Tractates on the Gospel of John

In Iohannis evangelium tractatus CXXIV

Reading pages: 1.1–1.18 · 1.19–3.1 · 3.2–3.20 · 3.21–4.16 · 5.1–5.15 · 5.16–6.12 · 6.13–7.5 · 7.6–7.20 · 7.21–7.24 · 8.1–8.13 · 9.1–9.17 · 10.1–11.1 · 11.2–11.13 · 11.14–11.15 · 12.1–13.1 · 13.2–13.16 · 13.17–13.18 · 14.1–14.13 · 15.1–15.23 · 15.24–16.7 · 17.1–17.16 · 18.1–19.2 · 19.3–19.14 · 19.15–19.20 · 20.1–20.13 · 21.1–21.13 · 21.14–21.17 · 22.1–23.1 · 23.2–23.12 · 23.13–25.8 · 25.9–26.3 · 26.4–26.20 · 27.1–27.12 · 28.1–28.12 · 29.1–30.8 · 31.1–31.11 · 32.1–32.9 · 33.1–33.8 · 34.1–34.10 · 35.1–35.9 · 36.1–36.13 · 37.1–37.10 · 38.1–38.11 · 39.1–39.8 · 40.1–40.11 · 41.1–41.13 · 42.1–42.16 · 43.1–43.18 · 44.1–44.17 · 45.1–45.15 · 46.1–46.8 · 47.1–47.14 · 48.1–48.12 · 49.1–49.14 · 49.15–49.28 · 50.1–50.14 · 51.1–51.13 · 52.1–52.14 · 53.1–53.13 · 54.1–55.7 · 56.1–58.5 · 59.1–62.6 · 63.1–66.2 · 67.1–70.3 · 71.1–73.4 · 74.1–77.5 · 78.1–81.4 · 82.1–85.3 · 86.1–89.5 · 90.1–92.2 · 93.1–94.6 · 95.1–96.5 · 97.1–98.8 · 99.1–100.4 · 101.1–103.3 · 104.1–105.8 · 106.1–107.8 · 108.1–109.5 · 110.1–110.7 · 111.1–112.6 · 113.1–115.5 · 116.1–118.5 · 119.1–121.5 · 122.1–122.9 · 123.1–123.5 · 124.1–124.8

1.1Augustine admits the difficulty of expounding John 1:1 to a mixed congregation and says that even the inspired evangelist said only what a man could say about God.
1.2John is one of the 'mountains' of Psalm 72 that receive peace so that the 'hills', the lesser souls, may receive the righteousness of faith.
1.3Founders of heresies and schisms are false 'mountains' on which souls are shipwrecked, for those who divide unity have not received peace.
1.4John could speak of Wisdom only because his heart rose above the merely human; God calls us to become 'gods', but only through first humbly acknowledging that we are men.
1.5To speak of the Word through whom all things were made, John had to rise in contemplation above every creature, visible and invisible.
1.6We lift our eyes to the 'mountains', the human writers of Scripture, but our hope rests not in them but in the Lord who enlightens them.
1.7The evangelist, who drank from the Lord's breast, passes on words, but understanding must come from the Lord himself, to whom hearers must lift a heart purified by self-restraint.
1.8Human words sound and pass away, but the inner word, the thought they signify, remains; by this analogy Augustine begins to show that the Word of God is not a passing sound.
1.9As a builder's unseen plan is admired through the building, so the Word of God, God's 'plan', is known from the beauty of the created world, visible and invisible.
1.10The Word must not be pictured like ordinary human words, for the evangelist adds that the Word was God.
1.11Against the Arians, Augustine argues that the Word through whom all things were made cannot itself have been made, and that it is unchangeable.
1.12Only a right faith in the uncreated Word allows one to be remade through him; the evangelist says the Word 'was', not that it 'was made'.
1.13'Nothing' in John 1:3 is not something: sin and idols were not made through the Word, but every creature from angel to worm was, and the Word became a 'worm' for our sake.
1.14Augustine tells how a Catholic annoyed by flies was led step by step by a Manichee to deny that God made man, and so became the devil's 'fly'.
1.15God made even troublesome little creatures, which serve to humble human pride, as the plagues of flies and frogs humbled Pharaoh's people.
1.16Augustine discusses the punctuation of John 1:3-4 and rejects the Manichean reading that everything made is alive: what is life is the reason in divine Wisdom by which each thing was made.
1.17As a chest exists invisibly and alive in the craftsman's art before it is made, so all things exist as life in the Wisdom of God; the weak should cling to Christ in the flesh until they reach the eternal Word.
1.18The life in the Word is the light of men, enlightening rational minds made in God's image, including both John the Baptist and John the evangelist.
1.19Sinners fail to see the ever-present light of Wisdom as a blind man fails to see the sun; they must cleanse the eye of the heart to see God.
2.1Augustine recalls that John 1:1-5 was expounded on the previous Sunday and asks those who missed it not to require a repetition.
2.2The Word is unchangeable Being, which no changeable mind can reach by its own strength; it is seen as a far-off homeland across the sea of this world, which can be crossed only on the wood of Christ's cross.
2.3Christians must cling to Christ's humanity and cross; it is better to hold to the cross without seeing God than to see and despise it, and best to do both, as John did.
2.4Some philosophers glimpsed through creation that all things were made through the Word, but in pride despised the humility of the cross, the only 'wood' by which the sea of this world can be crossed.
2.5John the Baptist, a great 'mountain', was sent to bear witness to the light, but must be admired only as one enlightened, not as the light itself.
2.6Christ alone is the true light that enlightens; John, like believers, was light only by being enlightened 'in the Lord'.
2.7As weak eyes see the sunrise only by its light on a wall or mountain, so men too weak to see Christ came to know him through John, whom he enlightened.
2.8Christ, always present by his divinity, came in the flesh to fallen and wounded humanity, even accepting a human witness, John the 'lamp', because of our weakness.
2.9When Christ's enemies refused to say whether John's baptism was from heaven, they were confounded through the 'lamp', John, as the Psalm foretold.
2.10The Word is in the world not as one creature among others, nor as a craftsman outside his work, but as the Maker present everywhere, governing what he made.
2.11'The world' that did not know Christ means not heaven and earth, which bear witness to him, but those who dwell in the world by loving it.
2.12'His own' who did not receive Christ are the men he made, and above all the Jews, his kin by the flesh; yet not all rejected him.
2.13Unlike a human father who prefers an only son, God sent his only Son to make many adopted sons and co-heirs, who possess him as he possesses them.
2.14Those born of God are not born 'of bloods' or the will of the flesh or of a man; Augustine defends the translator's plural 'bloods' and reads 'flesh' as wife and 'spirit' as husband.
2.15So that men might be born of God, God was first born of men: the Word became flesh, to assure us that our adoption is not incredible.
2.16The incarnation is an eye-salve made of 'earth': flesh that blinded us by carnal desire is healed by the Word made flesh, so that we can see his glory.
3.1Augustine introduces his promised distinction between the Old Testament and the grace and truth of the New, urging his hearers to receive the word like good soil.
3.2Christians bear the cross, the sign of Christ's humility; the law given through Moses showed sin and made the proud sick, so that they might confess their sickness and seek the physician, Christ.
3.3The physician is the crucified Christ, who did not come down from the cross though he could, because the cross was an example of patience, and by his death he killed death.
3.4The crucified Christ seen by the Jews is not the whole Christ, who is also the eternal Word; the life in him is the light of men, the light of the mind that bears God's image.
3.5The light is always present, but sinners are absent from it; all creation bore witness to Christ, and only 'the world', those who love the world, did not know him.
3.6Those who receive Christ are born of God, and the proof is that the Word was born of man; the incarnation is the medicine that heals our sight so that we see his glory.
3.7John says that Christ, though coming after him, ranks before him because he was prior to him; indeed he was begotten before the morning star, before Lucifer and every enlightened creature.
3.8From Christ's fullness we receive first the grace of faith and forgiveness, given freely to sinners who deserved only punishment, and also truth, the fulfilment of God's promises.
3.9Faith is a free gift to the ungodly, and eternal life, though it seems a wage owed to faith, is itself 'grace for grace' because faith is grace.
3.10Paul first confessed that he received mercy undeserved and then claimed the crown as owed; yet God, in crowning merits, crowns his own gifts.
3.11The law given through Moses made the proud guilty and showed them that, though commanded, they could not fulfill righteousness without God's help.
3.12All born of Adam inherit sin and the lust of the flesh by necessity, while those reborn through Christ, who came without inherited sin, are righteous in him by grace.
3.13Christ, who had no sin, died as a gift of mercy; believers still pay the debt of death from Adam, but Christ's death has destroyed their eternal death.
3.14The law of the Old Testament exposed sickness without healing it, binding the patient for the physician; Christ heals with bitter medicines, having first drunk them himself.
3.15Augustine confesses that he cannot adequately explain even Christ's humility, let alone his divinity, and leaves his hearers to the inner teacher who dwells in their hearts.
3.16The law came through Moses, a faithful servant who could not release from guilt; grace and truth came through Christ, the Emperor who grants pardon.
3.17Moses did not see God himself but created figures of him, a cloud, fire, an angel; only the Son, who is in the Father's 'bosom', that is, his secret, has declared the Father.
3.18Against those who said the Son was visible before the incarnation, Augustine holds that the Old Testament appearances were created figures, since the Word and Wisdom of God cannot be seen with bodily eyes.
3.19The same commandments are given to Christians as to Israel, the Sabbath to be kept spiritually by abstaining from sin, but the old promises were earthly because a carnal people, quick to turn to idols, could grasp only visible things.
3.20The law commands the same as the Gospel but promised earthly rewards; to Christians is promised eternal life, the vision of God that the psalmist longed for.
3.21As we love the righteous for invisible beauty, not bodily appearance, so Christians must love God freely for himself, not for temporal rewards, longing to contemplate him without hunger or weariness.
4.1John the Baptist, great yet humble, was granted not only to foretell Christ like the prophets but to point him out; yet the proud did not know the humble Christ and crucified him.
4.2Christ, who came hidden and silent to be judged and crucified, paying the price of our redemption, will come again manifest and speaking as judge.
4.3John, the lamp lit for Christ, showed his humility by confessing that he was not the Christ, though his excellence could have made people believe he was.
4.4Christ is Daniel's stone cut without hands, against which the Jews stumbled while it was small; those who deny the Church spread through the world stumble against the mountain it has become.
4.5John denied being Elijah, while Christ said he was Elijah; both spoke truly, for John was in the spirit of Elijah, herald of the first coming as Elijah will be of the second.
4.6John came 'in the spirit and power of Elijah': figuratively he was Elijah, properly he was not, so both he and the Lord spoke truly; his greatest merit was his humility in refusing to be taken for the Christ.
4.7John called himself 'the voice of one crying in the wilderness', the fulfilment of Isaiah's prophecy, a herald who calls people to the lowly Christ rather than driving them from the judge.
4.8Asked why he baptized if he was neither Christ, Elijah, nor the prophet, John was in fact more than a prophet, as Christ testified, because he pointed out the Christ already present.
4.9John's humility in declaring himself unworthy to untie Christ's sandal rebukes those who claim that the baptism they give is theirs and holy because they are holy.
4.10Christ alone is the Lamb who takes away sin, because, born of a virgin, he took flesh from Adam without inheriting sin; no minister may claim to take away sin himself.
4.11Against those who claim that the minister's holiness takes away sin, Augustine points to John's words: Christ alone, the eternal Word, is the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world.
4.12John's baptism served only to make Christ manifest to Israel, especially by Christ's own humble submission to it; once he was known, it ceased.
4.13Christ received a servant's baptism so that no proud catechumen, however ascetic, should disdain to receive the Lord's baptism, without which his sins remain.
4.14John baptized others besides Christ, and then his baptism ceased, so that it should not seem holier than Christ's baptism, which the whole world receives.
4.15Augustine poses a problem: John recognized Jesus before his baptism, yet says he did not know him until he saw the Spirit descend after it.
4.16Augustine leaves the question unsolved for now, asking his hearers to discuss it peaceably, and promises that its solution will silence the Donatists' arguments about baptism.
5.1Returning to the promised question, Augustine argues that John, being truthful, was sent by the Truth, Christ, together with the Father, so he must in some sense have known the one who sent him.
5.2John must have known Christ in one respect and not in another; the task is to find what he learned about Christ through the dove.
5.3John's baptism was not necessary for salvation; Christ received it to complete his humility and so to commend his own baptism to his servants.
5.4John alone received a baptism called his own, given him by Christ, who was then baptized by him, just as Christ created Mary and was born of her.
5.5Christ received John's baptism as an example of humility, and others received it too lest it seem greater than Christ's; but those baptized by John still needed Christ's baptism.
5.6Christ keeps the power of baptism to himself and baptizes through ministers; baptism is as holy as the one in whose power it is given, not as the minister who gives it.
5.7Christ chose not to transfer his power of baptizing to any servant, lest hope be placed in men and there be as many baptisms as ministers; so even an evil minister's baptism is Christ's.
5.8What John learned through the dove was that Christ would keep the power of baptizing for himself, so that whoever ministers, good or bad, it is Christ who baptizes.
5.9What the dove taught John was not who Jesus was, which he knew, but that Christ would keep for himself the power of baptism, so that no apostle ever speaks of 'my baptism'.
5.10What John learned through the dove the Church, Christ's one dove, must also learn; Augustine confesses his inadequacy to explain why it was taught through a dove.
5.11Through the dove John learned that the ministry of baptism passes to good and bad ministers alike, but its power remains with Christ; those who say 'We baptize' lack the dove's simplicity.
5.12Augustine answers Donatist complaints of persecution: they suffered lawful correction, while they themselves persecute the spirit by trying to take from Catholics, through rebaptism, the baptism by which they live.
5.13Rebaptism makes a Christian deny his baptism as the pagan persecutors tried to make martyrs deny Christ; against Donatist charges about the minister, the Catholic answers that the dove taught that Christ is the one who baptizes.
5.14As the Pharisees were confounded by the question about John's baptism, so the Donatists, their peers, are confounded by the same 'lamp', John.
5.15Ministers of baptism ought to be righteous, but an unworthy minister cannot defile Christ's gift, which passes through him like water through a stone channel or light through unclean places.
5.16To the Donatist argument that those baptized by John were rebaptized, Augustine answers that heretics, however wicked, give Christ's baptism, which John did not.
5.17If baptism must be repeated after a worse minister because the apostles baptized after John, the Donatists would have to rebaptize those baptized by their own drunken clergy.
5.18Baptism given even by Judas was Christ's and was not repeated, while John's was his own and was followed by Christ's; so baptism given by any minister, however sinful, is Christ's.
5.19As Paul rejoiced that Christ was preached even by the envious, so Christ's baptism given by one who hates, a 'murderer', is not repeated, for the sacrament cannot be polluted by its minister.
5.20Augustine sums up that John learned through the dove that Christ alone baptizes, and promises to explain another time why this was taught through a dove.
6.1Augustine thanks his hearers for coming despite the cold to hear his promised explanation of why the Spirit appeared as a dove, and asks that their mutual love groan to God like the dove.
6.2The dove's groaning signifies the Spirit, who makes us groan with longing for our heavenly homeland; the Church, like Noah's ark, holds both ravens, who seek their own, and doves, who seek Christ's.
6.3The Spirit appeared as a dove and as fire to signify simplicity and fervor together, as in Stephen, who rebuked his persecutors fiercely yet prayed for them without bitterness; the divided tongues signify diversity, not schism.
6.4The dove signifies true peace without tearing; those who tore the Church have only the false peace of ravens, who feed on death, but many are returning to life in the Church.
6.5At Christ's baptism the Trinity appeared plainly, the Father in the voice, the Son in the man, the Spirit in the dove; the Donatists, like the raven that did not return, shut their eyes to it.
6.6What John learned through the dove was that Christ would keep for himself the power of baptism; on this rests the unity of the Church and of baptism, signified by the one dove.
6.7John already knew before the dove that Christ would baptize in the Spirit; what he learned was that the holiness of baptism would always belong to Christ, whoever the minister, Peter, Paul, or Judas.
6.8If baptism depended on the minister's merit there would be as many baptisms as merits; but because Christ baptizes, the baptism given by good, better, or bad ministers is one and equal.
6.9The apostles were sent to baptize all nations in the one name of Father, Son, and Spirit; as Paul reads 'seed' in the singular of Christ, so the singular 'name' shows that the Trinity is one God.
6.10Christ sent the apostles to all nations, not to Africa alone; the pride of Babel divided tongues, but Christ's humility and love unite them in the one Church, signified by the dove.
6.11Augustine states the Donatist objection: if the Catholic Church is the one dove outside which there is no baptism, why does it not baptize those who come to it from outside?
6.12The Donatists, too, have bad members and do not rebaptize those baptized by them; since Christ is the one who baptizes, baptism given by chaff is valid, and the 'raven' should not rebaptize after the 'dove'.
6.13One can have baptism outside the dove, the one Church, but it cannot profit him there; the Donatist asks why he should become a Catholic if he already has baptism.
6.14Those baptized outside the Church have true baptism but lack love, without which it profits nothing; they are called into unity not to receive baptism again but so that it may begin to profit them.
6.15Holy things received unworthily bring judgment, like the Eucharist to the unworthy or the morsel to Judas; baptism outside the Church is like the emperor's mark on a deserter, and Catholics should call the Donatists back with groaning love.
6.16One baptized outside the Church is guilty not for receiving baptism but for receiving it outside; the baptism is kept and recognized, as a deserter is corrected but the King's mark is not altered.
6.17Donatists should not boast of having the same baptism, since even bad Catholics, drunkards and secret consulters of astrologers, have it; what they lack is humility, love, and peace.
6.18Simon Magus was baptized yet, full of 'gall', had no part in the faith; so baptism alone, outside the dove's love and unity, does not save.
6.19In Noah's flood the same water 'baptized' timbers inside and outside the ark; the dove refused to be 'rebaptized' and returned, bringing a fruitful olive branch, while the raven perished; so Catholics should bear fruit and call outsiders back.
