Sermons to the People 393.1–396.2

Penitents, penitents, penitents (if indeed you are penitents and not mockers), change your life; be reconciled to God. For you too are grazing on a tether. "What tether?" you ask. "Whatever you bind on earth will be bound also in heaven." You hear of binding, and do you think you can play a trick on God? You do penance, you bend your knee, and you laugh and sneer at the patience of God? If you are a penitent, repent; if you do not repent, you are no penitent. If you repent, then, why do you do the evil you did? If you repent of having done it, do not do it. If you are still doing it, you are certainly not a penitent. Indeed, dearly beloved, people fall ill, send to the church or are carried to the church, and are baptized and renewed, and will go hence happy. But that is not the case with penance. One who has not yet received baptism has not yet violated the sacrament; but one who has violated the sacrament by living wickedly and abandonedly, and has therefore been removed from the altar, lest he eat and drink judgment on himself, let him change his life, correct himself, and be reconciled while he lives, while he is in health. Is he to wait to be reconciled until he begins to die? We have known many who breathed their last while waiting to be reconciled. Further, I tell you in the sight of God my own fear, to make you afraid. Whoever does not fear despises me who fear, but to his own harm. Hear, then. I am certain that a baptized man, if he has led a life (I dare not say without sin, for who is without sin?) but without crime, and has had only such sins as are forgiven daily in the prayer of one who says, "Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors," when he ends his day does not end his life, but passes from life to life, from toil to rest, from misery to blessedness: whether he runs to baptism of his own will, or is baptized when in danger and departs from this life, he goes to the Lord, he goes to rest. But the baptized man who has deserted and violated so great a sacrament, if he does penance with his whole heart, if he does penance where God sees, who saw the heart of David when, rebuked by the prophet, and severely rebuked, after God's terrible threats he cried out, "I have sinned"; and at once he heard, "The Lord has taken away your sin." Such is the power of three syllables. "Peccavi" is three syllables; but in those three syllables the flame of the heart's sacrifice rose to heaven. So one who has truly done penance, and has been loosed from the bond by which he was tied and separated from the body of Christ, and has lived well after penance, as he ought to have lived before penance, whenever he dies after reconciliation goes to God, goes to rest; he will not be deprived of the kingdom of God; he will be separated from the people of the devil. But if anyone, in the last extremity of his illness, wishes to receive penance, and receives it, and is reconciled at once and departs, I confess to you: we do not deny him what he asks, but we do not presume that he departs well. I do not presume it; I do not deceive you; I do not presume it. The faithful man who lives well departs secure. One baptized at the last hour departs secure. One who does penance and is reconciled while in health, and afterwards lives well, departs secure. One who does penance at the end and is reconciled: if he departs secure, I am not secure. Where I am secure, I am secure and I give assurance; where I am not secure, I can give penance, but I cannot give assurance. (But someone may say: "Good priest, you say you do not know and can give us no assurance whether one who is given penance when dying, who while he lived and was in health was impenitent, is saved and merits to come to Christ; teach us, then, I beg you, how we ought to live well after penance." I say: abstain from drunkenness, from lust, from theft and evil speaking, from immoderate laughter, from idle words, for which men will render account on the day of judgment. See how light the things I have named are; yet all are grave and deadly. And I say something more: a man must keep himself from these vices not only after penance but also before penance, while he is in health; for if he waits until the end of his life, he does not know whether he will be able to receive penance itself and confess his sins to God and to the priest. See why I said that one must live well before penance, and better after penance.) Attend to what I say; I must explain it more plainly, lest anyone misunderstand me. Do I say, "He will be damned"? I do not say it. But neither do I say, "He will be set free." "What do you say to me, then?" I do not know: I do not presume, I do not promise; I do not know. Do you want to free yourself from doubt? Do you want to escape what is uncertain? Do penance while you are in health. For if you do true penance while you are in health, and your last day finds you, run to be reconciled: if you do this, you are secure. Why are you secure? Because you did penance at a time when you could also have sinned. But if you want to do penance only when you can no longer sin, your sins have left you, not you them. "But how do you know," you say, "that God may not perhaps forgive me?" You speak truly. How, I do not know. That I know; this I do not know. For that is why I give you penance: because I do not know. For if I knew that it would not benefit you, I would not give it to you. Again, if I knew that it would benefit you, I would not warn you, I would not frighten you. There are two possibilities: either you are forgiven or you are not; which of these will be yours, I do not know. So let go of what is uncertain; hold fast to what is certain.

