believed, we were made alive, hearing from him: "Because I live, you also will live." And again: "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, will live; and everyone who lives" (that is, who already believes, if he believes to the end) "will not die for ever." Turned, then, to the faith and made alive through baptism, we lift up our eyes to the Lord; we draw in the fragrance of the knowledge of him with an insatiable breath and testify with silent affection, "the fragrance of your ointments is above all spices"; we take in the divine readings with the ear; with the mouth we confess the Lord, praise, bless, entreat him; we stretch out suppliant hands to heaven, we run with our feet to the church, and with knees bent to the ground we adore the one Deity of the Trinity.

Having called the servants, then, the apostles, that is, and their successors who are the priests in each of the churches, Jesus says to them: "Fill these water jars with water"; that is: "Baptize all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all that I have commanded you." And clearly, because the same servants had heard the venerable Mary say, "Whatever he tells you, do it," they filled them to the brim, heaping up the baptism poured in with the fullness of teaching. He rightly said, "having called the servants"; for Paul is "called an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God"; likewise all the apostles were called: "Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men." "For those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified." Having called the servants, then, Jesus laid on them the work of celebrating baptism.

Nor shall I pass over, in the last part of this sermon, that our water jars are said to hold two or three measures each. On this some of our writers have said that the two or three measures are the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and that some of the Gentiles to be baptized can take in only the knowledge of the Father and the Son, while others, more capacious, take in that of the Holy Spirit as well. But I think that he who does not take in the Holy Spirit takes in neither the Son nor the Father. For no one can be baptized except into the whole and inseparable Trinity, since no one confesses, as he ought, that Jesus Christ is Lord by the property of his nature except in the Holy Spirit. And "no one goes to the Father except through the Son," as he himself testifies; "no one comes to the Son unless the Father draws him." So whoever lessens one person of the Trinity to be adored has denied the whole Trinity. Since, then, there is no more and less in the confession of faith which is handed down by Christ's servants in the sacrament of baptism, let us see what measures our water jars each hold, whether two or three. The holy apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians, among the other kinds of spiritual powers, which must be done away by the advance of better things, declares that these three will remain for ever: hope, faith and love. "There remain," he says, "hope, faith and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love." Faith is that by which we confess the Trinity of one substance; hope is that by which we hope for the resurrection of the flesh and the rewards to come according to merits; love is that by which we so love Christ that we patiently suffer to be killed for his name. But since all who are baptized in the apostolic faith believe indeed in the Trinity and hope for the things to come, yet not all have dared to say from the heart with the holy Apostle, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation? Or distress? Or persecution? Or famine? Or nakedness? Or danger? Or the sword?", therefore some of our water jars hold two measures, but some three. May the Lord Jesus, who is rich toward all and above all who call upon him, grant that we may hold three measures, perfect in his love, even without the open battle of persecution; so that, our minds being prepared in the love of God for every endurance of present punishments, we may steadfastly earn, from the triumph of a hidden contest, the illustrious crown of a victorious conscience.

So after the most blessed apostles, performing the office of faithful servants, had filled the water jars of the believing peoples with the water of venerable baptism, and the Lord Jesus by his invisible power turned this water into wine, so that those baptized by them at once testified by the sudden grace of tongues to the taste of the divine Spirit working in them (among whom first Stephen the martyr, full of grace and truth, was doing signs and great wonders among the people in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ): then the Lord Jesus himself says to the same servants: "Draw now, and take it to the steward of the feast. And they took it. And when the steward of the feast tasted," he says, "the water made wine, and did not know where it came from, but the servants who had drawn the water knew, the steward of the feast calls the bridegroom and says to him: Every man sets out the good wine first, and when they have drunk freely, that which is worse; you have kept the good wine until now."

Let us first explain the history of the deed itself, and so return to the proposed account of the spiritual understanding. When weddings took place among the Jews, one man (as far as we have learned from tradition) was given from the priestly order to govern the custom of discipline lawfully and to take care of conjugal modesty, and at the same time to arrange the servants and the order for the preparation of the banquets; and for this office he was called the architriclinus, that is, the one set over the dining room. To him, then, the servants of the banquet are ordered to bring a taste of the wine made from water. The steward tastes, not knowing where it came from, and, calling the bridegroom, praises to him the taste of the wine kept back until that time. By all these events it is proved that the power of the Saviour in this sign too was not a phantom but truth, since the president of the banquet testifies that what the servants, at the Lord's command, brought him to taste was not only wine but good wine.