6.20The olive's fruit signifies love, which like oil rises above all; without love even the tongues of angels are noise, as Augustine tells Donatus.
6.21Baptism and faith without love profit nothing; even the demons believed and confessed Christ, yet said 'What have we to do with you?'
6.22Catholics seek the Donatists precisely because they are not yet good; baptism without love is nothing.
6.23The Donatists' alms and sufferings are for Donatus, not Christ, and without love profit nothing; their so-called martyrs, who threw themselves from cliffs, acted from pride, not love.
6.24All Scripture cries out against the Donatist schism; Catholics should groan, pray, and love, trusting that the grain among the Donatists will return to the ark.
6.25To Donatist complaints about confiscated church property, Augustine answers that property is held by human law, given through emperors, and imperial law forbids those outside Catholic communion to hold property as a church.
6.26Those who reject the emperor cannot claim property held by imperial law, and by divine right they cannot claim to be the Church; Augustine invites them to the Catholic Church, where they will have both land and its Creator.
7.1The poor people of Christ, one body groaning among the chaff, finds its joy within, not in the passing pleasures of the world's festivals; what remains for ever is the Word, who became flesh so that we might lay hold of him.
7.2Those who delight in the festival are like the delirious; Augustine laments especially that some women have gone to it instead of to church, and invites his hearers to the sweeter banquet of God's word.
7.3Augustine recalls his earlier teaching: John learned through the dove that Christ alone baptizes; the dove signifies peace, and its olive branch the fruit of love, without which baptism outside the Church profits nothing.
7.4Christ, the only-begotten Son, has the power of baptism; adopted sons are his ministers, and even if a minister is wicked, Christ is the one who baptizes.
7.5Christ is the Lamb in a unique sense, alone without any stain of sin, by whose blood alone men could be redeemed.
7.6Against a pagan festival celebrating a woman's blood that outweighed gold, Augustine sets the blood of the Lamb that redeemed the world; demons imitate Christian redemption and even mix Christ's name into their charms to deceive Christians.
7.7The devil can do nothing unless God permits, and sufferings are a Father's training for an eternal inheritance; Christians who resort to charms and fortune-tellers give the devil a share in what Christ bought.
7.8John, seeking not his own glory, pointed his two disciples away from himself to the Lamb of God, and they followed Jesus.
7.9The two disciples followed Jesus not yet to stay with him for good, which came when he called them from their boats, but to see where he dwelt and to learn from him.
7.10The tenth hour signifies the law of ten commandments, which Christ, its giver and teacher, fulfills through love; those who cannot fulfill it should flee to his mercy and use the prayer he composed.
7.11As petitioners to the emperor have a lawyer draft their petition, Christ composed the Lord's Prayer for us with its condition of forgiving others; one who prays it falsely obtains nothing from God, who cannot be deceived.
7.12Better to lay the Gospel on an aching head than to run to amulets, and better still to let it heal the heart; health and sickness are in God's hands, and like Paul with his thorn we should trust the physician's knife.
7.13Andrew finds the Messiah, the 'Anointed' or Christ, who is anointed above all his fellows, from whom all Christians receive their anointing.
7.14Christ changed Simon's name to Peter, from 'rock', so that in Peter the Church built on the rock might be figured; only those who both hear and do Christ's words build on the rock and withstand the floods, such as the day's festival.
7.15Philip tells Nathanael that he has found the one foretold by Moses and the prophets; Augustine notes that Nathanael's reply about Nazareth can be read either as an affirmation or as a question.
7.16Nathanael received from the Truth himself a testimony given to no other disciple: 'an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.'
7.17Nathanael, though praised by Christ, was not made an apostle because he was learned in the law, and Christ chose the unlearned; his learning led him to hope at the name of Nazareth.
7.18'No guile' does not mean that Nathanael was sinless, but that he had no double heart: as a sinner he confessed himself a sinner, and so the physician judged him curable.
7.19The Pharisees who thought themselves healthy rejected the physician, while the sinful woman, who had no guile, confessed her sins at his feet and was healed; this absence of guile Christ praised in Nathanael.
7.20Nathanael, hearing that Jesus saw him under the fig tree, confessed him Son of God and King of Israel, as Peter later did in the confession on which the Church's firmness rests.
7.21The fig tree signifies sin, under which Christ saw Nathanael, as he sees and seeks all sinners before they know him; so Catholics seek the Donatists because they themselves were first sought and found.
7.22Christ saw his people under the shadow of death before calling them; the 'greater things' he promised Nathanael, the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man, signify more than that first seeing.
7.23Jacob's anointed stone signified Christ, and the angels ascending and descending are preachers like Paul, who ascended to the third heaven and descended to give milk to little ones, as a parent stoops to a child's speech.
7.24Augustine explains that he preached at length to keep his hearers away during the hours of the pagan festival, and urges them to pray for those who took part.
8.1Christ's turning water into wine is no greater than God's yearly turning of rain into wine in the vine; God, who made all things through the Word, works unusual miracles to awaken people dulled to the wonders of creation.
8.2The invisible things God made through the Word, angels and the soul, are still more wonderful than the visible: the soul animates the body, orders human society, and will do far more in the resurrection body.
8.3The God-man who made all things also turned water into wine, and the deed conceals a mystery: as water became wine, so we, once unwise, have been made wise by faith.
8.4Christ, who came into the world to wed his bride the Church, bought with his blood, came fittingly to the wedding at Cana; the Virgin's womb was the bridal chamber where the Word was joined to human flesh.
8.5Christ's apparently cold words to his mother at Cana hide a mystery; heretics who deny that he had real flesh use them to claim Mary was not his mother, but Christ is wholly true, with true flesh, birth, death, and resurrection.
8.6The same evangelist who reports 'What have I to do with you, woman?' also says that 'the mother of Jesus was there' and spoke to him; whoever believes the one must believe the other.
8.7The faithful should believe that Christ spoke these words to his true mother and seek their meaning by prayer; to deny that Mary was his mother makes the Gospel a liar and Christ's flesh, death, and resurrection false.
8.8Christ, born of the Father without a mother and of Mary without a father, did speak these words to his mother; neither the Manichees, who deny her motherhood, nor the astrologers, who claim 'my hour' shows Christ was under fate, may exploit them.
8.9Mary was mother of Christ's humanity, not his divinity, by which he was to work the miracle; so he 'did not acknowledge' her at Cana, but acknowledged her at 'his hour' on the cross, when the weakness she bore was dying and he commended her to the disciple.
8.10Against astrologers who claim 'my hour' shows Christ was subject to fate, Augustine cites Christ's power to lay down his life and take it up again; the maker of the stars cannot be under the stars, and no human being is subject to fate either.
8.11Those who consult astrologers pay money to buy themselves masters among the planets, entering already enslaved by error and greed.
8.12'My hour' means the opportune time Christ himself chose to suffer, after calling disciples and showing his divinity and humanity, an hour not of necessity but of will and power.
8.13Augustine postpones the mystical meaning of the wedding at Cana, the jars, the wine, the steward, and the bridegroom, to the next day's sermon.
9.1Augustine resumes the sermon on Cana to explain what the miracle signifies, since Christ's deeds instruct faith as well as rousing wonder.
9.2By attending the wedding Christ confirmed that God made marriage, against those who would call it evil; as joining is from God, divorce is from the devil, dismissal being allowed only for sexual immorality, and consecrated virgins too share in the Church's marriage to Christ.
9.3The water at Cana signifies Old Testament prophecy read without Christ, insipid as water; when Christ is understood in it, the veil is removed and it becomes intoxicating wine.
9.4Prophecy about Christ has run through all ages but was hidden like water, as the risen Christ showed when he opened the Scriptures to the disciples on the road to Emmaus and in Jerusalem.
9.5Christ turned the water itself into wine, rather than pouring it out, to show that the Old Testament is from him but has its savor only when he is understood in it, as on the road to Emmaus.
9.6The six jars signify the six ages of the world, from Adam to the present age that began with John the Baptist, all filled with prophecy that becomes wine when Christ is understood in it; in the sixth age, as on the sixth day, man is renewed in God's image.
9.7The jars holding 'two or three measures' signify the Trinity: naming the Father and the Son implies the Spirit, who is the Spirit of both, and 'three' states the Trinity openly.
9.8The Holy Spirit is the mutual love of the Father and the Son, so 'two measures' implies the Spirit and 'three' expresses the Trinity; without this love, poured out by the Spirit, the soul is dead.
9.9In another interpretation, the prophecy signified by the jars, though given through Israel, concerns the salvation of all nations, as promised to Abraham; Augustine will go through the ages as six jars.
9.10The first jar is the age of Adam: as Eve was formed from the side of the sleeping Adam, so the Church was formed from the sacraments flowing from the side of the dead Christ, who left his Father by taking the form of a servant and his mother, the synagogue, to cling to the Church.
9.11The second jar is the age of Noah: the ark holding all the animals figured all nations, saved through wood, because the life of the world was to be fixed on the wood of the cross.
9.12The third jar is the age of Abraham, whose only son carrying the wood for his own sacrifice figured Christ carrying his cross.
9.13The fourth jar is the age of David, whose psalm proclaims God's inheritance among all nations; the Donatists, out of communion with the nations, are like the guest without a wedding garment, thrown out and speechless.
9.14The prophecy concerning all nations was figured in Adam, whose name spells the initials of the Greek words for the four quarters of the world, and in Noah, Abraham, and David, who calls on the God who 'slept' in death to arise and judge.
9.15The fifth jar is the age of Daniel, who saw the stone cut from the mountain without hands, Christ born of the virgin from the Jewish kingdom, growing into a mountain that fills the earth.
9.16The sixth jar is the age of John the Baptist, who warned the Jews not to boast of Abraham, since God could raise children to Abraham from 'stones', the Gentiles, who become his children by imitating his faith.
9.17The 'two measures' are the circumcised and uncircumcised, joined in Christ the cornerstone, and the 'three measures' are the nations descended from Noah's three sons, like the three measures of flour leavened by the Gospel: all nations are reached by the prophecy.
10.1Augustine urges his hearers to bear tribulation in hope and to pray to the God who hears within the heart, not on mountains or toward the stars.
10.2Augustine explains that the Lord's “brothers” were Mary's kinsmen, since Scripture calls relatives brothers, and affirms Mary's perpetual virginity.
10.3The disciples were Christ's brothers more truly than his kinsmen, and Mary is blessed chiefly because she did the Father's will and kept God's word.
10.4Christ's cleansing of the temple, even of lawful trade, condemns much more the drunken feasting some practise in holy places.
10.5The whip of cords signifies the rope of sins that a person weaves by adding sin to sin, which ends in being bound and cast into outer darkness.
10.6The sellers of doves are schismatic leaders who claim to give the Holy Spirit for the price of their own honor, while the Spirit is given freely as grace.
10.7The oxen are the apostles and prophets who dispensed the Scriptures and magnified the Lord, not themselves, as Paul did in refusing to be the object of hope.
10.8Schismatic leaders deceive the people with the Scriptures and so sell them to the devil, who carries off whatever is cut off from the one Church.
10.9Every Christian should be consumed with zeal for God's house, working within his own sphere to correct wrongdoing and win others for Christ.
10.10Christ spoke of the temple of his body, destroyed and raised in three days, which the Church celebrates at Easter, when catechumens receive grace.
10.11Christ's flesh came from Adam, and both the Father and the Son raised it, for the Son is equal to the Father and they are one.
10.12The letters of ADAM, initials of the Greek names of the four quarters of the world, add up to forty-six, the years of the temple, because Christ's flesh came from Adam.
10.13Augustine closes by urging humility and joy in hope, with all desire directed to Christ.
11.1Augustine urges catechumens to hasten to baptism, since no one burdened with unforgiven sins will see the kingdom of God.
11.2Though many believed in Jesus' name, he did not entrust himself to them, not from fear, for he suffered only by his own will, but because he knew what was in man.
11.3Nicodemus, like the catechumens, believed in Jesus' name, but Jesus entrusts himself only to those born anew, who know what it is to eat his flesh and drink his blood.
11.4As Israel ate manna only after crossing the Red Sea, so catechumens must pass through baptism, red with Christ's blood, before receiving the true bread from heaven.
11.5Nicodemus, like the disciples who were offended by Christ's words about eating his flesh, understood carnally what was meant spiritually; Christ needs no one, but all need him.
11.6There are two births, of the flesh and of the Spirit, and neither can be repeated; so baptism, like birth from the womb, cannot be given again.
11.7Birth from the Catholic Church is birth from Sarah, the free woman, and birth from heresy is birth from the slave woman; God's name as God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob holds a mystery.
11.8The births from free and slave women among the three patriarchs prefigure four kinds of Christians: good or bad born through good or bad ministers of baptism.
11.9Augustine illustrates the four kinds from Scripture: Ananias baptizing Paul, insincere preachers, and Philip baptizing Simon Magus.
11.10Sarah and Hagar show good born of good and bad of bad, while Rebecca's twins, Jacob and Esau, show good and bad born of one free mother, as in the Church.
11.11Jacob's sons by slave women shared the inheritance because of their father's seed, so those baptized by bad ministers are heirs if they are humble, unlike proud Ishmael.
11.12Ishmael's “play” with Isaac, which Paul calls persecution, signifies the heretics' enticement to a second baptism, a worse persecution than bodily affliction.
11.13The Donatists' complaints of persecution by Catholic rulers are answered by Sarah's affliction of Hagar, which was meant to make her return to her mistress.
11.14Christian rulers rightly act against those who dishonor Christ, as Nebuchadnezzar decreed punishment for blasphemy against the God who saved the three young men.
11.15Augustine disputes the Donatist claims about their martyrs Marculus and Donatus of Bagai and urges the Donatists, like Hagar, to return to the Catholic Church.
12.1Augustine resumes the passage on spiritual regeneration, promising afterward a report on the peace of the Church.
12.2Spiritual birth, like bodily birth, happens only once, so baptism is not repeated; the promise to Abraham fulfilled among all nations exposes those who separate from them.
12.3Catechumens believe in Jesus, but he entrusts himself to them only when they are born again in baptism and receive his flesh and blood.
12.4Ishmael was disinherited not for his birth from a slave woman but for his pride, so the worth of the baptizer matters less than the humility of the baptized.
12.5Birth of water and the Spirit is birth from the Church for an eternal inheritance; the invisible Spirit is heard in Scripture, and those born of him are a mystery to others.
12.6Christ's rebuke of Nicodemus was meant to humble his pride, since only the humble are born of the Spirit, after the example of Christ's own humility.
12.7Augustine rejects the view that John 3:8 speaks of the wind and takes the “earthly things” to be Christ's word about raising the temple of his body.
12.8Christ, present on earth in the flesh and in heaven by his divinity, alone descended and ascended; believers ascend as his members.
12.9Believers ascend because they are made one in Christ, the one seed of Abraham; hence the unity of the Church, which Paul defended against factions.
12.10Death entered through the devil's envy and man's consent, and Christ, the Word made mortal, freed us from death by his death.
12.11The bronze serpent lifted up in the desert figures Christ's death on the cross, by which those who look in faith are healed from sin for eternal life.
12.12Christ came to save, not to judge, but whoever refuses to believe in him has already been judged.
12.13Doing the truth means confessing and accusing one's own sins, which is the beginning of good works and is itself the work of God's light in us.
12.14Augustine urges watchfulness and daily confession even of small sins, which if neglected sink the soul like water seeping into a ship.
13.1Augustine recalls his earlier sermons on John's baptism and the dove before taking up the next reading.
13.2John the Baptist, though greatest of those born of women, declared himself unworthy to loose Christ's sandal, which shows Christ to be above all men and angels.
13.3The psalm proclaims God king of all the earth, which the Donatists deny by confining him to Africa; Christ's hidden divinity must be seen with the inner eye of understanding.
13.4Christ, baptized by his servant John, baptizes with his own baptism and is himself the way: by Christ the man we come to Christ the God, the bread of angels.
13.5Righteousness, the food of angels, nourishes without being consumed, like light for the eyes; God is all things to the soul, and no name is worthy of him.
13.6Christ was baptized by John to rebuke those, such as continent catechumens, who might think themselves too good to need baptism.
13.7Others besides Christ were baptized by John so that John's baptism would not seem superior to Christ's, and no catechumen, however advanced, is forgiven before baptism.
13.8When John's disciples disputed about baptism, John did not claim his baptism was greater for having baptized Christ, but humbly confessed Christ as God, from whose fullness all receive.
13.9John answers that a man receives only what is given from heaven and that he is not the Christ but his herald.
13.10John, the bridegroom's friend, refused honor due to Christ; those who claim that baptism is holy because they give it are adulterers seeking to be loved in place of the bridegroom.
13.11Like a faithless friend guarding an absent man's bride for himself, the heretic who claims his own baptizing makes baptism holy usurps the place of Christ, who alone baptizes.
13.12John and Paul, friends of the bridegroom, were jealous for Christ, not themselves; the whole Church is one virgin, whose virginity of mind is whole faith, firm hope, and sincere love.
13.13Heretics' virgins keep their virginity for Donatus, not Christ, who bought the whole world with his blood; even his persecutors did not divide his seamless tunic, the figure of unity.
13.14Psalm 22, read by both Catholics and Donatists in Holy Week, shows that Christ bought not Africa alone but all the nations of the earth.
13.15Virginity, continence, and almsgiving profit nothing to those who tear apart the tunic of unity and love.
13.16Heretics have baptism, but as ministers, not owners; they have the form of the sacrament but, cut off from the vine, lack the root of love.
13.17Miracles claimed by Donatist leaders prove nothing without love and unity; it is better to be a humble member within the body than a gifted one torn from it.
13.18Augustine urges love for Christ's peace and for one another under Christ the head, and asks for prayer for those still outside.
14.1Christ is God and man, the light that enlightens; John is a light only as enlightened by him.
14.2John confessed that he was not the Christ but the bridegroom's friend, rejoicing in Christ's voice, not his own, and owing all he had to the true light.
