Homilies on the Psalms 114.1–114.2

Long ago you took possession of this sacred shrine of the martyrs, and from midnight you have been propitiating the God of the martyrs with hymns, and you have held out until this midday, awaiting our arrival. For you, who put the honor of the martyrs and the worship of God before sleep and rest, the reward is ready. But if we too must make a defense for ourselves, for our delay and our long absence from you, we will tell the reason: that we were ministering to another church of God, equal in honor to this one, separated from you by no small distance, and spent this time of the day there. Since, then, the Lord has granted us both to complete the liturgy for them and not to miss your love, give thanks with us to the benefactor, who guides by his invisible power this visible weakness of our body. So that we may not grieve you by keeping you longer, we will speak briefly on the psalm we found being sung to you, and, having fed your souls with the word of encouragement according to the power we have, we will let each of you go to the care of the body. What, then, was being sung? “I have loved,” he says, “because the Lord will hear the voice of my supplication.” It is not for everyone to say “I have loved,” but for one who is already being made perfect, who has gone beyond the fear of slavery and has come to be in the spirit of adoption. Now “whom” is not added to “I have loved”; but it is understood by us: God, the God of all. For what is properly lovable is God, since they define the lovable as that which all things desire. And God is good, the first and most perfect of goods. I have loved God himself, then, the ultimate of all things to be desired, and I have accepted with joy the sufferings for his sake. What these are, he goes through a little later: the pangs of death, the dangers of Hades, affliction, pain, all of which seemed lovable to him because of his love for God and the hope laid up for those who accept sufferings for the sake of piety. For I did not endure the contests against my will, he says, or by force and under compulsion, but I accepted the toils with a kind of affection and disposition, so that I can say, “For your sake we are put to death all the day long.” And this seems to be equivalent to the words of the Apostle, and to be said from the same disposition as his: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Affliction, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?” I have loved all these, then, knowing that it is with the Master of all as spectator and judge of the games that I bear the dangers for the sake of piety. “Because the Lord will hear the voice of my supplication.” For so each of us too can carry through what is toilsome in the commandments, when he displays his way of life as if God, the God of all, were watching.

“Because he inclined his ear to me.” “He inclined,” he said, not so that you should take a bodily idea about God, as having ears and bending them to a quiet voice, as we do with those … [inclining our] hearing, so as to catch what is spoken from close by; but he said “He inclined” to show his own weakness: that he came down to me lying on the ground, out of love for mankind; as, when a sick man from great weakness cannot even speak clearly, … hearing, he may learn from close by what the sufferer needs. “He inclined his ear to me,” then. For divine hearing does not need a voice to perceive; it knows how to recognize what is sought even in the movement of the heart. Or do you not hear that Moses, saying nothing, but pleading with the Lord by his unspoken groanings, was heard by the Lord, who said, “Why do you cry to me?” God knows how to hear even the blood of a righteous man, which has no tongue and no voice passing through the air. The presence of righteous works is a loud voice before God. “And in my days I will call upon him.” We, when we have prayed on one day, or for one hour have been a little downcast over our sins, … as though we had already done something to match our wickedness. But the saint says that he shows his confession measured out over the whole time of his life. “For in my days,” … not because, prospering in this life and with all his affairs going smoothly, he called upon God; he tells the greatness of the troubles in which he did not forget the name of God. “For the pangs of death surrounded me,” he says, “the dangers of Hades found me.” Properly, pangs are said of the pains in childbirth, when the belly, swelling to its bulk, pushes the infant outward; then the parts of generation are pressed, and the sinews …, cause the sharpest pains and bitter anguish to those giving birth. And he has transferred the pangs to death as well, those that beset a living creature in the separation of soul and body. He says, then, that he suffered nothing moderate, but experienced even the very pangs of death and came to the danger of going down to Hades. Did he suffer only these things in which he takes pride? Or were these often involuntary? But nothing done under compulsion is praiseworthy. But see the greatness of the athlete. For since “the pangs of death surrounded me and the dangers of Hades found me,” I was so far from succumbing to these trials that I offered myself willingly to many more trials than these. Affliction and pain I sought out for myself as one acting willingly; I was not caught by them against my will. For in the earlier words it is “the dangers of Hades found me”; but here, “I found affliction and pain.” For since there I was found unyielding toward what the tempter brought on, I added affliction to affliction and pain to pain, to show the abundance of my love toward God; not rising up against the pains by my own power, but because I called on the name of the Lord. Such is also the Apostle's word: “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” For he conquers who does not give in to what is brought on by necessity; but he is more than a conqueror who of his own choice draws pains on himself to show his endurance. Let the one who has fallen into some sin unto death say, “The pangs of death surrounded me.” “For everyone who does sin,” it says, “is born of the devil.” When then I was, he says, a worker of sin, and … of the dangers of Hades. How then did I heal myself? Because I found affliction and pain, the affliction that comes through repentance. For I devised for myself the hardship of repentance in proportion to the greatness of the sin, and so I dared to call on the name of the Lord. And what were the words I said? “O Lord, deliver my soul.” I