Now, returning to the spiritual lines, let us note who this steward of the feast is. I think the steward is the most blessed Moses, a man of the tribe of Levi, God's faithful steward in all his house, who was set over not only that ancient wedding of the people of Israel, which afterwards deserved to be divorced, but also this one which is celebrated among the Gentiles. For which of us could have learned without Moses the steward that the Lord our God is one God, and not gods? And lest you think that what is said of the one Deity is without qualification, the Trinity is proclaimed by him there, since he says "the Lord God" and "Lord." For he did not say simply, "Hear, Israel, your God is one," but what? "Hear, Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord"; that is to say, God is one in the Trinity; the Divinity and dominion of the Trinity are one, while the true distinction of the subsisting persons remains. So too the two wings of the Seraphim, bearing the image both of the Law and the Prophets and of the Old and New Testaments, give back the hymn of the Trinity to be adored and cry without ceasing: "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts"; "Lord," not "Lords"; for the one and the same Divinity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit does not admit the plural number. Further, which of us, as I said, could without Moses the steward have known that in the beginning God made heaven and earth and the sea and all that is in them; and from what man was formed as male, from what also the woman, from whom the whole offspring of the human race is known to have been multiplied? Then what the first blessedness of paradise was, what the beginning of man's guilt was in the offence that provoked God; and what the generations of the just were and what those of the wicked; and why or when the flood and the other things written in the Law of Moses happened; and, to put it briefly, whose soul among us has been counted worthy to be joined to the divine Love and to Christ the heavenly Bridegroom without this steward's preparation? For Moses himself foretold the coming of Christ to the people of Israel, saying: "The Lord our God will raise up a prophet from your brothers like me; hear him in everything that he says to you. And every soul that does not hear that prophet will perish from the people." But when he saw that they fought against Christ, whom he had preached, he betook himself to the Gentiles, and together with the holy apostles reproaches the people of the Jews: "It was necessary that the word of God should first be announced to you; but since you have rejected it and judged yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles; for so the Lord has commanded us: I have set you as a light of the Gentiles, that you may be for salvation to the end of the earth."

So after the Lord Jesus made wine from water in us, to show, as the Apostle says, the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, and seasoned all the baptized with the taste of the Holy Spirit, turning the water of the letter of the Law into spiritual wisdom through the hearts of believers, then he says to the servants: "Draw now, and take it to the steward of the feast." The apostles draw from the water jars of the baptized Gentiles the spiritual taste and at the same time the grace of the gospel's vigour, the taste in faith, the grace of colour in works (one is perceived, the other seen), and they take it to Moses. For which of the priests who serve Christ does not compare all the wisdom of the New Testament with the Law of Moses, since he hears that the Lord himself both commanded this and sees that he did it? For when he had cleansed a leper by the touch of his power, he at once sent him to the Law, saying: "Go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift for your cleansing which Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." The steward tasted the mystery of Christ, hidden from the ages, which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit: "that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, and of the same body, and sharers of his promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel, of which I," says Paul, "was made a minister." So the Gentiles were made sharers, through each apostle as a minister of the gospel, of God's promise in Christ: that promise, namely, which the apostles themselves first obtained, so that afterwards they might minister to others. For when Christ was living with them for forty days after his resurrection, as the evangelist Luke testifies at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, "he commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of the Father, which you have heard from me," he says; "for John indeed baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days after these." At the end of his Gospel too he records the same Lord speaking thus to the apostles: "Behold," he says, "I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high."

Although, then, Moses the steward does not know that so great a grace had been conferred by the gift of baptism, which the apostles, who were ministers of the word, did not fail to know, yet, marvelling that the taste of the Holy Spirit is in the water jars of the Gentiles, he praises the munificence of the Bridegroom, who has kept such wine for the Gentiles. The Jews, having this wine at the earlier wedding, did not drink it for their health, but became drunk and were wounded by a deadly heaviness, being weaker in mind and not bearing the power of the divine Spirit; but he who is strong in faith, filled with the Holy Spirit, does not become drunk. For this reason the cup of God that inebriates is splendid, because the inebriation of the divine drink makes the minds of those who drink sober. Hence the Apostle says: "Do not be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit." For Stephen too, full of the Holy Spirit, not drunk, saw the heavens opened and Jesus at the right hand of God. For that reason too the most blessed Peter repudiated drunkenness, saying: "For these men are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is the third hour of the day; but this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: And it shall be in the last days, says the Lord, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams." "This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee," that is, in the possession of the Gentiles, "and manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him." Nor is it idle that he says "disciples" and not "apostles." For to declare the multitude of believers he used the name of disciples, not of apostles. For all who believe are his disciples; but, as blessed Paul says, "are all apostles?"

Let us now strive and pray, beloved, that after this beginning of signs which the Lord Jesus made by giving the Holy Spirit in our hearts, he may accomplish in us the other signs of powers as well. "For to one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit; to another faith in the same Spirit; to another healing in the one Spirit; to another the working of power, to another the discerning of spirits, to another prophecy, to another kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of speech. But all these the one and the same Spirit works, dividing to each as he wills." "Having these promises, then, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of the flesh, perfecting the sanctification of the spirit in the fear of God." The Apostle proclaimed that the Holy Spirit distributes the gifts of heavenly graces by the choice of his own authority, saying, "All these the one and the same Spirit works, dividing to each as he wills," and not as he is commanded, so that no one, by hostile persuasion, may dare to suspect that in that substance of the Trinity to be adored there is anything subordinate, or less powerful, or contrary to itself; since the will and the power alike of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in all things, for all ages. Amen.