14.3John's joy is fulfilled in rejoicing at Christ's voice; unlike the ungrateful wise men Paul condemns, he acknowledged that his gifts came from God.
14.4John's saying that Christ must increase cannot refer to bodily growth, since they were almost the same age and both grown men.
14.5Christ must increase and John decrease, signifying that man's glory must yield to God's; this was shown even in John's beheading and Christ's lifting up, and in the seasons of their births.
14.6John, as a man, is of the earth; whatever divine thing he speaks comes from the grace of Christ who enlightens him.
14.7The Son speaks what he hears from the Father, yet he is himself the Father's Word, begotten without time as a word is conceived in the heart before any language.
14.8“No one receives his testimony” refers to those foreknown as unbelievers; those who receive it set their seal that God, that is Christ, is true.
14.9Father and Son are one God, not two gods, since the love that made the first believers one heart and soul is infinitely surpassed by the love within the Trinity.
14.10God gives the Spirit to men by measure, distributing different gifts among the members of one body, but to Christ he gives without measure.
14.11The Father loves the Son as his only Son and has given all things into his hand, making him equal to himself; in sending the Son he sent his other self.
14.12Philip asked to see the Father because he saw only Christ's flesh; Christ, equal to the Father, became visible man so that believers might be healed to see his hidden divinity.
14.13All are born under the wrath of God through Adam's sin and mortality; Christ shared our mortality so that those who believe in him might share his life and grace.
15.1Augustine introduces the account of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, rich in mysteries.
15.2Jesus withdrew from Judea not out of fear, since he could not be harmed against his will, but to give his servants an example that fleeing persecution is not sin.
15.3Jesus both baptized and did not baptize: his disciples performed the outward act, but he cleansed, and he still baptizes through every minister.
15.4Christ baptizes not only in spirit but with water, for his baptism is the washing of water in the word.
15.5Augustine introduces the scene at Sychar and explains that Jacob's well can also be called a spring.
15.6Jesus' weariness at the well begins the mysteries: strong as the Word through whom all was made, he became weak in the flesh to remake and seek us.
15.7Christ, like a hen weakened with her chicks, became weak in the flesh, his “journey” to us, so that we might be strong in his weakness.
15.8Eve formed from a rib of the sleeping Adam, with flesh put in its place, prefigures the Church born from the side of Christ asleep on the cross: his weakness is our strength.
15.9The sixth hour signifies the sixth age of the world, and the well the depth of human life, to which Christ came in humility.
15.10The Samaritan woman, a foreigner, is a figure of the Church to come from the Gentiles.
15.11Jesus asks the Samaritan woman for a drink, thirsting in truth for her faith.
15.12Jesus, who asks for water, promises living water, the gift of the Holy Spirit, speaking at first in a veiled way.
15.13The woman, thinking of the water in the well, misunderstands Jesus but by her question knocks for him to open the meaning.
15.14Jesus makes plain that the water he gives is spiritual, becoming a spring welling up to eternal life.
15.15The woman still understands carnally and wants water that would spare her the daily labor of drawing.
15.16The water of the well signifies worldly pleasure, drawn by desire and never satisfying, while Christ gives the fountain of life that quenches thirst forever.
15.17The woman asks for the water to spare herself labor, not yet understanding that Jesus offers the fullness of the Spirit.
15.18Jesus' command to call her husband cannot mean that she should learn through her husband, since Christ was present; it has a spiritual meaning for the soul.
15.19The woman's “husband” is the understanding, the part of the soul enlightened by Christ, which she must bring to bear so as to grasp his spiritual words.
15.20The woman says she has no husband, and Jesus, by his divine knowledge, reveals her five former husbands and her present unlawful partner.
15.21The woman's five husbands may be the five books of Moses, but Augustine prefers to read them as the five senses that rule the soul before reason, after which the understanding should rule.
15.22The woman's present unlawful partner signifies error, which had taken the place of the understanding that should have succeeded the senses.
15.23The woman, beginning to understand, calls Jesus a prophet and raises the dispute between Jews and Samaritans over the place of worship.
15.24With understanding present, the woman is told to believe: God is spirit and is worshiped not on a mountain or in a temple but in spirit and truth.
15.25God is not found by climbing mountains but by humility; the believer must become God's temple and pray within.
15.26“Salvation is from the Jews” refers not to the reprobate but to the faithful of Israel, the wall joined with the Gentiles in Christ the cornerstone.
15.27The woman looks for the Messiah who will teach all things, not yet recognizing him in the one speaking to her; Augustine explains the name Messiah.
15.28Jesus reveals himself to the woman as the Messiah; with understanding restored and Christ as its head, she is set in order in faith.
15.29The disciples marvel that Jesus, who came to seek the lost, is speaking with the woman.
15.30The woman, receiving Christ, leaves her water jar, the figure of worldly desire, and runs to proclaim him to the city.
15.31Christ's food is to do the Father's will, and his thirst at the well was for the woman's faith, to bring her into his body, the Church.
15.32The prophets and patriarchs sowed, and the apostles reaped the ripe harvest in Judea; from it the whole world was sown for a harvest that angels will reap at the end, and sowers and reapers will rejoice together.
15.33The Samaritans believed first through the woman's report and then through Christ's presence, as people today come to faith through the Church's witness and the two commandments of love.
16.1Augustine raises the puzzle of why the evangelist cites the saying that a prophet has no honor in his own country just as Jesus goes to Galilee.
16.2Augustine insists that the evangelist, who leaned on the Lord's breast, spoke truly, and that the reader must humbly seek his meaning.
16.3The Samaritans believed Christ's word without signs while the Galileans, even after miracles, believed little; so the Jews, Christ's own people, rejected him, while the Gentiles believe the Gospel without seeing signs.
16.4Thomas, an Israelite, believed only after seeing, as the official did; those who believe without seeing, the Gentiles, are the blessed whom Christ foretold.
16.5Christ praised the humble Gentile centurion's faith above Israel's, showing that the proud branches would be broken off and the wild olive grafted onto the root of the patriarchs.
16.6The centurion's story shows the Gentiles grafted in to recline with the patriarchs in the kingdom, while the natural branches are cut off.
16.7Christ, made man in Zion, which as the Word he had himself created, was not honored by his own country; let him be honored by the people he has reborn.
17.1Christ healed only one of the many sick at the pool, since his miracles aimed at the eternal salvation of souls and signified unity, not mere bodily health.
17.2The pool signifies the Jewish people and its five porticoes the five books of Moses, which, like the law, exposed the sick but could not heal them.
17.3The stirring of the water signifies Christ stirring up the Jewish people toward his Passion; going down into it is humble faith in his Passion, and the one healed signifies the unity outside which none is healed.
17.4The number forty, hallowed by the fasts of Moses, Elijah, and Christ, signifies the perfection of good works in abstaining from worldly desires; with the reward of the denarius (ten) it becomes fifty, the joy of Eastertide.
17.5Christ's forty days after the resurrection and the sending of the Spirit ten days after the Ascension signify the same; meanwhile the Lord feeds his laborers with the mysteries of Scripture.
17.6Forty signifies the fulfillment of the law, which love fulfills in its two commandments; so the man sick for thirty-eight years, two short of forty, lacked the twofold love.
17.7Christ, the teacher of love, healed the man and gave him two commands, take up your bed and walk, supplying the two that were lacking from forty.
17.8Love of God comes first in command but love of neighbor first in practice, since by loving the neighbor we cleanse the eye to see God; “take up your bed” signifies love of neighbor.
17.9The bed signifies the neighbor: once carried when sick, the healed man must now carry his neighbor, fulfilling the law of Christ, and walk on toward God.
17.10The Jews objected not to the healing but to the man's carrying his bed on the Sabbath, and he answered that he obeyed the one who had healed him.
17.11The healed man did not recognize Jesus in the crowd but found him in the temple: God is seen not in noise but in recollection, by those who carry their neighbor and walk on.
17.12Having recognized Jesus, the healed man proclaimed him to the Jews, who did not seek their own salvation.
17.13Jesus answers that the Sabbath was a sign given for a time and fulfilled in him: “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”
17.14Both that God rested on the seventh day and that he is working until now are true; how God works at rest and rests in working is beyond words and must be seen by those who advance.
17.15God's rest on the seventh day signified Christ, who completed his work on the cross on the sixth day and rested in the tomb on the Sabbath; through him, the Word, the Father both made and rules the world.
17.16The Jews rightly understood that Jesus made himself equal to God, which the Arians deny; the Son did not seize equality like the devil, but was begotten equal and emptied himself by taking the form of a servant.
18.1John received the gift of speaking deep things of the Son that exercise mature minds; what is not yet understood must be held in faith, since heresies arise from misreading good Scriptures rashly.
18.2The Jews saw only Christ's flesh; as Word he is equal to the Father, and as flesh less than the Father: this is the Catholic rule by which all must be understood.
18.3The Arians take Christ's saying that the Son can do nothing of himself as proof that the Son is less than the Father.
18.4To speak of a greater and a lesser God is pagan; the equal Father and Son are not two gods but one God, united in a love far greater than that which made the first believers one soul.
18.5If the Son only imitated what he saw the Father do, like an apprentice, not all things would be made through the Word, contrary to John 1:3; the Father does nothing except through the Son.
18.6The Father does all his works through the Son, not separately; we cannot yet understand how the Son sees the Father, let alone how he acts, and must not picture God like a human craftsman.
18.7How the Word sees cannot be explained; understanding follows a way of life, and only those who live according to the spirit and grow in holy desire can approach the vision.
18.8The Son does the very same works as the Father and in the same way, unlike the hand that writes the same letters as the heart but in another manner; therefore the Son is equal to the Father.
18.9The Word, who made eye and ear, both sees and hears, but not with separate members: in him seeing and hearing are one.
18.10Returning to the heart, where the image of God is, we find that it sees and hears without separate organs; so much more in the Son are seeing and hearing one with his very being.
18.11Like a patient with healing eyes dazzled by the light, the soul glimpses the Word and falls back; it must accept the stinging salve of righteous living, or, loving darkness, be cast into outer darkness.
18.12Augustine closes, asking his hearers to console his labors by living well, lest his work among them be in vain.
19.1Augustine recalls the unfinished question of how the Son “sees” the Father working and warns against picturing Father and Son as two men.
19.2The Son's doing only what he sees the Father do must be held together with the truth that the Father makes all things through the Son.
19.3If all things are made through the Son, the Father must “show” them to the Son before they are made, not after.
19.4The promise of “greater works” raises the question how the eternal Father can show anything in time to the coeternal Son.
19.5Father and Son give life to the same people with one power and will, which raises the question how the Father “judges no one.”
19.6To honor the Father is to honor him as Father of the Son, so honoring the Son as lesser dishonors the Father too.
19.7Hearing the Son's word and believing the Father agree, because the Son is himself the Father's Word.
19.8Believers already pass from the death of unbelief and sin to the life of faith, a present resurrection.
19.9Christ speaks of a resurrection to eternal life that happens now, before the final resurrection at the end of the world.
19.10The same believers rise twice, now in the mind by obedient faith and at the end in the flesh; “hearing” Christ's voice means obeying it.
19.11Unlike the soul, whose life changes and is borrowed from God, the Father and the Son have life in themselves, the Son receiving it from the Father.
19.12The soul is alive enough to animate the body, but it is truly alive, wise, and just only when it comes to God, who is its life and light.
19.13“He gave the Son to have life in himself” means that he begot the Son as life itself, coeternal and equal, not as one who shares in life.
19.14The present resurrection of minds, which even false religions admit, must not be made the only resurrection, as Hymenaeus and Philetus did.
19.15The Son of God raises souls; as son of man he received power to judge and will raise bodies; the Word having man is one Christ, as soul and body are one man.
19.16Christ will judge in the form of a servant, visible to just and unjust alike, which is why “the Father judges no one.”
19.17“All who are in the tombs” shows that Christ now speaks of the bodily resurrection of just and unjust, not of the present rising of minds.
19.18At the bodily resurrection the good and the wicked will be openly separated, and after judging in the form of a servant Christ will show the form of God to those who love him.
19.19Christ seeks not his own will, as son of man, but the Father's; doing God's command willingly is not doing one's own will.
19.20Too tired to continue, Augustine postpones the deferred question to the next day.
20.1John's words about Christ, drawn from the Lord's breast, trouble the perverse and exercise the upright; Augustine returns to John 5:19.
20.2Christ healed on the sabbath because God never labors or ceases from work; Christians keep the sabbath spiritually by resting from sin, in hope of rest after good works.
20.3The Catholic faith holds that, as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are inseparable, so their works are inseparable: what the Father makes, the Son and Spirit also make.
20.4“The Son can do nothing of himself” means that the Son, whose being and power are one, has both from the Father who begot him equal.
20.5Against heretics who infer that the Son is lesser, Augustine asks when the Son saw the Father walk on the sea.
20.6Christ's walking on the sea, in which the flesh walked and the divinity governed, was an inseparable work of the Father abiding in the Son.
20.7There is no second light, firmament, or world made by the Son; the one world was made by the Father through the Son.
20.8“Can do nothing of himself” means the Son is from the Father, begotten equal and coeternal, as light is coeval with the flame.
20.9“These same things likewise” excludes the picture of a master and pupil making two chests: Father, Son, and Spirit made one world.
20.10Unlike mind and tongue, which make the same word in unlike ways, the Son makes the same things as the Father and makes them likewise.
20.11No separation is found in Father and Son by one who rises above body and mind; as the psalmist poured out his soul above himself, God is reached only by passing beyond oneself.
20.12Augustine leads the hearer upward past the body, the heavenly bodies, and the changeable mind itself, to the unchangeable God.
20.13John rose above all creation to see the Word with God; as radiance cannot be separated from its source, the Word cannot be separated from the Father, and the Trinity's works are one.
21.1Augustine prays to understand truly, or at least not to err, and recalls that Christ, God hidden and man manifest, speaks as a little one to little ones.
21.2The Father does not show the Son works done outside him, as a smith shows his son, but shows them in the Son, his Wisdom and Power, through whom he makes all things.
21.3We may call Christ's Father “our Father,” but Christ always distinguished “my Father” from “your Father,” since he is Son by nature and we by adoption.
21.4Unlike us, who sometimes see and sometimes do not, the Son's seeing the Father is his very being as Son; he is the Word in whom the Father says all he makes.
21.5Since the Son's knowledge is eternal and is the Son himself, the future “he will show” raises the question how anything could be shown to him in time.
21.6The “greater works” are greater than the healing of the man sick for thirty-eight years, namely raising the dead; yet the Son did not need to learn this.
21.7Christ, God and man, speaks sometimes in majesty and sometimes in humility; the Father shows the greater works to Christ's members, in whom he learns as he suffers in them.
21.8Believers have been made not only Christians but Christ: head and members together are the whole Christ.
21.9What is shown to Christ's members is shown to Christ through Christ, as the head guides the hand; the distant Word came near by becoming flesh.
21.10The raising of Lazarus was the work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together; “to whom he will” shows that the Son has equal power and one will with the Father.
21.11The dead whom Father and Son give life are not those raised as miracles, but all who will rise to eternal life at the final judgment.
21.12“The Father judges no one” seems to contradict texts where the Father judges; Augustine presses the difficulty and asks for understanding.
21.13The Father “judges no one” because only the Son will appear at the judgment, visibly, in the risen human body in which he ascended.
21.14At the judgment all will see Christ's human form; the form of God, equal to the Father, is kept for the righteous who go into eternal life.
21.15Christ promised to show himself, in the form of God, to those who love him; eternal life is to know the one true God and Jesus Christ.
21.16After the judgment the Son will appear equal to the Father, so that all honor the Son as the Father; whoever despises the Son dishonors the Father who sent him.
21.17Being sent does not make the Son less: sending implies no separation, as a ray from the sun, and the Father who sent him remained with him.
22.1Augustine introduces the reading with confidence that Christ, who became small for us, wills that his words be understood and grants understanding to those who ask.
22.2Faith leads to understanding and understanding to eternal life, where Christ himself will be seen without the reading of the gospel.
22.3The passage from death to life happens now, in the heart, when one hears and believes; the present life is not yet true life, which is eternal.
22.4Christ's promise that believers will not come into judgment seems to clash with Paul's statement that all must appear before Christ's judgment seat.
22.5“Judgment” sometimes means discernment, before which all appear, and sometimes condemnation, into which believers will not come.
22.6Believers still pay bodily death as Adam's penalty, but now pass by faith from the death of unbelief to the life of faith.
22.7The “hour” in which the dead hear Christ's voice is the whole present age; the sinner rises by believing, comes forth by confessing, and is loosed by the apostles' ministry, as Lazarus was.
22.8Those who hear Christ's voice live from Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life.
22.9Believers have life in Christ, not in themselves; the Son has life “in himself” as the Father does, because he is life itself.
22.10As a flame has light in itself while the eye only receives it, Christ is light and life in himself, given by being begotten, while believers are light only “in the Lord.”
22.11As Son of God he has life in himself; as son of man, the crucified one, he received the power to judge, appearing at the judgment in his human form.
22.12Against those who say the resurrection is past, Augustine notes that the bodily resurrection is spoken of without “and now is,” because it comes at the end of the world.
22.13“All who are in the tombs … will come forth” describes the bodily resurrection of good and evil, unlike the present rising of believers, which makes no such division.
22.14Christ “hears” the Father because he is the Father's one Word; “as I hear, I judge” means “as I am from the Father,” equal yet from him.
22.15The Son, equal to the Father, does not seek his own will, while proud men seek theirs; the Trinity has one will, yet the Son is from the Father.
23.1Like the wise builder, the hearer of Scripture must dig deep until he reaches the rock, which is Christ.
23.2Christ's works, the Father, John the lamp, and the Scriptures all bear witness to him; the Jews who trusted the Scriptures were directed by them to Christ.
23.3Prophets and apostles are lamps lit by grace and liable to go out; Christ alone is the true light that is never extinguished.
23.4Above the witness of Moses, John, prophets, and apostles stands the witness of Christ's works, through which God makes himself known in the Son.