Two gems have shone today in the Church, with one brightness: for Perpetua and Felicity are one feast; nor can there be any doubt about the felicity that possesses perpetual dignity. The custody of the prison joined them, and grace joined them, for there is no discord in them. Together they sing in prison; together they go to meet Christ in the air; together they fight against the cow; together they will enter the eternal homeland; together they bore martyrdom; one was nursing, the other giving birth. Perpetua said, as she handed over her infant and put away the nursling: "Who will separate us from the love of Christ?" Felicity groaned in childbirth and hurried fearlessly after her companions; and, freed through her groaning, what did she say to Christ? "You have broken my bonds; I will offer you the sacrifice of praise." And blessed David, to console her groaning, said: "May the Lord give you according to your heart, and confirm all your counsel." O frailty! The darkness fled, and the human condition did not pass away. But he who conquered death both freed the one from the danger of childbirth and relieved Perpetua of the weight of her milk. For when they climbed the steps of that ladder and trampled the treacherous neck of the dragon, they came to the garden of the heavenly meadows, and found there the good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep and seeks the richness of milk from his flocks. "For there sat," she says, "a shepherd, young and old," fresh in years, white-haired, who knew no old age. A youthful face shone in him, because he is the same, and his years will not fail. His head was white, because the just Lord loved justice and recognized equity in the martyrs. Around him the sheep lay bowed down; he milked them with a shepherd's finger, and found in them abundance of milk and a fruitful conscience of devotion. He milked with his fingers and spoke to them with fatherly consolations, with the heavenly promises prepared, saying: "Come, blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." And he showed them troughs of milk foaming with a pure heart through shining almsgiving, and said: "I was hungry, and you gave me food; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink." Perpetua received fresh milk from the sweet shepherd before she shed her precious blood. They answered, "Amen," and began to ask for mercy. They prayed in prison, now secure about the shepherd. "Lord," they said, "let not our confession be barren, so that we too may merit to be joined to your precious flocks and not be separated from your martyrs." In a vision a wrestling ground is set before them, a splendid arena in an amphitheater. There is that Egyptian, who in heaven was the beautiful Lucifer: ready to fight, he rolls in the dust; and Perpetua, to triumph by the Lord Saviour, joined her hands in the form of a cross, having before her the Lord's young man as her defender. She receives the triumph of victory and obtains the branch for her crown. Let us too offer them our gifts: others in their time offered them visits in prison; let us offer them the vow of this feast, so that we may merit the kingdom with all the saints.

Today we celebrate the Lord's ascension into heaven. Let us not hear "Lift up your heart" in vain, and let us ascend with him with our whole heart, as the apostle teaches when he says, "If you have risen with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things on earth." Let the necessity of action be on earth, the will to ascend in heaven: hope here, the reality there. For the time will come when the reality is there. And when the reality is there, hope will be neither here nor there; not because hope is empty, but because it ends when the reality has come. Hear what the apostle said about hope: "For in hope we have been saved. But hope that is seen is not hope; for why does anyone hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." Look at human affairs themselves, and consider: if someone hopes to marry a wife, he does not yet have her. For if he has her, what does he hope for? He marries the wife he hoped for, and then he no longer hopes. Happily, then, hope ends when the reality has come. A traveler abroad hopes to come to his homeland; as long as he is not there, he hopes; when he has come, he no longer hopes, for the reality has taken the place of hope. Happily hope ends when what was hoped for is held. Now, then, dearly beloved, since you have heard that we should have our hearts lifted up, it is with that very heart that we think about that life to come. Let us live well here, so that we may live there.

