Christ in the Winepress (GH #27)

On Thursday of this Easter Christians around the world remembered the Lord’s Supper and Jesus’ vigil in the Garden of Gethsemene, and on Good Friday we recalled the day of Christ’s crucifixion. I cannot think of a better George Herbert poem to accompany these two days than “The Agony,” which develops the theme of Christ's sacrifice through the metaphor of the winepress.

“The Agony” begins, however, not with Jesus’ Passion, but with scientific exploration:

Philosophers have measured mountains,

Fathomed the depths of seas, of states, and kings;

Walked with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:

But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove;

Yet few there are that sound them,—Sin and Love. (1-6)

The speaker of the poem opens with the challenge of measuring geographical locations and political entities, and then switches to the more difficult task of measuring two abstract ideas: Sin and Love.

As a scientific observer and experimenter in the poem, Herbert remains distant from the object of his observation, which is the agony of Christ, until the final two lines of the poem, where the scientific experiment becomes a personal and spiritual experience for the speaker. In the second stanza, the poet as observer describes the agony of Christ:

            Who would know Sin, let him repair

Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see

A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,

            His skin, his garments bloody be.

Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain

To hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein. (7-12)

Herbert’s references to wringing, bloody garments, pressing, and forcing would have evoked in his readers the familiar winepress image from the Old Testament and Revelation. One of the most extensive passages focusing on the winepress image comes from Isaiah 63, which features a dialogue between Isaiah the prophet and a mysterious man wearing a robe sprinkled with wine/blood:

 

[Isaiah:]  Who is this . . . that is glorious in his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength? 

[Man:]  I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save.

[Is:]  Why art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him who treadeth in the winefat?

[Man:]  I have trodden the winepress alone. . . ; for I will tread them in mine anger, . . . and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my rainment. (63:1-3)

In 1623 (during George Herbert’s university years) popular preacher Lancelot Andrewes gave an Easter sermon on this Isaiah 63 passage and discussed the winepress imagery at length. The man with the blood-stained garments is Christ, says Andrewes, and the Scripture passage is a prophecy of two winepresses: the Winepress of Redemption and the Winepress of Vengeance (220).*

Lancelot Andrewes states, "A double wine-presse . . . we find; Christ was in both. . . . In the former, He was himselfe troden and pressed: He was the grapes and clusters himselfe. In this later heere, He that was troden before, gets up again, and doth heere tread upon, and tread downe . . . upon some others. The Presse he was troden in, was his Crosse and Passion" (230-31). The second press is Christ's triumph over his enemies, which Andrewes says occurred during the Resurrection and will also occur in the execution of God's divine wrath in the end times.

Focusing on this first pressing mentioned by Andrewes in his sermon, that of the Passion of Christ, Herbert's poem "The Agony" uses the winepress image to refer to the weight of sin pressing Christ during the Passion. On Mount Olivet, the place of Jesus' prayer to God and betrayal by Judas, Jesus was tormented by the cup of suffering he knew he would have to taste on the cross. "Wrung with pains" (9), he sweat drops of blood. Andrewes calls this agony of Jesus' the first strain of his pressing.

Christ being pressed in the winepress of "The Agony's" second stanza produces the wine of stanza three, which states,

            Who knows not Love, let him assay

And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike

Did set again abroach; then let him say

            If ever he did taste the like.

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,

Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine. (13-18)

The act of the winepress is compared to the Passion of Christ, and Christ's body is transformed by Herbert into a wine barrel, “set . . . abroach” or punctured (15). The cup of suffering, which is the curse of Adam's sin that Jesus would take upon himself, turns into the cup of blessing and salvation after he has been pressed on the cross, and the new cup is offered to all who will partake of it. Love in “The Agony” becomes a liquid substance, felt by God as blood and by the speaker as wine through the symbolic nature of Holy Communion.

As Henry Vaughan, an admirer of Herbert's poetry, states in his own poem “The Passion,” Christ as the vine was "prest / To be my feast!" (19-20). Let us drink deeply of His divine love as we remember His sacrifice this Easter.

* Andrewes, Lancelot. Sermons. Ed. G. M. Story. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1967.