23.5The soul gives life to the body but is made blessed only by participation in God; this is why the Christian religion worships the one God, not many gods.
23.6Christ is Word, rational soul, and flesh; souls rise from sin through Christ as God, and bodies rise from corruption through Christ as man.
23.7The Father does not show the Son finished works to copy; by showing he makes through the Son, and the creature so made is beneath both.
23.8A father who shows his son a plan in words uses a sound that is neither of them; the Father does not speak to his Word through other words.
23.9Unlike signs between father and son, the Father's showing begets the Son; if we cannot grasp what God is, we can learn what he is not: not body, not changeable spirit.
23.10Augustine turns the hearer inward to the mind, made in God's image, to find a likeness of the Father's showing and the Son's seeing.
23.11As memory shows Carthage to thought without words, so in a far higher way the Father's showing begets the Son's seeing, within and not in time.
23.12The “greater works” the Father will show the Son, as man made in time, are the resurrection of bodies.
23.13The resurrection of souls is the joint work of the Father and the Son in their one substance; the resurrection of bodies is the Son's work as man, in whom he is honored but not “as” the Father.
23.14Believers live from the Father by believing him who sent the Son, and from the Son by obeying his voice, because both have life in themselves.
23.15The Father raises souls through the Son's divine substance, but raises bodies and judges through the son of man, who judges “as he hears,” seeking the Father's will.
24.1The feeding of the five thousand is less than God's daily governing of the world, but its rarity makes us marvel and raises the mind from visible works to the invisible God.
24.2Christ's miracles, deeds of the Word, are like writing: one must not only admire them but read and understand what they say.
24.3The Lord on the mountain is the Word on high; his question to Philip, whom he tested, showed up the disciple's ignorance for a purpose to be explained.
24.4The boy's five barley loaves and two fish were multiplied to feed five thousand, with twelve baskets of fragments left over.
24.5The five barley loaves are the five books of Moses, whose kernel is hidden in husk; the boy is Israel, the two fish priest and king, both fulfilled in Christ.
24.6The five thousand are the people under the Law; the grass is carnal understanding; the twelve baskets of fragments are deeper truths entrusted to the apostles; we who believe without seeing are fed by the kernel.
24.7The crowd called Christ a prophet; he is the prophet foretold to Moses, yet Lord of the prophets, and “Angel of great counsel” as Lord of the angels.
25.1After the feeding, Jesus, knowing they meant to make him king, fled again to the mountain alone; his descent to feed and his ascent are significant.
25.2Christ, already king, fled because the crowds wanted to anticipate the time of his kingdom, which will be manifest after the judgment.
25.3Like the Emmaus disciples and the apostles asking about Israel's kingdom, the crowd wanted the kingdom too soon; Christ first ascends and gathers the nations.
25.4Christ's “flight” was a sign, not a necessity: his height could not be understood; he ascended alone, the firstborn from the dead, to intercede for us.
25.5With Christ, the high priest, gone up on high, the boat in the dark is the church at the world's end, where hatred darkens love and slanders toss the ship.
25.6The ship of the church makes headway amid storms; the twenty-five and thirty stadia signify the Law (five times five) fulfilled by the gospel (five times six), to whom Jesus comes treading the waves.
25.7Christians fear when the world's heights are crushed, but Christ, who foretold it, says “It is I; do not be afraid,” and brings the ship to land.
25.8The crowd, seeing that Jesus had not left by boat, followed to Capernaum, which revealed that he had walked across the sea.
25.9Jesus now speaks freely with the crowds he had fled, which shows that his flight was a sign.
25.10Christ rebukes those who seek him for bread, as many seek the church for worldly favors, and points to the food that endures, as with the Samaritan woman's living water.
25.11Christ is Son of man in a unique way, “sealed” by the Father with something proper to him, so that through him the human race is set free.
25.12The work of God is to believe in Christ, faith working through love; the crowd, preferring Moses' manna, asked for a greater sign.
25.13The true bread from heaven, which the manna signified, is Christ himself; like the Samaritan woman, the crowd asked for it in a bodily sense.
25.14Christ, the bread of life, will not cast out those who come to him; the place within from which none is cast out is the joy of the Lord.
25.15Christ casts out none who come because he came to do the Father's will, not his own; the soul went out from God through pride and returns through humility.
25.16Pride is the root cause of all sin; the Son of God came humble, doing the Father's will, to cure it and to make humble those who come to him.
25.17Psalms 36 and 73 show that God's inner fountain is for the humble and upright of heart; pride drove the wicked out, while humility keeps the hearer standing within.
25.18Christ, teacher of humility, incorporates those who come to him as his members; only pride casts out.
25.19None of the humble whom the Father gave to Christ will be lost; they rise now by faith and will be raised in the flesh on the last day.
26.1The Jews did not hunger for the bread from heaven because they trusted their own righteousness; Christ is God's righteousness, given by grace, and to believe in him is to eat the living bread.
26.2No one comes to Christ unless the Father draws him, yet faith cannot be unwilling, since one believes with the heart; how, then, is one “drawn”?
26.3We come to Christ by believing, not walking; to “touch” him, like the woman with the flow of blood, is to believe, and Mary was told not to touch him as though he were only what she saw.
26.4The Father draws not by force but by delight: as the poet says each is drawn by his own pleasure, so the lover of truth and righteousness is drawn to Christ.
26.5The Father draws to the Son those who believe him equal to the Father, unlike Arius and Photinus; Peter's confession shows that revelation is itself the drawing, as a branch draws a sheep.
26.6Here we hunger for righteousness; we will be filled at the resurrection on the last day.
26.7The Father draws by teaching within, as the prophets said all would be taught by God; preachers only plant and water from outside.
26.8The Father teaches through his Word, the uncreated Son, whom men in the flesh can hear because the Word became flesh.
26.9No one has seen the Father except the Son; to be drawn and taught by the Father is to hear his Word, who remains with the speaker and draws the hearer.
26.10To believe in Christ is to have him, eternal life itself, who took death from us in the flesh in order to slay death and gave eternal life to his risen flesh.
26.11The fathers who ate manna without faith died, while Moses and others who understood it spiritually did not; so the sacrament differs from its power, and one should approach the altar with innocence and forgiveness.
26.12Manna and the altar were sacraments differing in sign but alike in what they signified; the fathers ate the same spiritual food, and life comes from eating inwardly, in the heart.
26.13The bread is Christ's flesh for the life of the world; the faithful live by the Spirit of Christ only as members of his body, and the sacrament is a sign of unity and a bond of love.
26.14The Jews quarreled because they did not understand the bread of concord, which makes many one body.
26.15Unless one eats Christ's flesh and drinks his blood one has no eternal life; this food signifies the fellowship of his body, the church of the predestined, and its sacrament, received daily or at intervals, brings life to some and destruction to others, while the reality brings life to all who share it.
26.16Those who eat Christ's flesh still die in the body; they have eternal life now in the spirit and will receive it in the body at the resurrection.
26.17Christ's flesh and blood are true food and drink because they make the saints one; he commended them in bread and wine, each made one out of many grains or grapes.
26.18To eat Christ's flesh and drink his blood is to abide in him and he in us; one who does not abide in Christ, even if he receives the sacrament, eats and drinks it to his judgment.
26.19The Son lives because of the Father, as one sent and emptied in the form of a servant, while we live because of the Son by participation in his body and blood; this shows the grace of the mediator, not equality between us and him.
26.20Unlike those who ate manna and died, those who eat Christ, though they die in time, live for ever, because he is eternal life.
27.1Eating Christ's flesh means abiding in him and in the unity of his body; those who thought of his flesh carnally were scandalized.
27.2Many disciples found the saying hard because they understood it carnally, as if Christ would distribute his flesh in pieces.
27.3Christ's ascension, whole, into heaven answers the scandal: his body is not doled out in pieces, nor is his grace consumed by bites.
27.4The Son of man is said to have been in heaven before because Christ, God and man, is one person, not two, lest the Trinity become a quaternity.
27.5“The flesh profits nothing” means flesh alone, understood as dead meat; quickened by the Spirit, as knowledge by love, Christ's flesh profits greatly.
27.6The Spirit gives life only to members joined in the unity of Christ's body, as the soul quickens only attached limbs; so the Christian must dread separation from that body.
27.7Some did not understand because they did not believe; faith, which joins us to Christ, is itself a gift of the Father, so the believer must not be proud.
27.8Many disciples went back after Satan, not behind Christ as Peter was told; this consoles preachers whose truth drives hearers away, while urging care in speaking.
27.9Peter, speaking for all as the sign of unity, confessed that Christ has the words of eternal life; we believe in order to know, and Christ gives in his flesh and blood what he himself is.
27.10God, supremely good, uses evil well, as he used Judas's betrayal for our redemption and Satan's persecution for the martyrs' crowns; the twelve remained twelve when Matthias replaced Judas.
27.11We must eat Christ's flesh and blood not only in the sacrament, as the wicked also do, but to share in his Spirit as members of his body, which on earth remains mixed with the wicked until the end.
27.12Saint Laurence abode in Christ through slow torture by fire, strengthened by the food and cup he had received, and followed his bishop Xystus to martyrdom three days later, as Xystus had foretold.
28.1Christ, remaining God, hid as a man to give his members, who lack his power, an example; the whole Christ is head and body.
28.2Christ's avoiding Judea was an example for his weak members, not a loss of power, which he showed when his captors fell back.
28.3The Lord's “brothers” are Mary's kin, by Scripture's custom of calling relatives brothers; Mary bore no other child.
28.4Christ's unbelieving brothers urged him to show himself to the world because they sought human glory.
28.5“My time has not yet come” means the time of Christ's glory, which must be reached by the lowly way of his passion.
28.6Christ's time is the time of judgment; now his body must live justly and bear with the wicked until justice is turned into judgment.
28.7The upright in heart blame themselves and praise God; like their head, Christ's members say to the world's lovers that their time has not yet come.
28.8Christ did not go up to “this” feast of human glory; his going up secretly signified that he was himself hidden in that feast.
28.9The Feast of Tabernacles foreshadowed the Church, brought out of Egypt through baptism and now sojourning in the world's desert, where Christ lies hidden.
28.10Christ went up not when his brothers wished but in the middle of the feast, which lasted several days.
28.11As people disputed whether Christ was good or a deceiver, so they dispute about his servants, whose life is hidden like a tree in winter until the summer of judgment.
28.12Once the friends of Christ whispered and his enemies spoke loudly; now, with the Church spread everywhere, the reverse is true.
29.1To “lead astray” is good or bad according to whether one draws people from evil to good or from good to evil.
29.2The Jews marveled that Jesus knew letters without having studied, and their wonder became an occasion for deeper teaching.
29.3“My teaching is not mine” is solved by John 1:1: Christ is himself the teaching, the Word, which is his own and yet the Father's.
29.4Passing sounds point to the abiding Word who is God; seeing that he is God and the Father's Word solves “mine” and “not mine.”
29.5“My teaching is not mine” means “I am not from myself”: the Son, equal to the Father, is God from God, Light from Light, one Light with him.
29.6Believe in order to understand: to do God's will is to believe in Christ, which means to love him and be incorporated into his members by faith working through love.
29.7“My teaching is not mine” refutes the Sabellians, who held that Father and Son are one thing with two names.
29.8Antichrist will seek his own glory; Christ, though equal to the Father, sought the Father's glory and so gives us an example of humility.
30.1We should hear the Gospel as if the Lord were present, for many who saw him killed him and many who have not seen him believe; his body is in one place, his truth everywhere.
30.2The Jews sought to kill Christ because they did not keep the Law, which would have led them to recognize him; the troubled crowd answered that he had a demon.
30.3Christ, who as Health itself gives bodily health to men and beasts alike, also keeps for good men a health of eternal life; “men” belong to Adam, “sons of men” to the Son of man.
30.4If the Jews circumcise on the sabbath for the sake of a sign of salvation, they should not be angry that Christ made a whole man well on the sabbath.
30.5Circumcision on the eighth day signified Christ, the stone knife, whose resurrection on the eighth day strips us of the fault of birth and of our sins.
30.6Christ asks them to judge between him and Moses by the truth, not by persons: healing on the sabbath is no servile work.
30.7We too are warned not to judge by persons; the Jews sought earthly promises of the Old Testament, while we, made new, hope for an eternal homeland.
30.8One avoids judging by persons by loving equally: in a dispute between father and son, honor goes to the father but the judgment to the truth.
31.1Christ's open speaking at the feast showed as power what had seemed timidity; the crowd supposed the rulers spared him because they knew him to be the Christ.
31.2The Jews' saying that no one knows where the Christ is from reflects Scripture's twofold witness: his human origin was foretold, but his divine generation none can declare.
31.3The Jews knew Christ's human origin, except the virgin birth, but not the Father who sent him, whom only the Son reveals.
31.4“I am from him” means the Son is God from God and Light from Light; “he sent me” refers to the incarnation and implies the Father's authority as begetter, not a different nature.
31.5Christ's “hour” was not fate but his own will; he came in the fullness of time to free us from time into eternity.
31.6The manner of Christ's death, waiting until all was fulfilled and then dying while the robbers still lived, showed that he died by power, not necessity.
31.7The humble crowd, moved by the miracles, recognized the physician whom the rulers wished to kill.
31.8The officers sent to seize Christ could not take him unwilling; he would suffer only when his dispensation was fulfilled.
31.9Those who killed Christ later sought him and found forgiveness; he is always where he returned to, and “you cannot come” described their present state, not a hopeless one.
31.10Not knowing what they said, the Jews prophesied that Christ would go to the Gentiles, as he did through his members, though they could not grasp that he never left the Father's bosom.
31.11The woman with the flow of blood figured the Gentile Church, which touched Christ without seeing him; the cross, between the two robbers, foreshadowed his judgment.
32.1Christ calls the thirsty to come to him, not by moving the body but by loving, for a change of love is a moving of the heart.
32.2Christ's invitation to drink concerns the inner man, and the soul, though unseen, is loved more than the body, both in ourselves and in friends.
32.3Even lovers of bodies want to be loved in return, showing that the soul is the body's beauty, as God is the soul's.
32.4The inner man's belly is the conscience; it becomes a fountain flowing to others through benevolence toward one's neighbor.
32.5The Spirit promised is the Holy Spirit, who knows the things of God; we have received him as a pledge whose fullness will be given later.
32.6The Spirit, though at work in the saints before, was not yet given in the new manner, with the tongues of all nations, until Christ was glorified in his resurrection.
32.7The baptized receive the Spirit without speaking in all tongues, because the Church spread through all nations now speaks them; those cut off from its unity lack the Spirit.
32.8We have the Holy Spirit as much as we love the Church; in its unity each member's gift serves all, and love, poured out by the Spirit, surpasses every gift.
32.9The Spirit was given after the resurrection to show the eternal life we hope for and to turn our love from the world, since Christ promises not earthly goods but eternal life.
33.1The officers sent to seize Christ returned in admiration; the Pharisees, teachers of the Law, became blind, while the unlearned crowd believed in the Law's author.
33.2Nicodemus urged a fair hearing; the Pharisees replied that no prophet arises from Galilee, though the Lord of the prophets did.
33.3Christ, the Anointed, fittingly taught from the Mount of Olives, the mount of chrism; he anointed us as wrestlers against the devil.
33.4The scribes brought the adulteress to trap Christ between his gentleness and justice, since the Law commanded adulterers to be stoned; but the trap caught those who set it.
33.5Christ answered, “Let him who is without sin throw the first stone,” keeping both justice and gentleness; the accusers went away, leaving misery and mercy.
33.6Christ, the only one without sin, did not condemn the woman but condemned her sin, telling her to sin no more.
33.7Those who love the Lord's gentleness must fear his truth and justice, and not presume on long life while delaying repentance.
33.8Men are endangered both by presumptuous hope and by despair; God offers forgiveness to the despairing and makes the day of death uncertain for the presumptuous.
34.1Augustine introduces his sermon on the Gospel just read, asking those who already understand to bear with him for the sake of the rest.
34.2“I am the light of the world” does not mean, as the Manichees held, that Christ is the sun; he is the one through whom the sun was made.
34.3Christ is the light that made the sun; as Psalm 36 says, God in his manifold mercy gives health to men and beasts alike.
34.4Beyond the health shared with beasts, men hope for the drink of God's house and the fountain of life; Christ, light from light, was made under the sun, his light tempered by the cloud of the flesh.
34.5Christ is the light of life: in God light and fountain are the same, shining that we may see and flowing that we may drink.
34.6Following the sun leads astray and ends in darkness when it sets; Christ, whole everywhere, never sets for one who does not fall away from him.
34.7Following is present, having the light is future: now we follow by faith, then we shall see; meanwhile we desire God, who alone sees that desire and gives himself.
34.8We must do what Christ commanded, follow him, before claiming his promise; many have done what the rich young man refused, with the Lord loosing their fetters.
34.9Christ, who healed the man born blind with spittle and earth, enlightens us by faith; he is the way, as man, to the truth and life that he is with the Father.
34.10In this life we strive with others and within ourselves, flesh against spirit; following Christ in hope leads to the perfect peace of immortality.
35.1Following Christ the light of the world means avoiding the darkness of morals, discerned by the inner eyes.
35.2Christ sent prophetic lamps before him, among them John the Baptist, whose witness he used to confound those who questioned his authority.
35.3John was a lamp enlightened by Christ, the true light; as bodily eyes need outside light, the mind needs the light of truth to walk the way of justice.
35.4Light shows both itself and other things, so Christ's witness to himself is true; he is present everywhere, though unbelievers lack the eyes of the heart to see him.
35.5Christ came without leaving the Father and returned without leaving us, as he is God, unlike the sun.
35.6Christ is fit to witness to himself, but because he came humbly to our weakness and we are still in the world's night, the lamps of prophecy are needed too.
35.7Christians answer pagans from the prophets, using the Jews' own books, which foretold the passion and the pure sacrifice offered among the nations.
35.8Even Christians' day is night compared with the light to come, so we need the sure word of prophecy, which also refutes those who call Christ a magician.