See how great is the condescension of our Lord: he who made us came down to us, because we had fallen from him. And to come to us, he did not fall but came down to us. If, then, he came down to us, he has lifted us up. Already in his own body our head has lifted us up: where he is, the members too will follow. For where the head has gone before, the members will follow. He is the head; we are the members. He is in heaven; we are on earth. Is he, then, far from us? Far from it. If you ask about distances, he is far; ask love, and he is with us. For if he were not with us, he would not say in the gospel, "Behold, I am with you until the end of the age." If he is not with us, we lie when we say to you, "The Lord be with you." He would not have cried out from heaven to Saul, when Saul was persecuting not him but his saints, his servants, and, to put it more intimately, his members: "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" "Behold, I am here in heaven, you are on earth, and I am among those you persecute. Why me? Because they are my members, and through my members I am there." For if the foot is trodden on, does the tongue not cry out? He, then, through whom heaven and earth were made came down to earth for the sake of the one he made from earth, and from here he lifted earth up into heaven. What went before in him, then, let us hope for at the end. He will give us what he promised: we are secure; he has given a guarantee; he has written the gospel; he will give it to us. What he has already spent on us is more. For do we think he will not give us his life, who has already paid out his death for us? The humility of the passion, the injuries, the insults, every indignity on earth he took on for us: will he not give us the kingdom, happiness, immortality, eternity? He bore our evils: will he not give us his goods? In this hope, since the one who promised is truthful, let us walk securely; but let us so live that we may say to him with a clear face, "We have done what you commanded; give what you promised."

You, brothers, are looking for someone to console you; but we too need consoling; and our consolation is no human being, but he who makes human beings, for he who made remakes, and he who created re-creates. Through weakness we cannot help being saddened; but through hope we ought to be consoled. We want all good people to live longer with us, and we do not want to be deserted by our companions in this harshest life; but those who have lived well and gone before us urge us by their example that, whether we live here long or go hence soon, we should live so as to come to them. For to live long here is nothing else than to endure troubles long. But to live with God and in his presence is to live without any trouble, and without any fear that happiness may perish, a happiness that has no end. Nor ought we to think that your bishop, our brother, has gone hence quickly and lived too little. For there no one lives too little, where life, when called long, has no end. Here even what is long, once it has ended, will be reckoned as nothing. Yet he did not live too little here either, if we consider his works and do not count his years. How many others perhaps have not accomplished in many years half of what he fulfilled in a few? To want to keep him here, then, would have been nothing other than to begrudge him his happiness.

In this, then, we feel sadness about a man, as men. What should we do, then, so as not to be men? As men, then, we are saddened in a human way by a man's departure. But how did we hear in the divine reading that "being perfected in a short time, he fulfilled long years"? Let us count times there as a day is counted. Whatever he did among you, then, by exhorting, by speaking, by setting himself before you to be imitated in praising and worshipping God, hold fast to it; and you yourselves will be his most splendid memorial. For it is no great thing for him to be laid in marble tombs, but to be laid in your hearts. Let him who is buried live in living tombs; for his tomb is your memory. He lives with God, so that he may be happy; let him live with you, so that you may be happy. We could perhaps exhort you at length to faithful prudence, if human grief did not leave us scarcely able to speak. Since, then, God granted us to be present with him for a time as he was dying; since he granted us to conduct his funeral (the escort that is owed to love adds nothing to his happiness); he granted also that we should see your holiness and speak to you, so that, according to our small measure, we who console you might ourselves be consoled. Whatever grief does not let us say, supply by reflection; and let our mind, in remembering so great a man, though it has human sorrow, not have faithless despair.