am held in this captivity; you give the ransom for me, and deliver my soul. “The Lord is merciful and righteous.” Everywhere Scripture joins righteousness to the compassions of God, teaching us that neither is God's mercy without judgment, nor his judgment without mercy. But in having mercy he measures out his compassions with judgment to the worthy; and in judging he brings judgment with an eye to our weakness, repaying us with love for mankind rather than with an equal measure. “And our God has mercy.” Mercy is a feeling toward those brought low beyond what they deserve, arising in those who are sympathetically disposed. We pity the one who has fallen from great wealth into extreme poverty, the one cast down from the height of bodily health into extreme weakness, the one who took pride in the beauty and bloom of his body and has been ruined by the most shameful passions. Since, then, we too were once glorious in the life of paradise, but became inglorious and lowly through the fall, “our God has mercy,” seeing what we have become in place of what we were. That is why he called Adam back with the voice of mercy, saying, “Adam, where are you?” For he who knows all things was not seeking to be informed, but wished him to understand what he had become in place of what he was. “Where are you?” instead of, “Into what a fall have you come down from so great a height?” “[The Lord guards the little ones;] I was humbled, and he saved me.” Either according to the natural account: human nature would not have survived if the very young and still infants were not guarded by the Lord. For how could what is carried in the womb be nourished or move in such narrow places, which have no room to turn, living in dark and wet places, neither able to breathe nor to live the life of men, but carried in the fluids like fish, unless it were held together by God's guarding? And how, falling out into this unfamiliar place, and chilled by the air after the warmth of the womb, would it have lasted even a short time, if it were not preserved by God? So the Lord guards the little ones: “I was humbled, and he saved me.” Or you may also understand the word thus: since I turned and became like the infant, and received the kingdom of heaven as a child, and brought myself down through innocence to the humility of children, “the Lord, who guards the little ones,” … “since I was humbled, saved me.” “Return, my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has done you good.” The good athlete addresses words of encouragement to himself, like Paul saying, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness.” The prophet too says this to himself: since you have sufficiently completed the long course of this life, “return” now “to your rest, for the Lord has done you good.” For eternal rest awaits those who have lawfully contended through the life here, not as a debt owed for their works, … of God, given to those who have hoped in him. Then, before telling of the good things there, describing the escape from the troubles of the world, he gives thanks for them to the liberator of souls, who delivers him from the varied and inexorable slavery of the passions. And what are these? “That he has delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from slipping.” By comparison with things here he describes the rest to come. Here, he says, “the pangs of death surrounded me”; there “he has delivered my soul from death.” Here the eyes shed the tear that comes from affliction; there no longer any tear darkens the pupils of those who rejoice in the contemplation of the beauty of God's glory. For “God has taken away every tear from every face.” Here the danger of slipping is great; that is why Paul too said, “Let the one who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.” But there the steps are firm, the life unchangeable; no longer is there danger of being carried into sin. For there is neither rebellion of the flesh nor a woman's cooperation toward sin. For there is no male and female in the resurrection, but one life of a single kind, of those who are pleasing to their Master, who dwell in the land of the living. This world is itself mortal and a place of the dying. For since the constitution of visible things is composite, and every composite thing naturally dissolves, we who are in the world share the nature of the whole. That is why, even before the soul is separated from the body by death, human beings die many times. And do not let what is said seem strange to you, but consider the truth of the matter. In three weeks of years a human being naturally undergoes three alterations and changes of age and of life, and at each week there is its own boundary marking off what is past and providing a clear transformation. The age of the infant is bounded by the loss of the teeth in the first week. The term of the boy, now fit for learning, runs until adolescence. The adolescent, completed up to the twenty-first year, when he begins to shade his cheeks with down, disappears unnoticed, as the youth changes into the man. When, then, you see a man who has put away the growth of his age and is now settled in his reasoning, and bears no trace of youth, will you not reckon that the past has died in him? Again, the old man, adapted to another shape and disposition of soul, is clearly another person than his earlier selves. So the life of human beings is naturally completed through many deaths, not only in the change of age but also in the falls of souls through sin. But where there is no alteration of body or soul (for there is no turning aside of reasoning, no change of mind, no circumstance taking away the stability and calm of the reasonings), that is truly the land of the living, of those who are always like themselves. In it above all the prophet promises that he will be pleasing to the God of all, as one who is not going to be interrupted by anything outside in his aim of the true service equal in honor to that of the angels. “We make it our ambition,” it says, “whether at home in the body or away from the body, to be pleasing to him.” That land is of the living, in which there is no night, no sleep, the image of death; in which there is no eating, no drinking, the props of our weakness; no sickness, no pains, no medicine, no law courts, no trading, no crafts, no money, the beginning of evils, the occasion of wars, the root of enmity; but a land of the living, not of those who die through sin, but of those who live the true life in Christ Jesus, to whom be glory and power to the ages of ages. Amen.