35.9When Christ comes, Scripture's lamps will no longer be needed; we shall see the Word himself, the light from which every ray now reaches us.
36.1John, compared to the eagle, soared above the other evangelists to speak of Christ's divinity, which he had drunk from the Lord's breast.
36.2Lowly sayings of Christ refer to the form of a servant, lofty ones to the form of God; against heretics who deny either, the Catholic faith confesses him both God and man.
36.3The Jews judged by the flesh, seeing only a man; self-praise is arrogant in weak men who can lie, but not in Christ, the light who cannot lie.
36.4“I judge no one” means either not yet, since Christ came first in mercy, even to the death of the cross, or not according to the flesh.
36.5Christ's judgment is true because the Father is with him; John is the eagle among the four living creatures, which figure the four evangelists, soaring to Christ's divinity.
36.6Heretics who erred about Christ's divinity forced spiritual men, and Augustine himself, to expound these lofty matters for the protection of the faithful.
36.7Christ's judgment is true because the Father, who sent him, is with him; his being sent is his incarnation, which is believed before it is understood.
36.8Against the Patripassians, the Father did not become incarnate, yet he did not withdraw from the incarnate Son, for God is everywhere.
36.9Christ's words both distinguish the persons of Father and Son against the Sabellians and, with “I and the Father are one,” affirm one substance against the Arians.
36.10The law of two or three witnesses is a mystery of the Trinity, the true and stable witness, as Susanna's case shows.
36.11God is both witness and judge: he sees us now and cannot be deceived when he judges; those who obey will receive what he promised.
36.12The Son alone will appear in the judgment, in the human form in which he suffered, though the Father is with him; the vision of God himself is the reward of the just.
36.13“Your Law” means the Law given to them by God, as “our daily bread” is still asked of God.
37.1The Jews, judging by the flesh, asked where Christ's father was; they saw the garment of flesh and despised the hidden God within it.
37.2Christ will not show the Father to those who think him only a man; they must first know who he is.
37.3Christ's “perhaps” is not doubt but rebuke of unbelief, as men too use words of doubt to reprove.
37.4No pedant should fault the Word's “perhaps”: even a human word remains in the speaker while passing by sound to the hearer, and the Word of God is God.
37.5To Philip, a believer, Christ said without any “perhaps” that whoever has seen him has seen the Father; the “perhaps” to the Jews marks their unbelief.
37.6Between the Sabellians, who make Father and Son one person, and the Arians, who make the Son different in substance, the Catholic faith holds “I and the Father are one.”
37.7“If you knew me, you would know my Father” shows the Son's likeness to the Father, as one recognizes a man from someone very like him; against the Arians, Father and Son are one.
37.8Christ was not under fate: he is the Word in whom all things existed before they were made, and the maker of the stars to which fate is ascribed.
37.9Christ's hour was not fated but chosen: he waited until all the prophecies were fulfilled and then gave up his spirit by his own power.
37.10Christ did not come down from the cross, deferring his power to teach patience; that hidden power will be manifest at the judgment, for he is one Christ, God and man.
38.1Augustine recalls that Christ's “hour” meant no fated necessity but the time at which he would be killed willingly.
38.2Christ's enemies would seek him with hatred and die in their sin; the disciples, told likewise that they could not come, were promised only delay.
38.3Thinking carnally, the Jews supposed Christ meant to kill himself, though all men die; he meant where he would go after death.
38.4Those who savor earthly things are “from below”; Christ is “from above,” not from sky or angels but from the Father, before all creation.
38.5The apostles, born of Adam, were of the world but chosen out of it; the unbelievers remained of the world and would die in their sins.
38.6All are born with sin and add to it; what Christians flee, by hastening to baptism even for infants, is to die in sin, as the unbelievers were told they would.
38.7“If you do not believe that I am” restored hope to those who would believe; even those who shed Christ's blood could be forgiven, as the robber was saved on the cross.
38.8Christ's unqualified “I am” recalls God's name to Moses, “I am who am,” which no mind can grasp; God therefore added the name we can grasp, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
38.9Augustine, aware of his weakness, proposes to question the Lord about the meaning of “I am,” rather than presume to explain it.
38.10Only God truly is, without change, past, or future; Christ's “I am” means “I am God,” which we cannot grasp but must believe.
38.11Asked “Who are you?”, Christ answered “The Beginning,” meaning “Believe me to be the Beginning,” who became lowly and speaks to men so that they may believe.
39.1If the Son, who is from the Father, is called the Beginning, the Father, who is from no one, must be the Beginning too.
39.2Father and Son are each the Beginning yet not two beginnings, as each person is God yet there are not three gods.
39.3Each person is God, yet there are not three gods but one; what they are in themselves is God, what they are toward one another is Father, Son, and Spirit.
39.4Father, Son, and Spirit are three only in their relations; in what each is in himself they are one God, one almighty, one Beginning, beyond number.
39.5As love made the thousands of the first Church one heart and one soul in God, much more are Father, Son, and Spirit, the fountain of love, one God and one Beginning.
39.6Christ will judge in the future, having come first to save; by giving glory to the Father, though equal, he rebukes the pride of servants.
39.7Though qualities like piety exceed those who share them, the Father is not lesser than the Son, the Truth, for he is true by begetting the whole Truth, not by sharing in it.
39.8The changeable soul becomes good, chaste, and true by participating in God's goodness and truth, while God the Father is true not by participating but by begetting the Truth.
40.1Augustine introduces the next reading, recalling that John, the eagle among evangelists, speaks above all of Christ's divinity.
40.2“When you have lifted up the Son of man” refers to the cross: some of those who would crucify him were foreknown to believe afterward, so that no one need despair of forgiveness.
40.3“Then you will know that I am” is guarded against the Sabellians by “I do nothing of myself,” which shows that the Son is God from God, not from himself.
40.4The Father's teaching of the Son must not be pictured in human form; human form belongs to Christ's servant form from Mary, while the Word, like wisdom and justice, has no bodily shape.
40.5As God speaks to our hearts without sound, giving understanding, the Father “taught” the Son by begetting him knowing, since for the simple nature of truth to be and to know are the same.
40.6The Father sent the Son without leaving him, since the sending is the incarnation of the Son alone and both are everywhere; the Son always does what pleases the Father, in equality without beginning.
40.7As many believed when Christ spoke, Augustine hopes that Arians in his congregation, brought by recent newcomers, will believe with him.
40.8Faith is a lowly foundation, like a tree's root, but if they remain in Christ's word it leads to discipleship and knowledge of the truth.
40.9We believe in order to know: faith in what is not seen will be rewarded with the sight of the truth, when God's image, worn away in us like a coin's, is stamped anew.
40.10We must stretch out our desire for the glory to come, loving God more than money and using the world like an inn on a journey, trusting him who called us.
40.11The freedom Christ promises belongs to the life to come; the unbelieving Jews took offense at being implied to be slaves.
41.1To those who believed, Christ promised that by remaining in his word they would know the Truth, himself, which would set them free, that is, make them truly free.
41.2The Jews boasted that as Abraham's seed they had never been slaves, though their history and their tribute to Rome proved otherwise.
41.3Christ's “Amen, amen,” left untranslated from the Hebrew, is a solemn assurance, like an oath, that whoever commits sin is sin's slave.
41.4The slave of sin cannot flee or change his master, for his sin is within; only Christ, who redeemed us with his blood, can free him.
41.5Only Christ, sinless, frees from sin's slavery, which even infants inherit from Adam; as mediator he removed the sin that separated us from God by becoming a sacrifice for sin.
41.6The Law itself calls the sin offerings “sins,” so Christ was “made sin” by becoming the sacrifice for sin.
41.7Christ alone was “free among the dead,” having no sin for the devil to find; he died by doing his Father's will, not by necessity.
41.8The slave of sin does not remain in God's house, but the Son, head and body, does; freed by him, we become slaves of love and justice rather than of sin.
41.9The first freedom is to be without crimes, that is, grave sins, for no one in this life but Christ is without sin; God hates all sin and by grace diminishes it in the progressing and consumes it in the perfect.
41.10Church officers must be without crime, not without sin; freedom from crime begins freedom, but in this life weakness remains, and we are free only in the part in which we delight in God's law.
41.11Paul was free where he delighted in God's law and captive where weakness remained; he looked to the Son for full freedom, being one man serving God's law with the mind and sin's law with the flesh.
41.12Sin must not be allowed to reign in our members, though desire remains; we cannot yet fulfill “You shall not covet,” but we can refuse to follow our desires.
41.13Perfect freedom will come when death is swallowed up in victory; meanwhile the Church is the inn where Christ, the Good Samaritan, has us cared for.
42.1The Jews were Abraham's sons by the flesh but not by faith; Christ's word, like a hook, did not take hold in them.
42.2Christ speaks what he has seen with the Father, namely himself, the Truth; the Jews do what they have seen with another father, whom they imitate in evil.
42.3The Jews appealed to Abraham, hoping to provoke Christ to speak against him.
42.4Christ praised Abraham and condemned the Jews: seeking to kill a man who spoke God's truth, they were not Abraham's sons in deeds.
42.5Gentile Christians, not descended from Abraham, have become his sons by imitating his faith; God raised them from the stones of idolatry, as John the Baptist warned.
42.6Sons of Abraham must prove it by deeds; the Jews sought to kill the man they saw, offending the God they did not see, and so did their own father's works.
42.7Rebuffed about Abraham, the Jews claimed God as their father, denying spiritual fornication, that is, idolatry.
42.8Christ's coming from the Father is his incarnation; his proceeding from God is eternal, for God was never without the Word; his humanity is our way to his divinity.
42.9The Jews could not hear Christ's word because they would not be corrected; he tells them their father is the devil.
42.10Against the Manichees, who held the devil and our flesh to come from an evil nature, the Jews were the devil's sons by imitation, as Scripture calls Jerusalem a child of the Amorites; the devil himself was an angel who fell by pride.
42.11The Jews were the devil's sons because they shared his desires: he was a murderer from the beginning by persuading man to evil, and he fell from the truth.
42.12“He is a liar and its father” has been taken by the Manichees to mean that the devil has a father; Augustine sets out their argument.
42.13The devil is the father of lies because he begot his lie himself, as God the Father begot the Truth; others who lie are liars but not fathers of the lie.
42.14The Jews saw a lie with their father, while Christ saw with his Father the Truth, himself; they did not believe him though no one could convict him of sin.
42.15Against the Manichees' two natures, the unbelievers were from God by nature and not from God by fault, just as they were and were not Abraham's sons.
42.16Christ called “from God” those he foreknew would be reborn by faith, and “not from God” those foreknown to remain in their sins; all men are from God by nature and sinners by fault.
43.1Christ, though all-powerful, patiently bore being told he had a demon; we must imitate his patience to come to his power.
43.2Christ denied having a demon but not being a Samaritan, which means “keeper”: he is our keeper, the Samaritan of the parable who cared for the wounded man.
43.3Christ answered the insult only by saying that he honors the Father and they dishonor him.
43.4Augustine raises the question how the Father both “judges” and “judges no one.”
43.5Like the apparent contradictions about God's tempting and about fear, the question of the Father's judging can be solved.
43.6God tempts to prove, not to deceive; he tempts “that he may know” in the sense of making us know ourselves, as with Job, by a common figure of speech.
43.7Servile fear dreads punishment; chaste fear dreads losing justice, as a lover of money fears loss, or as a chaste wife fears her husband's departure, and it endures forever.
43.8As there are two kinds of temptation and of fear, so there are two kinds of judgment.
43.9“Judgment” can mean condemnation or distinction; the Father “judges” by distinguishing the Son's glory, even in his servant form, from the glory of sinful men.
43.10Christ promised that whoever keeps his word will not “see” or “taste” death, that is, will not experience it; the Jews mocked, citing the deaths of Abraham and the prophets.
43.11The death Christ promised to spare us is the second, eternal death of damnation; bodily death is only a departure.
43.12Many, fearing bodily death, fell into eternal death by worshiping idols; we must fear the death of Gehenna, as the three young men and the martyrs did, keeping Christ's word in faith.
43.13Abraham and the prophets, though dead in body, live, for God is the God of the living; it was Christ's accusers who were truly dead.
43.14Christ refers his glory to the Father; against the Arians, Father and Son glorify each other, which shows equality.
43.15Against the Manichees and Marcionites, Christ shows that the God of the Jews is his Father, whom he knows and whose word he keeps, being himself that Word.
43.16Abraham saw Christ's day with the eyes of the heart and rejoiced; his oath by the God of heaven with a hand under his thigh foretold that God would come in the flesh from his lineage.
43.17“Before Abraham came to be, I am” contrasts the creature's coming to be with the Creator's eternal being.
43.18When they took up stones, Christ, though he could have destroyed them, hid himself as man, commending patience rather than power.
44.1The man born blind signifies the human race, blind in mind from birth through Adam's sin.
44.2The anointing with clay signifies the catechumen's faith in the incarnate Word, and the washing in Siloam signifies baptism in Christ, the Sent One.
44.3Christ's answer that neither the man nor his parents sinned refers only to the cause of the blindness, not to sinlessness.
44.4Christ works while it is day; since night itself was made through him, the night in which no one can work needs explaining.
44.5Christ the light of the world is the day, and he has not departed, as the apostles' greater works after the ascension show.
44.6The night in which no one can work is the condemnation of the ungodly, which each unbeliever enters at death, as the rich man in Luke 16 shows.
44.7The healing itself is quoted and passed over as plain.
44.8The healed man confesses what Christ did, but like one only anointed he does not yet know whom he proclaims.
44.9The Pharisees who accused Jesus of breaking the sabbath kept it only carnally; the spiritual sabbath is to be without sin.
44.10The parents of the healed man, fearing expulsion from the synagogue, refer the questioners to their son.
44.11The healed man refuses to deny the gift he received and invites his questioners to become disciples too.
44.12Those who claim to be disciples of Moses do not truly follow him, for Moses wrote of Christ.
44.13The healed man's claim that God does not hear sinners is said while still only anointed, for the publican was heard; but his confession of Christ's divine origin is true.
44.14The Pharisees cast out the man they had made their teacher, but Christ who opened his eyes will save him whole.
44.15Cast out by the Pharisees, the man is found by Jesus and, his heart now washed, confesses and worships the Son of God.
44.16Christ's saying that he came so that the seeing may become blind raises a question.
44.17Those who confess their blindness and seek the physician are made to see, while the proud who claim to see remain blind; this separation is the judgment Christ came to bring now.
45.1Today's reading continues Christ's reply to the Pharisees after the healing of the man born blind.
45.2Those who live outwardly good lives without Christ, the door, do not truly live well, for they do not reach eternal life.
45.3Philosophers who promised happiness apart from Christ climbed in another way, like thieves.
45.4The Pharisees, though they read of Christ, did not enter by the door; Augustine turns to those who bear Christ's name.
45.5Heretics such as Sabellius, Arius, and Photinus do not enter by the door, for they preach a Christ of their own making; the fold is the Catholic Church, and the door is entered only by humility.
45.6Christ's figure of the door, the fold, the shepherd, and the sheep is stated but not yet explained.
45.7Believers who do not yet understand Christ's words differ from unbelievers because they believe and keep knocking; let them hold to faith and wait for understanding.
45.8Christ is the door; the prophets were not thieves and robbers, since they came with the eternal Word, but all who came apart from him were.
45.9The righteous before Christ believed in him as to come and so belonged to the same faith and fold as believers now; the signs differed, as in the Red Sea and the rock, but the faith was one.
45.10Not all who heard Christ were sheep, like Judas, and some who crucified him later became sheep; one answer is that hearing changed wolves into sheep.
45.11Ezekiel's “straying sheep” and Catholics who fall into heresy and return raise the question how sheep can hear a stranger's voice if the sheep do not hear thieves.
45.12God knows his own by foreknowledge and predestination, so that some now outside are his sheep and some now inside are not.
45.13The shepherd's voice that distinguishes his sheep is “He who perseveres to the end will be saved”; the predestined who stray return to it.
45.14Christ is the shepherd who calls the predestined by name, frees them from sin, and goes before them; both shepherd and sheep enter by the door.
45.15To go in through Christ is to enter the Church and the life of faith; to go out is to pass by faith at death to the more abundant life where the shepherd has gone before.
46.1Christ the good shepherd speaks to his sheep of every age; the good persons of the parable are the door, doorkeeper, shepherd and sheep, the bad are thieves, hirelings and the wolf.
46.2Christ explained that he is both the door and the shepherd; the doorkeeper remains to be sought, but no one may be thought greater than the door.
46.3Christ may be taken as the doorkeeper too, since by likeness he is door, shepherd, sheep, lion and rock, whereas properly he is the eternal Word, equal to the Father, who became man.
46.4Christ, who opens himself by explaining himself, may be the doorkeeper; or the doorkeeper may be the Holy Spirit, who teaches all truth.
46.5The hireling is a church leader who seeks his own advantage rather than Christ; such are known fully only to God, while leaders who are sons are shepherds as members of the one shepherd.
46.6Hirelings are necessary because Christ's voice is heard through them, as through the scribes on Moses' seat: take the grape and avoid the thorn, and rejoice with Paul that Christ is preached even in pretense.
46.7The apostles were shepherds as members of the one shepherd, yet they fled persecution as Christ commanded; how then is the hireling blamed for fleeing?
46.8The hireling flees in spirit when, for fear of losing human friendship, he fails to rebuke a grave sinner; fear is the flight of the mind.
47.1Augustine recalls the earlier sermon and proposes to show how Christ, being both shepherd and door, enters through himself.
47.2Augustine enters to his hearers through Christ the door; the good shepherd's laying down of his life is shared by his members, as John urges and as Christ foretold of Peter.
47.3Christ enters through himself because he preaches himself, as light shows itself; he shares the office of shepherd with apostles and good bishops but keeps being the door as his own.
47.4Christ came in person only to Israel, where his saving presence was shown, but sent his messengers to the Gentiles; the one fold excludes following Donatus.
47.5Christ speaks in those he sends, so the Gentiles hear his own voice; from Jews and Gentiles he makes one fold, as the cornerstone joins two walls.
47.6Christ is rock, door, cornerstone, shepherd, lamb and lion by likeness; properly he is the eternal Word who became flesh.
47.7Christ lays down his life by his own will and power, so the Jews cannot boast; he also raised himself, as the temple saying shows, though he gives the glory to the Father.
47.8The soul does not die naturally, but it dies when it loses God, its life, as the body dies when it loses the soul.
47.9Christ is the Word, a human soul, and flesh; Augustine warns against the Apollinarians, who deny Christ a rational human soul, as he earlier warned against Sabellians, Arians, Photinians and Manichees.
47.10In Christ's death the soul was separated from the body but never from the Word; so neither the Word nor the soul itself is properly what lays the soul down.
47.11To lay down the soul is to die; the flesh lays down the soul by breathing it out, and in Christ this happened when the Word willed, by the Word's power.
47.12As soul and body are one man, so Word and man are one Christ; hence what the flesh does can be said of Christ, as one says that Paul both rests with Christ and lies in his tomb.
47.13Even Christ's dead flesh in the tomb is called Christ, as the creed confesses; so when the flesh laid down and took up the soul by the Word's power, Christ did so.
47.14The Son's receiving a commandment from the Father shows his generation, not inferiority; the Jews were divided over his words.
48.1Those not yet ready for John's solid food should believe what they cannot understand; love makes the labor of understanding light.
48.2The feast of Encaenia in John 10:22 was the Jews' celebration of the temple's dedication.
48.3The Jews, cold in heart, demanded that Jesus say plainly whether he was the Christ, thinking of him only as David's son; Christ is truly David's son but also David's Lord.
48.4Jesus answers the demand that he call himself the Christ by pointing to his works as the Son of God; those who do not believe are not his sheep.
48.5The pasture of Christ's sheep is eternal life, entered by faith and reached by dying as believers.
48.6Christ's sheep, the predestined, cannot be snatched from him; what the Father gave the Son by begetting him, coeternal and equal, is greater than all.
48.7The one hand of Father and Son is best understood as their one power, though the Son can also be called the Father's arm.
48.8When Jesus said “I and the Father are one,” the Jews tried to stone him, understanding, as the Arians do not, that he claimed equality with the Father.
48.9If men to whom God's word came are called gods, how much more is the Word himself God; the Father sanctified the Son by begetting him holy.
48.10The mutual indwelling of Father and Son is one of equality, unlike believers' being in God by grace.
48.11The Jews tried to seize Jesus in order to kill him, but he escaped them; to grasp Christ rightly is to grasp the Word with the mind by faith.
48.12Beyond the Jordan many believed in Jesus, recognizing that John, who did no sign, had spoken truly of him.
49.1The raising of Lazarus is no wonder for the Creator; it is a sign given so that we may believe and prepare for the final resurrection to life.
49.2Christ's raisings are signs of the raising of souls; people labor greatly to put off bodily death but will not avoid sin to gain eternal life.
49.3The three dead whom Christ raised figure three deaths of the soul: sin in thought, sin in deed, and sin hardened by habit, from which even Lazarus' sister was raised.
49.4The reading begins: Lazarus of Bethany fell ill while Jesus was beyond the Jordan.
49.5Martha and Mary simply told the Lord that the one he loved was sick, trusting his love; Christ loves sinners, whom Lazarus signifies.
49.6Lazarus' sickness was for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified, which shows indirectly that the Son is God.
49.7Jesus loved the family yet waited until Lazarus had been dead four days, then returned to Judea, showing his power.
49.8Christ's answer about the twelve hours rebukes the disciples' attempt to advise him: he is the day, they the twelve hours who must follow him, as Peter learned when rebuked.
49.9Lazarus was asleep to the Lord who could wake him; all the dead sleep until the resurrection, but they are held in different conditions according to their merits, as Luke 16 shows.
49.10At death souls receive rest or torment, but all the saints will receive together at the resurrection the fullness that God has promised.
49.11Jesus told the disciples plainly that Lazarus was dead, knowing it without being told, so that their existing faith might be strengthened.
49.12The four days of Lazarus' death signify original sin, transgression of the natural law, of the law of Moses, and of the gospel; Christ comes to raise even such.
49.13Martha trusted that God would give Jesus whatever he asked, but did not presume to ask for her brother's raising.
49.14Christ, the resurrection and the life, can raise now as well as at the last day, including those buried in habits of sin.
49.15Faith is the life of the soul: the believer who dies in the flesh lives, and the unbeliever who lives in the flesh is already dead.
49.16The evangelist calls Martha’s low voice “silence” and lets her words imply the Lord’s call to Mary.
49.17The Jews followed Mary to the tomb, and so the raising of Lazarus had many witnesses.
49.18Christ’s troubling of himself shows his power: as the Word made flesh in one person, he hungered, grieved, and died because he willed to.
49.19Christ’s groaning signifies the groaning of faith in a sinner who accuses himself; waking faith is like waking Christ asleep in the storm-tossed boat.
49.20“Where have you laid him?” signifies that God, as it were, does not know the lost sinner; “come and see” means “have mercy.”
49.21Christ’s love for Lazarus is his love for sinners; raising the dead is greater than preventing death.
49.22The stone on Lazarus’s tomb signifies the law that weighs on the guilty; to remove it is to preach grace.
49.23Raising one four days dead shows the glory of God, as grace abounds where sin abounded.
49.24Lazarus coming out still bound signifies the sinner who confesses; the ministers’ unbinding him signifies the loosing of sins.
49.25Many who saw Lazarus raised believed; some reported it to the Pharisees, whether to persuade or to betray.
49.26The council feared losing place and nation if all believed in Jesus, neglected eternal life, and lost both.
49.27Caiaphas prophesied by virtue of his office; the evangelist extends his words to God’s scattered children, who are his sheep by predestination.
49.28Jesus withdrew to Ephraim not from weakness but to show his followers that it is no sin to avoid persecutors by withdrawing.
50.1Augustine introduces the reading and says he will pass quickly over what is plain.
50.2The Jewish Passover was a shadow of Christ the true Lamb, whose sign protects only those whose hearts receive him.
50.3The Jews sought Jesus wrongly, to kill him; Christians must seek him rightly, to hold him.
50.4Augustine invites the Jews to find Christ in the Church and to hold him, absent in body, by faith.
50.5Lazarus eats at table with Jesus, proving that his raising was real and no phantom.
50.6Mary's anointing figures faith and righteousness, and wiping with her hair figures giving one's superfluities to the poor, Christ's feet.
50.7The fragrance filling the house is the good report of Christ, which, as Paul says, brings life to some and death to others.
50.8The same good fragrance of Paul's preaching gave life to those who loved him and death to those who envied him.
50.9Judas's complaint about the ointment came not from care for the poor but from theft, and the good fragrance became death to him.
50.10Judas was already a thief before the betrayal; his presence among the twelve teaches the Church to bear with the wicked without dividing Christ's body, for the one bread gives life to the good and judgment to the unworthy.
50.11Christ kept a purse and tolerated a thief to teach the Church patience with the wicked in its midst.
50.12"Me you will not always have" was said to Judas as the figure of the wicked in the Church, as Peter, receiving the keys, figured the Church of the good.
50.13Alternatively, Christ meant his bodily presence, which ascended into heaven, while by his majesty he remains with the Church always.
50.14The chief priests' plan to kill Lazarus was folly, since the Lord who raised the dead could raise the slain, as he raised himself.
51.1Augustine recalls the previous sermon and turns to the fruit of Christ's preaching before his passion.
51.2The palm branches signify Christ's victory through the cross, and "Hosanna" is an interjection of entreaty, left untranslated like "Raca."
51.3"In the name of the Lord" means in the Father's name, for Christ, equal to the Father in divinity, teaches humility in the form he shares with us.
51.4Christ's kingship over Israel was not earthly rule but the rule of minds unto eternal life, an act of condescension by the eternal Word.
51.5The colt fulfils Zechariah's prophecy to the daughter of Zion, the believing remnant; the colt signifies the Gentiles and the she-ass the believers from Israel.
51.6Only after the resurrection did the disciples understand that the entry fulfilled the Scriptures.
51.7The crowd that saw Lazarus raised drew others to Jesus, to the Pharisees' dismay.
51.8The Greeks' wish to see Jesus foreshadows the faith of the nations that would follow his glorification.
51.9Christ is the grain of wheat that must die to bear much fruit among the nations.
51.10Hating one's soul in this world means choosing death rather than sin under persecution, never taking one's own life.
51.11To serve Christ is to follow him, and the reward is to be with him, honoured by the Father.
51.12Serving Christ means following him: seeking his interests, doing good works for his sake, and even laying down one's life for the brothers.
51.13Not only clergy serve Christ: every head of a household serves him by governing his home, and many lay people have served him to the point of martyrdom.
52.1Christ's troubled soul was not love of this world but his voluntary sharing in the weakness of his members.
52.2Christ's trouble does not discourage his followers but carries their weakness, so that the fearful in his body may not despair.
52.3Christ's prayer in his trouble teaches the tempted to set God's will above their own, as he did in Gethsemane and as Peter did in martyrdom.
52.4The Father glorified Christ's name before creation and in his earthly life, and would glorify it again in his resurrection and exaltation.
52.5The voice from heaven, like Christ's trouble of soul, was for the sake of others.
52.6The present judgment of the world is the separation of believers from the devil's dominion through Christ's blood, distinct from the final judgment.
52.7The prince of this world is cast out now, from the hearts of those who renounce him by faith.
52.8The devil was cast out of a few hearts before Christ, but now of many peoples, just as the Spirit was given before but now in Pentecostal abundance.
52.9The devil still attacks believers from without but cannot reign within, and God heals and guards them through Christ and prayer.
52.10"The world" whose prince is the devil means the wicked throughout the earth, not heaven and earth; the good too are called the world reconciled in Christ.
52.11"All things" that Christ draws when lifted up on the cross are the whole human person, or the predestined, or every kind of person, joined to him as head.
52.12The crowd understood "lifted up" as crucifixion because they themselves were planning his death.
52.13Christ urges belief in both his eternity and his death; refusing the humility of the cross is walking in darkness and stumbling on the stone.
52.14Jesus hid from those who envied him, to provide for our weakness rather than from lack of power.
53.1Augustine recalls the end of the previous reading.
53.2Isaiah's "arm of the Lord" is the Son, the Word through whom God made all things, not a bodily member of the Father.
53.3Calling the Son the Father's arm is a figure of speech and gives no support to those who deny that the Son is a distinct person.
53.4God foretold the Jews' unbelief by his foreknowledge but did not cause it; foreknowledge does not compel sin.
53.5John's "they could not believe" and Paul's citation of Isaiah seem to make God the cause of unbelief, sharpening the question.
53.6They could not believe because they would not; God blinds by withholding help, by a judgment hidden but never unjust, before which we must stand in awe.
53.7Augustine declines to probe God's hidden judgments further and urges perseverance in faith, which will lead to fuller knowledge.
53.8Free choice must not be defended so as to make prayer for grace needless, nor denied so as to excuse sin; both faith and its power are God's gifts.
53.9"Could not believe" means "would not": their pride in their own righteousness blinded them.
53.10Those who deny their need of divine help cannot believe in Christ, and so remain blinded and hardened.
53.11Their blinding may have been a merciful remedy, humbling them so that many afterwards sought God's righteousness and believed.
53.12Isaiah saw Christ's glory only in a figure; the Son is invisible in the form of God and became visible in the form of a servant; the pure in heart will see God as he is.
53.13The rulers who believed but feared to confess loved human glory; the cross signed on the forehead teaches believers not to be ashamed of Christ.
54.1Augustine sorts Jesus' hearers into those predestined to believe, the open and the timid believers, and unbelievers, some of whom later believed.
54.2To believe in Christ is to believe in the Father who has a Son equal and co-eternal with him, not merely in the man who was seen.
54.3No apostle could say "he who believes in me"; Christ could, because he is equal to the Father, so that whoever sees him sees the Father.
54.4The saints are lights lit by Christ, but only Christ is the light in whom we believe, who came to bring all out of darkness.
54.5Christ does not judge now because this is the time of mercy; judgment will come later.
54.6The word Christ spoke, which is himself, will judge on the last day; those who heard and despised will be judged differently from those who never heard.
54.7The Father's command to the Son is not a word spoken in time but is given in the eternal begetting of the Son, who is the Father's Word, Wisdom and life.
54.8The Son himself is the Father's command and the truth begotten by the truthful Father, who speaks inwardly to understanding minds, beyond the passing sounds of words.
55.1Pascha means "passing over": Christ passed from the world to the Father, and his members pass with him from the devil to his kingdom.
55.2"Unto the end" means unto Christ, our end, or that his love brought him to death; it does not mean his love ended at death.
55.3"Supper being done" means the supper was served, not finished, since Jesus later gave Judas the morsel.
55.4The devil's suggestion entered Judas's heart spiritually; Judas came to the supper as a traitor, unaware that Christ knew him and was using him.
55.5Even the betrayer was in Christ's hands, and his evil served the good Christ intended; Christ neither left God in coming nor leaves us in returning.
55.6John first stresses Christ's majesty so that his humility in washing the disciples' feet, even the betrayer's, may stand out.
55.7The foot-washing figures the incarnation and passion: Christ emptied himself, washed us with his blood, and taught humility by example.
56.1Jesus began the foot-washing with Peter, the first of the apostles, whose awe at "you" washing "my" feet is beyond words.
56.2Peter refuses the washing until Jesus warns he would have no part with him, and then offers hands and head as well.
56.3Being "clean all over" yet needing the feet washed is not a contradiction: clean all over except the feet.
56.4Baptism washes the whole person, but the daily sins of life among earthly things are the feet, washed daily through Christ's intercession, confession and the Lord's Prayer.
56.5The Church is without spot in the baptized who die at once, and in those whose feet are also washed, but the living still need their feet washed; how one treads earth to reach the risen Christ is deferred.
57.1Augustine resumes the deferred question of how the Church can fear to defile her washed feet while coming to Christ.
57.2The bride's fear of defiling her washed feet is the fear of the Church's preachers, who must tread the earth and risk pride in order to open to Christ.
57.3Hearing the truth guards humility, and the Church's "sleep" with a waking heart is the quiet leisure of those who listen and study.
57.4Christ knocks at the door of the contemplative Church, calling her out of quiet to preach him in a world where love grows cold.
57.5The Church laments that her great preachers of old, who have put off the body, cannot return to preach now; they will be clothed again only at the resurrection.
57.6Preachers who fear defilement must still open to Christ, asking him to wash the feet soiled by the praise and blame that come with preaching.
58.1"Not all clean" refers to the betrayer, as John himself explains.
58.2Jesus now fulfils his promise to explain to Peter the meaning of the foot-washing.
58.3Christ rightly calls himself Master and Lord, for the Truth cannot be arrogant in speaking the truth, and we profit by knowing it.
58.4Christ's example calls Christians to wash one another's feet, in the heart and preferably also literally, as many did in hospitality.
58.5Washing one another's feet means confessing sins to one another, praying for one another and forgiving one another, as Christ intercedes for and forgives us.
59.1Judas was not chosen for blessedness, though chosen for a purpose; the other disciples ate the bread that was the Lord, Judas the Lord's bread to his judgment.
59.2The words "he who receives me receives him who sent me" give no support to the Arian ranking of the Son below the Father, which cannot even place the Holy Spirit consistently.
59.3The saying commends the authority of the sender in the one sent: Christ is received in the apostle and the Father in the Son.
60.1Jesus was not troubled by new knowledge of the betrayal, which he had long foretold, but by his approaching passion, as when his soul was troubled before.
60.2Christ, troubled by his own power and will, took on our weakness so that we might see ourselves in him and not despair when troubled.
60.3Against the Stoics, Augustine affirms that Christians rightly feel fear, sorrow, desire and joy for just causes.
60.4Christ's trouble was not joy, as some philosophers would say, but sorrow, as at Gethsemane, as the betrayer was about to go out.
60.5Christ was troubled not from weakness but by his own power, to console the weak in his Church who are troubled at death.
61.1Christ's trouble at Judas's departure prefigures the Church's grief when schismatics and heretics, tolerated like tares, must be separated before the harvest.
61.2Judas was "one of you" in outward communion but not in heart, as 1 John says of those who went out and were never truly of us.
61.3The disciples, sure of themselves but not of one another, looked at each other in doubt.
61.4The beloved disciple is John himself, who, like Matthew, Moses and Paul, speaks of himself in the third person to avoid boasting.
61.5Jesus loved all his own, so the beloved disciple's place in his bosom points to a hidden mystery, to be discussed later.
61.6Peter beckons to John to ask who the betrayer is; Jesus gives Judas the dipped bread, a good thing he received to his harm, and Satan enters him.
62.1Augustine explains that Satan entered Judas after the bread because a good thing received badly does harm, as Paul shows of the Lord's body taken unworthily.
62.2Satan had entered Judas before the supper to deceive him; after the bread he entered to possess him fully.
62.3Judas had already received the sacrament with the others; the dipped morsel only identified him as the betrayer.
62.4In saying "What you are doing, do quickly" the Lord did not command the crime but hastened toward our redemption, for Christ handed himself over.
62.5The Lord's money-box shows that the church may keep funds, provided God is not served for money.
62.6Judas, himself night, went out to the unbelievers, while Christ, the day, spoke to his faithful disciples.
63.1God is sought both in order to be found and, once found, because he is immeasurable; so the seeking never ends in this life.
63.2Judas's departure, leaving only the clean with Christ, prefigures Christ's glorification when the wicked will be separated from the righteous.
63.3God glorifies the Son of Man in himself by raising the human nature assumed by the Word to immortality at once in the resurrection.
64.1"Yet a little while I am with you" may mean either the forty days after the resurrection or his time in mortal weakness before the passion.
64.2The "little while" is not Christ's abiding presence to the end of the age but his mortal life or his bodily presence before the ascension.
64.3Luke 24:44 shows that "with you" can mean sharing their mortality, which supports that reading of "Yet a little while I am with you."
64.4The disciples could not yet follow Christ to the deathless life; the new commandment of love is the way by which they would follow him later.
65.1The commandment of love is new because Christ's love, unlike natural or sinful love, renews us and makes us die to the world.
65.2Love of God and love of neighbor contain each other, for to love one's neighbor rightly is to love God in him.
65.3Love, not other gifts that outsiders may share, is the mark of Christ's disciples and the delight of his bride the church.
66.1Christ delays but does not deny Peter's hope of following him, and foretells that Peter, presuming on his own strength, will deny him three times.
66.2Peter truly denied Christ, for to deny Christ the man is to deny Christ himself; his tears refute those who would excuse him.
67.1In bidding the disciples believe in him as in God, Christ testifies that he is God, whose divine form will raise his servant form from death.
67.2The many dwelling places are different degrees of glory within the one eternal life, shared by all through love without envy.
67.3Augustine rejects the view that some of the many dwelling places lie outside the kingdom of heaven as a place of blessedness for unbaptized infants.
67.4Augustine raises the puzzles of John 14:3–4 and defers their explanation.
68.1The dwelling places already exist in God's predestination but are still being prepared in his working, as the disciples were chosen both before the world and when they were called.
68.2The Father's house is the church, God's temple and kingdom, which now exists in name and hope and will reign when the wicked are gathered out of it.
68.3Christ goes away to prepare the place by making us live by faith, which cleanses the heart for the sight of God; the dwelling places differ as merits differ.
69.1Since Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, the disciples who knew him already knew the way without knowing it.
69.2Christ goes through himself to himself and to the Father, and we go through him to him and to the Father; such heights are grasped only by God's gift.
69.3Christ, one person as Word and flesh, came to us and returned to himself through the flesh, so that he is the way even for himself.
69.4As a speaker goes out to his hearers without leaving himself, so, far more, the Son, God born of God, came to us and returned without leaving himself.
70.1Christ is the eternal life in which we shall be; he is life in himself, while we only share in that life by abiding in him.
70.2Some disciples knew the Son and so, through his perfect likeness, knew the Father; Philip did not. Father and Son are two, yet so alike that to know one is to know both.
70.3Philip was rebuked because he sought the Father as if he were better than the Son, not knowing that they are inseparable and alike.
71.1"I do not speak from myself" means that the Son, equal to the Father, is from the Father: God from God, light from light.
71.2Against both Arians, who make the Son unequal, and Sabellians, who make him the Father, Augustine holds that the Son is other than the Father yet equal to him, from him and inseparable from him.
71.3The greater works the disciples would do, such as healing by their shadow and converting nations, are done by Christ through them.
72.1Christ does greater works through believers than he did apart from them, not from any lack in himself but by condescension.
72.2Since every believer is said to do Christ's works, those works must be the justification of the ungodly, which Christ works in us but not without us.
72.3Justifying the ungodly may be a greater work than creating the world, for it shows greater mercy; and the "greater works" may be measured against Christ's words of that hour.
73.1Many prayers are not granted because they are asked badly; God in mercy withholds what would harm, as the Israelites' craving for meat shows.
73.2The promise cannot be limited to the apostles, yet even Paul did not receive what he asked three times.
73.3To ask "in the name" of Jesus, the Savior, is to ask for what serves salvation, as taught in the Lord's Prayer; what harms salvation he grants by refusing.
73.4Some rightly asked things are deferred, not denied; and the Son grants prayers together with the Father, for they are one.
74.1Since no one can love Christ or keep his commandments without the Holy Spirit, the apostles who loved him already had the Spirit whom they were promised.
74.2The disciples had the Spirit hiddenly and in lesser measure and were to receive him more fully and openly, as the Spirit was given twice after the resurrection.
74.3Christ alone received the Spirit without measure; to others he is given by measure and increased until each measure is filled.
74.4Christ too is a paraclete, an advocate; the world, meaning the lovers of the world, cannot receive the Spirit because it has no eyes to see what is invisible.
74.5The Spirit remains with the disciples by being in them, and is known inwardly, as one's own conscience is.
75.1In promising not to leave his disciples orphans, the Son, who made us sons of his Father, shows a fatherly affection toward us.
75.2The world saw Christ's flesh but not the Word hidden in it; after the resurrection he showed himself only to his own.
75.3"I live" points to Christ's resurrection soon to come, "you will live" to ours at the end of the age; as death came through Adam, life comes only through Christ.
75.4What we now believe, that Christ is in the Father, we in him, and he in us, we shall know by sight in the day of the resurrection.
75.5Love for Christ is shown by keeping his commandments; his love now brings faith, and then will bring the vision that rewards faith.
76.1Judas, author of the canonical Epistle, not Iscariot, asks why Jesus will manifest himself to the disciples and not to the world.
76.2Christ manifests himself to those who love him, in whom the Father and the Son make their dwelling; the ungodly see him only in the flesh, for judgment.
76.3The world will see Christ at the judgment; "a little while" refers to the end of the age, after which only those who love him will see him.
76.4The whole Trinity dwells in the saints; the world sees only the Son, in the form of a man, for judgment.
76.5"The word is not mine" refers to the Son himself, the Word, who is equal to the Father yet from him, and so attributes his works to the Father.
77.1Christ's bodily dwelling with the disciples, which ends, is distinguished from the spiritual dwelling of the Trinity in the saints, which is eternal.
77.2The whole Trinity both speaks and teaches; the persons are named one by one only because human weakness could not otherwise grasp that God is a Trinity.
77.3Christ leaves peace now, by which we overcome the enemy and love one another, and will give his own peace in the age to come; he himself is our peace.
77.4The peace Christ leaves is ours, imperfect because of inner conflict and hidden hearts; his own peace, which he will give, is perfect.
77.5Worldly peace serves the enjoyment of the world and lacks true concord; Christ's peace joins hearts together and lifts them up.
78.1Christ goes to the Father as man, by which the Father is greater, while as God he remains everywhere and is one with the Father.
78.2In the form of a servant the Son is less than the Father, the Spirit, and even himself; the Arians wrongly use what he says as man to diminish his divinity.
78.3Christ, one person who is God, rational soul, and flesh, goes to the Father as man, so that human nature is made immortal and seated at the Father's right hand.
79.1"That you may believe" means that seeing the risen and ascending Christ would restore and increase the disciples' faith in what they could not see, his divinity.
79.2The devil is ruler not of creation but of sinners, the lovers of the world; he had nothing in Christ, who died without debt at the Father's command to redeem us.
80.1Christ is the vine as man, sharing the nature of the branches; he is the true vine in contrast with the foreign vine that bore thorns.
80.2As man Christ is the vine; as God, one with the Father, he is also the vinedresser who cleanses the branches and gives the increase.
80.3Baptismal water cleanses only through the word of faith joined to it, which makes the sacrament a visible word and cleanses even infants.
81.1The mutual abiding of Christ and the disciples benefits them, not him, as branches live from the vine.
81.2Against those who claim to be righteous of themselves, Augustine insists that no branch bears fruit unless it abides in the vine.
81.3Without Christ no fruit at all can be borne; a branch that does not abide in the vine is fit only for the fire.
81.4Those who abide in Christ, whose words abide in them, ask only what serves salvation, as taught in the Lord's Prayer, and receive it.
82.1The Father is glorified when we bear fruit, because our good works are his grace and the glory belongs to him, not to us.
82.2Our good works come from love, and our love from being loved first; Christ's words show the grace of the mediator, not an equality of nature.
82.3Keeping the commandments shows, but does not produce, our abiding in Christ's love; his love comes first and enables us to keep them.
82.4The Father's love for the Son as man is grace, by which human nature, with no prior merits, was taken into the person of the only-begotten Son.
83.1Christ's joy over us, full from eternity in his foreknowledge, begins in us when we are called and will be filled in the resurrection; God's blessedness does not increase from us.
83.2The repeated commandment of love is called new, to draw us from our oldness, and his own, so that we do not despise it.
83.3Love contains faith, hope, and the love of God, so that in keeping the commandment of love we keep all; it is love for the sake of having God.
84.1The ruler's table of Proverbs is the Lord's table, where Christ's body and blood are received; the martyrs repaid in kind by laying down their lives, and at the altar they are asked to pray for us, not prayed for.
84.2Martyrs imitate Christ's love but are not his equals; his blood alone remits sins, and no one may claim to be without sin as he was.
85.1Christ condescends to call his obedient servants friends, so that a good servant can be both servant and friend.
85.2Augustine sets out the puzzle that by obeying Christ's commands, which is what servants do, the disciples cease to be servants.
85.3There are two fears and two servitudes: servile fear, which love casts out, and chaste fear, which endures; Christ's friends know that the Lord makes them righteous.
86.1Christ says he has made all things known because he speaks of the future fullness of knowledge as already done, as Scripture speaks of salvation already received in hope.
86.2Christ chose us not because he foresaw our faith or works but by grace, which does not find merits but produces them.
86.3Christ makes good those he chooses and appoints them to bear the fruit of love, which remains and through which the Father grants what serves salvation.
87.1Love is the fruit Christ appoints us to bear; it heads and contains all the other fruits of the Spirit.
87.2Christ's followers must share the world's hatred with their head; the church, itself called "the world", is hated by the world.
87.3Out of the mass lost in Adam, God by free grace makes vessels of mercy, the world reconciled, whom the world of the lost hates.
87.4The world loves its vice and hates its God-given nature; we are to hate its vice and love its nature, loving our enemies but not the world.
88.1Christ offers himself as the example of suffering the world's hatred; the "servant" here is the one of chaste fear, not the one of servile fear.
88.2Persecution for Christ's name is persecution for righteousness, since Christ is our righteousness; those who suffer it are blessed.
88.3Augustine resolves how persecutors act "on account of Christ's name": either the phrase refers to what the righteous suffer, or to the righteousness the persecutors hate in them.
88.4The world both hates and loves its own; and those who truly know the Father do not persecute those whom Christ gathers.
89.1The sin those who heard Christ would not have had without his coming is unbelief, the sin by which all other sins are retained.
89.2Those who never heard Christ have an excuse for unbelief, but not those to whom he speaks through his church.
89.3Those who died without hearing the gospel have an excuse for unbelief but do not thereby escape condemnation.
89.4Those who heard and rejected Christ are not among those "judged by the Law"; all not saved in Christ perish, though punishments differ as sins differ.
89.5Augustine raises the question how Christ's enemies can hate the Father whom they do not know.
90.1We can love or hate people we have never seen, because a person is known by his character and life, not by his face.
90.2Since we cannot see into others' hearts, we must judge rightly about virtues and vices themselves and withhold firm verdicts on persons; errors about persons are pardonable.
90.3One can unknowingly love the good in a person and hate what one wrongly takes him to be; so Christ's enemies hate the truth, and its Father, without knowing them.
91.1The sin meant is unbelief in Christ despite his words and works, the sin that retains all others.
91.2Others besides Christ raised the dead and did unique wonders, so the phrase "works which no one else did" needs explaining.
91.3The works "which no one else did" are Christ's many healings done in the people themselves; the virgin birth and resurrection, though greater, were not done before them.
91.4They saw Christ's healing works and hated him without cause; and since the one God works every miracle, no one else did Christ's works.
92.1The Spirit's witness at Pentecost converted many who had seen and hated Christ, so that they were redeemed by the very blood they had shed.
92.2The Spirit, poured out at Pentecost, turned Peter's fearful denial into bold witness and turned many enemies of Christ into believers.
93.1Example alone did not keep Peter from denying Christ; the Holy Spirit made him a firm witness, and the Spirit's love keeps believers from stumbling.
93.2Expulsion from the synagogues showed that those who rejected Christ put out those who would not leave him; had they received Christ, synagogue and church would have been one.
93.3"But the hour is coming" announced the apostles' success: they would win so many that their opponents, thinking to serve God, would kill them, as they had killed Christ.
93.4Those who killed the apostles thought they served God by protecting the temple; Israel's blindness was partial, and many Jews believed.
94.1Since Matthew records early warnings of persecution, "I did not say these things from the beginning" must refer to the promise of the Holy Spirit's coming.
94.2Christ had not spoken earlier of the Comforter because his presence comforted them; the Spirit would make them witnesses able to endure persecution.
94.3No one would ask where he was going because they would see him ascend into heaven.
94.4Christ had to withdraw his bodily presence so that the disciples, no longer clinging to him in a fleshly way, could receive the Spirit and know him spiritually.
94.5After Christ's bodily departure the whole Trinity was present to the disciples, since where any one of the persons is, the one God, the Trinity, is.
94.6Augustine introduces John 16:8–11 and defers its explanation.
95.1The Spirit convicts the world through the disciples sent to all nations, giving them the love that casts out fear; Christ convicts in them too, for the works of the Trinity are inseparable.
95.2The world is convicted of its own sin of unbelief and of the righteousness of believers, which is faith in the Christ they no longer see.
95.3"You will no longer see me" means they would no longer see Christ in his mortal lowliness; believing in him unseen is the righteousness of faith.
95.4The devil, ruler of the unbelieving world, has been judged; the world that imitates him is convicted of sharing his judgment, and must believe in Christ to escape it.
96.1What the disciples could not then bear is not to be guessed; but just as many later endured martyrdom which Peter could not then, many may now bear more, since the Spirit has been sent.
96.2Without divine testimony no one may claim to know which things the Lord left unsaid; even later Scripture cannot be identified with them unless Scripture says so.
96.3The things the disciples could not bear cannot simply be the later apostolic writings, which even catechumens now bear; only unbelievers and heretics cannot bear what refutes their errors.
96.4Rather than seek secret teachings, believers should grow in love, by which the Spirit leads them inwardly toward a fullness of truth reached only in the life to come.
96.5Augustine warns against sects that pass off obscene teachings as the things the disciples could not bear; the Spirit teaches all truth by pouring out love.
97.1The things the disciples could not bear are the common truths of faith as angels know them; the Spirit makes the mind grow in understanding of them, by God's gift.
97.2The foolish woman of Proverbs, offering hidden bread and stolen water, is the heretics' false promise of secret knowledge.
97.3Magic, divination, and the fables of heretics come from the same foolish boldness; heretics wrongly claim their inventions are what the disciples could not bear.
97.4Only profane novelties of words are condemned; new terms such as "Christian" and homoousion express old truths, unlike the heretics' promise of secret knowledge.
97.5Augustine raises the question whether spiritual teachers keep anything from the carnal, citing 1 Corinthians, and defers it.
98.1Augustine takes up the question whether spiritual teachers have doctrines they keep from the carnal.
98.2Christ crucified is the same teaching for all, milk to the carnal who believe it and solid food to the spiritual who understand it.
98.3There is no need for secret doctrines: the carnal and the spiritual hear the same Christ crucified, and grasp it in different measure.
98.4Solid food is the trained understanding that distinguishes good from evil; without the milk of faith the weak fall into fables like the Manichees', who make evil a substance.
98.5The spiritual do not hide the faith from the carnal but do not overload them; the milk of the faith is the basic teaching handed on in the Creed and the Lord's Prayer.
98.6Solid food does not contradict the milk of faith; the incarnate Wisdom became milk for little ones, and Christ crucified remains the foundation to which understanding is added.
98.7Believers must grow in understanding without abandoning the rule of faith, rejecting both those who deny Christ's humanity, the creation, or the Old Testament and those who know God truly yet turn from the one Mediator.
98.8What remained to be taught was to be added to, not to overturn, what the disciples had learned; the forged Apocalypse of Paul presumes to reveal what Paul said may not be spoken.
99.1The Son's "I cannot do anything of myself" is said as man; but the Holy Spirit took no creature into unity of person, so "he will not speak from himself" needs another explanation.
99.2The dove and the tongues of fire were passing signs made from creatures, not assumed into the Spirit's person; nor does God speak to his Word in passing syllables.
99.3God has no bodily senses in different places; seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching are in him one and the same knowing.
99.4In God, who is simple, knowing is being; so the Spirit "hears" from him from whom he proceeds, because he is not from himself, while remaining equal to the one from whom he is.
99.5Verbs of any tense may be used of the eternal God; the Spirit's hearing is eternal knowing, from him from whom he proceeds.
99.6The one Holy Spirit is the Spirit of both the Father and the Son, as Scripture calls him the Spirit of each.
99.7The Spirit is called Spirit properly as the communion of Father and Son; Christ's breathing on the disciples and the "power" going out from him show that the Spirit proceeds from the Son too.
99.8Christ says the Spirit proceeds from the Father because he refers to the Father what is his own; the Son has from the Father that the Spirit proceeds from him too.
99.9The Spirit is said to proceed, not to be born, since he would otherwise be the Son of two; he proceeds from both at once, the Father having given this to the Son.
100.1The Spirit glorified Christ by making the disciples spiritual and bold, so that his fame spread through the world; such glory benefits the world, not Christ.
100.2Glory is false when praisers err about the thing, the person, or both; even true glory benefits those who give it, not the one praised.
100.3Heretics and pagans who praise a false Christ do not give him true glory; true glory is given him by the Spirit only in the catholic church.
100.4"He will receive of mine" does not make the Spirit less than the Son; since all the Father's is the Son's, the Spirit receives from the Father as the Son does.
101.1The disciples could not understand "a little while"; it was soon made plain by Christ's death and resurrection.
101.2The disciples' sorrow at Christ's death turned to joy at his resurrection, while the world, his enemies, rejoiced at his death.
101.3The woman in labor pictures the disciples' sorrow turning to joy; their joy, Christ risen, can no longer be taken from them.
101.4"You will not ask me anything" is puzzling, since the risen Christ was both questioned and asked, as by Stephen.
101.5The joy no one will take away is the eternal vision of God, the fruit of contemplation to which all action is directed, which the church now travails to bring forth.
101.6The "little while" until we see Christ is the whole present age; Christ's going to the Father is why he is not now seen, and the church waits in joyful hope.
102.1To ask in Christ's name is to ask with a true understanding of him and for what serves salvation; such prayers are granted, at the proper time, for those who ask.
102.2Only what leads to full spiritual joy is truly asked in Christ's name; anything else asked is nothing by comparison.
102.3The promised hour of plain speech cannot simply be the age to come, since there will be no asking there, where all desire is satisfied.
102.4The promised plain speech is the spiritual understanding of God as incorporeal; the spiritual know that Christ as man intercedes for us and as God hears us with the Father.
102.5God's love comes first: our love for God is his gift, poured out by the Spirit of Father and Son.
102.6Christ came from the Father without leaving him, and returns to the Father without deserting the world he governs.
103.1The disciples thought Christ was already speaking plainly, though the promised hour had not come; as little ones they did not understand that they did not understand.
103.2Christ, who knew all things, needed no questions; he let himself be questioned for the sake of the questioners, and told the disciples that the Father was with him so they would not think he had left the Father.
103.3At Christ's arrest the disciples abandoned even their faith, but after receiving the Spirit they kept peace in him through persecution and overcame the world in him.
104.1Christ's whole discourse aimed at the disciples' peace in him, the end of all Christian life; the Spirit would make his proverbs plain to them.
104.2Christ prayed aloud to teach us; the hour of his passion came not by fate or the stars but by the ordering of God, who with the Father fixed all times.
104.3Christ's glorification is his resurrection, the reward of the humility of his passion; it was done in the form of a servant, while in the form of God his glory is eternal.
105.1The Son glorifies the Father by making him known to all nations through the preaching of his resurrection.
105.2The Son, given power over all flesh as man, glorifies the Father by making him known to all and giving them eternal life.
105.3Eternal life is knowing the one true God, the Trinity; the Son glorifies the Father by making him known, and God's highest glorification will be the full knowledge of him in eternal life.
105.4Christ says he has accomplished the work "given" him, showing grace, and speaks of his passion as done because he foreknew it certainly.
105.5Christ speaks of glorifying the Father as already done because it was certain in predestination; the Father glorifies the Son by seating him at his right hand, and the Son glorifies the Father by being preached to the nations.
105.6The glory Christ had before the world was is the glory predestined for his humanity; it does not mean that his human nature was converted into the Word.
105.7As we were chosen in Christ before the world, so the Father glorified Christ's humanity in predestination before the world was.
105.8Christ as man was predestined, as Rom 1:4 shows; the glory he had with the Father before the world was is the glory of his resurrection, predestined then and now fulfilled.
106.1If "I have made your name known" refers to the whole church of all nations, it is the glorification by which the Son glorifies the Father.
106.2John 17:6–12 refers to the apostles then present, whom Christ kept by his bodily presence; only afterward does he pray for all future believers.
106.3John 17:1–5 refers to all Christ's people, through whom the Father is glorified as he becomes known.
106.4The name Christ made known is God's name as Father of Christ; God as Creator is known to all nations, God as the one God was known in Judea.
106.5"They were yours, and you gave them to me" is said of Christ as man; as God he chose them with the Father, for Father and Son are equally almighty and have all things together.
106.6The disciples truly knew and believed only after receiving the Spirit; Christ speaks of their faith in the past tense as a prediction.
106.7As eternal Son, Christ received the Father's words not in time but by being begotten, for the Father speaks all things in his Word.
107.1Christ prays not for the world, those who live by worldly desire, but for those the Father has given him.
107.2The saints belong equally to the Father and the Son, showing that the Son is equal to the Father, unlike the elder son of the parable, to whom only lower creation belonged.
107.3Christ is glorified in the apostles when his glory becomes known through them; he speaks of it as done because it was predestined.
107.4"I am no longer in the world" refers to Christ's bodily departure soon to come, as one says of someone about to leave, "He is no longer here."
107.5Christ prays as man for his disciples, but "that they may be one as we are" shows that as God he is one in nature with the Father.
107.6Father and Son do not keep the disciples by turns; the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, keeps them together, though Scripture distinguishes the persons.
107.7Judas, the son of perdition, alone perished, as the psalm prophesied.
107.8Christ's joy, to be fulfilled in the disciples, is their being one as he and the Father are, the peace and blessedness of the age to come.
108.1The disciples are not of the world by rebirth from the Holy Spirit; Christ was never of the world, being born of the Spirit even in the form of a servant.
108.2"Sanctify them in the truth" asks for growth in holiness by grace; the truth is Christ himself, of whom the old sanctifications were shadows.
108.3"Your word is truth" means Christ, the Word (logos); the Father sanctifies his own in his only-begotten Son.
108.4As the Father sent the Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, the Son sends the apostles, "those sent", whom he cleansed from sin.
108.5Christ sanctifies himself for his members because head and body are one Christ; the man was sanctified in the Word at the incarnation, and his members are sanctified in him.
109.1Christ prayed for all who would ever believe through the apostles' word, including believers of later ages.
109.2Augustine raises the difficulty that many who had already believed, such as Nathanael, Joseph of Arimathea, Mary, and the crowds, seem left out of Christ's prayer.
109.3Those who seemed already to believe did not yet hold faith in the resurrection; they too came to true faith through the apostles' word and were included in Christ's prayer.
109.4Paul, taught by revelation, and the penitent thief, who believed when the apostles' faith failed, seem not to have believed through the apostles' word.
109.5"Their word" is the word of faith in Christ's resurrection, first entrusted to the apostles to preach; all believers, Paul and the thief included, believe through it.
110.1Christ asks that believers be one as he and the Father are one, but believers are one in their own nature, not of one substance with God; God dwells in them as in his temple.
110.2The unity and the faith Christ prays for are the same thing: the faithful world, reconciled to God, becomes one by believing, by God's grace.
110.3The glory given to the disciples is immortality, which Christ gives together with the Father, for the works of the Trinity are inseparable.
110.4"I in them and you in me" is said as mediator; "perfected into one" points to the final blessedness, when the world will know by sight what it now believes.
110.5The Father loves believers because they are members of the Son he loves; "as" here means "because", not equality.
110.6God's love is unchanging: he loved us before the world and before reconciliation, hating our sin while loving his own work in us.
110.7That Christ died for humans and not for fallen angels shows God's mercy, not human superiority; by grace, as members of Christ, we will be made equal to the holy angels.
111.1Christ's prayer that those given him by the Father may be with him is a sure promise, for the will of Father, Son and Spirit is one.
111.2To be with Christ means to be in heaven with the risen Christ and, beyond all bodily images, to see him as God, which the blessed alone enjoy.
111.3Seeing Christ's glory is the reward of faith reserved for the pure in heart; we shall be with Christ in the Father, a 'place' to be thought of without bodily images.
111.4Our life is already hidden with Christ in God by faith and will appear in glory, as God predestined before the world was made.
111.5The condemned world justly does not know God, while the reconciled world knows him by grace through Christ, the fountain of grace.
111.6Augustine explains the phrase 'the love with which you loved me' and says the Father's love for the Son is in us because we are the body of which Christ is the head.
112.1John's passion narrative begins; Augustine notes that the evangelists' accounts agree and that this question is treated elsewhere.
112.2Judas comes to the garden with a Roman cohort and temple officers, whose force Christ allows because he wills to suffer.
112.3At Christ's word 'I am he' the armed band falls back, showing that he is arrested only because he wills it.
112.4Christ obtains the release of his disciples, because they did not yet have the faith that would have kept them from perishing.
112.5Peter cuts off Malchus's ear; Augustine reads the healed ear as hearing renewed by Christ and notes that Christ himself chose the cup the Father gave.
112.6Those who seized and bound Jesus did not truly approach him, though some of them may later have been set free by him.
113.1Jesus is taken first to Annas, the father-in-law of the high priest Caiaphas, apparently at Caiaphas's wish.
113.2Peter, brought into the courtyard by another disciple, denies that he is Jesus's disciple, which Augustine treats as denying that he is a Christian.
113.3Augustine explains how Jesus could say he taught openly and said nothing in secret, though he spoke in figures and explained parables privately.
113.4Struck by an officer, Jesus answers truly and gently, showing that the command to turn the other cheek concerns the readiness of the heart.
113.5Augustine harmonizes Matthew and John, suggesting that Annas and Caiaphas held the high priesthood in alternate years.
113.6Peter denies Jesus a second and third time and the cock crows, as Jesus had foretold.
114.1John resumes the narrative with Jesus led to Caiaphas into the praetorium, which Augustine explains as the governor's residence.
114.2Those leading Jesus avoid the governor's residence to keep ritual purity for the Passover, while not fearing to shed innocent blood.
114.3The accusers call Jesus an evildoer, though all whom he healed and raised could testify otherwise.
114.4The accusers' claim that they may not put anyone to death does not clear them, for by their demand they killed Christ through Pilate.
114.5The fulfilled saying about Christ's death refers to his being handed over by the Jews to the Gentiles, not specifically to crucifixion.
115.1Pilate asks Jesus whether he is king of the Jews, and Jesus answers that his kingdom is not of this world, removing both Jewish and Gentile fears.
115.2Christ's kingdom, made up of those reborn in him, is in the world until the end but not from the world, so earthly rulers need not fear it.
115.3Jesus's answer 'You say that I am a king' neither denies his kingship nor accepts Pilate's worldly idea of it.
115.4Christ was born in time to bear witness to the truth, and those who are 'of the truth' hear him because grace has given them to believe, not by prior merit.
115.5Pilate asks 'What is truth?' and offers to release Jesus, but the crowd chooses Barabbas; through this the true Passover is fulfilled.
116.1Pilate has Jesus scourged and the soldiers mock him, by which Christ teaches the martyrs patience and conquers the world through suffering.
116.2Pilate shows the scourged and mocked Jesus to the crowd, hoping to satisfy their hatred, but it only grows.
116.3The accusers add the charge that Jesus made himself the Son of God; both this and his kingship are true, but he chooses patience.
116.4Jesus's silence before his judges fulfils the prophecy of the silent lamb, showing him innocent and sacrificed for others' sins.
116.5Jesus tells Pilate that his power is given from above and that the one who handed him over out of envy has the greater sin, though Pilate too sins.
116.6Pilate sought to release Jesus from the start, so as not to sin by killing an innocent man.
116.7The accusers threaten Pilate with Caesar's displeasure, a fear stronger than their appeal to their own law.
116.8Pilate sits in judgment and presents Jesus as their king, trying to shame the accusers, but fear soon overcomes him.
116.9Pilate hands Jesus over 'to be crucified' by his own authority, yet the evangelist rightly holds the accusers implicated in the deed.
117.1Augustine reconciles Mark's 'third hour' with John's 'sixth hour': Christ was crucified by the accusers' tongues at the third hour and by the soldiers' hands at the sixth.
117.2Augustine offers a second solution: John's 'sixth hour' counts from the start of the 'preparation' of Christ's sacrifice in the night, not from daybreak.
117.3Christ carries his cross, a mockery to the ungodly but a mystery to the godly, and is crucified between two robbers as prophesied.
117.4Pilate's title on the cross is written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the three leading languages of the place.
117.5Pilate refuses to change the title, and Augustine explains that Christ is king of the true Jews, the children of the promise, Gentiles included.
118.1The soldiers divide Christ's garments; Augustine holds that the accusers, by their plotting and shouting, are more truly the ones who crucified him.
118.2John alone explains that the soldiers divided the other garments into four equal parts and cast lots only for the seamless tunic, as the psalm foretold.
118.3Augustine shows that Matthew, Luke, and Mark agree with John about the casting of lots for the tunic.
118.4The four parts of Christ's garments figure the Church spread through the world, and the seamless tunic its unity in love, as Peter answered and received the keys in the name of all.
118.5Things done by evil men can signify good, as the cross does: its four dimensions figure love, perseverance, hope, and grace, and its sign is used in all the sacraments.
119.1From the cross Jesus entrusts his mother to the beloved disciple; this is the 'hour' he spoke of at Cana.
119.2By providing for his mother from the cross, Christ teaches children to care for their parents.
119.3John, who owned nothing, received Mary 'into his own' care, providing for her from what the community shared.
119.4Christ arranges even his sufferings, saying 'I thirst' to fulfil Scripture; the vinegar, sponge, and hyssop are given figurative meanings.
119.5The sponge was raised on a reed, which figures the Scripture being fulfilled; Christ knowingly made good come from evil deeds.
119.6Having fulfilled all that was foretold, Christ dies by his own will, showing a power that makes his coming judgment to be hoped for or feared.
120.1The accusers ask Pilate to have the legs of the crucified broken so that the bodies can be removed before the feast.
120.2The soldier 'opened' Christ's side, from which flowed blood and water, the sacraments of the Church, as Eve was formed from the side of the sleeping Adam.
120.3John's witness invites belief, and two Scriptures are fulfilled: no bone of the Passover lamb broken, and the pierced one to be looked upon at his coming.
120.4Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus bury Jesus according to Jewish custom; Augustine notes that Nicodemus became a disciple.
120.5Jesus is laid in a new tomb near the place of crucifixion, in haste before the day of preparation ended.
120.6Mary Magdalene finds the tomb open on the first day of the week, now called the Lord's day, and tells Peter and the beloved disciple.
120.7Peter and the beloved disciple run to the tomb; John, speaking of himself as of another, tells that he arrived first.
120.8The disciples see the grave cloths; Augustine believes they have meaning but passes on for lack of time.
120.9The beloved disciple 'saw and believed' Mary's report that the body had been taken, not yet the resurrection, which they did not yet understand.
121.1Mary stays weeping at the tomb and sees two angels, who in forbidding her tears announce the joy to come.
121.2Mary takes Jesus for the gardener until he calls her by name; turning in heart, she recognises him as Teacher.
121.3'Do not touch me' teaches Mary to believe in Christ as equal to the Father; God is his Father by nature and ours by grace.
121.4The risen Christ comes through closed doors, shows his wounds, breathes the Holy Spirit on the disciples, and gives the power to forgive and retain sins, which Augustine relates to the Church's love.
121.5Thomas sees the risen man and confesses him as God; Christ blesses those who believe without seeing, which points to the faith of the Gentiles.
122.1John's apparent conclusion serves as a preface to the appearance by the sea of Tiberias, whose catch of fish figures the Church at the last resurrection.
122.2Augustine asks why the apostles returned to fishing after the resurrection and the gift of the Spirit, when they had left everything to follow Christ.
122.3The apostles were free to earn their living by their trade, as Paul did, since living from the Gospel was a right and not a command.
122.4Christ himself provided the catch, letting want drive the disciples to fish so that he might feed them and reveal a mystery.
122.5The Gospel text of the miraculous catch of a hundred and fifty-three fish.
122.6The seven disciples and the shore signify the end of the age, as the parable of the net shows.
122.7The earlier catch (Luke 5) figures the present Church of good and bad, this one the Church of the good alone at the end of the age, in a fixed number.
122.8The number 153 is the sum of the numbers from one to seventeen, and seventeen is ten (the law) plus seven (the Spirit), so the fish signify all who belong to the grace of the Spirit.
122.9The large fish are those who do what they teach; those who teach but do not do will not enter the kingdom at the end.
123.1At the breakfast none of the disciples dared to ask who Jesus was, because the evidence was so clear that no one could doubt.
123.2The breakfast of roasted fish and bread figures Christ who suffered and the bread from heaven, to whom the Church is joined in everlasting blessedness.
123.3This is the 'third' appearance counted by days: the day of the resurrection, eight days later, and this day.
123.4Christ asks Peter three times whether he loves him, gives him his sheep to feed, and foretells his martyrdom, by which Peter fulfils his earlier rash promise.
123.5Feeding Christ's sheep is the duty of love for him, not of self-love; pastors must seek Christ's interests and, like Peter, be ready to die for the flock.
124.1Augustine asks why Peter is told 'Follow me' while John is to 'remain until I come', noting that John himself denies that Jesus said he would not die.
124.2Augustine reports the belief that John sleeps alive in his tomb at Ephesus, where the earth seems to breathe, and declines to argue against it.
124.3Even if the story about John's tomb were true it would not solve the question, and more probably John died like others; the question of Christ's words remains.
124.4Augustine poses the puzzle that Peter loved Christ more, while Christ loved John more.
124.5Peter, who bore the person of the Church, figures the present life of faith, action, and suffering, which follows Christ; John figures the future life of contemplation, which waits for his coming.
124.6Peter, loving more, figures our present love for God's mercy in our misery; John, loved more, figures the future contemplation of truth, which makes us blessed and for which we wait.
124.7Peter and John are not to be separated: the whole Church binds and looses sins and drinks the Gospel; John's virginity, held by some, fits the life without marriage that he signifies.
124.8The closing words of John's Gospel, that the world could not contain the books, are a hyperbole, a figure found elsewhere in Scripture.

About this work

Author: Augustine of Hippo
Attribution: authentic · Sermons preached at Hippo, taken down by stenographers and later revised; the tractates are numbered by the Benedictine editors.
Standing: Honoured by the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. Honoured as a saint or in a church calendar by: Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant.
Older English translation: Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, vol. 7 (1888) (public domain, at CCEL; for comparison: our translation is made from the original first and checked against it afterwards) · John Gibb and James Innes's translation; its tractate and section numbers follow Migne's.
Date: ca. 406–420 (approximate) · Tractates 1–54 are usually dated to about 406–407, the later tractates (55–124) to about 419–420; the dating is a scholarly estimate.
Written at: Hippo Regius, Africa Proconsularis (North Africa) (probable)
Language: Latin
Genre: homily
Reference system: tractate.section (124 tractates, each cited by Migne's section numbers, which the English translation in NPNF also uses; e.g. Tract. Ev. Jo. 26.13)
SBL abbreviation: Tract. Ev. Jo.Not yet checked
Text from: J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina, vol. 35 (Paris, 1841), cols. 1379–1976 (Benedictine text of the Maurists; Migne's footnotes, Gospel lemmata and paragraph numbers are not reproduced as text) (Printed edition (Migne, 1841-1842) in the public domain; digital text CC BY-SA 4.0)
Critical editions: Radbod Willems, Augustinus: In Iohannis evangelium tractatus CXXIV, CCSL 36 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954) (cited, not reproduced)

Tractates on the Gospel of John

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