Sermons 61–63

[On the same.] Were I not consoled by the sudden and unexpected conversion of blessed Paul (Acts 9), I would scarcely believe that you could be changed so easily from earthly stain to heavenly glory. For a sudden confession at once made him an apostle instead of a persecutor, and gave the church a distinguished teacher in the man it had found raging as the destroyer of the Christian name. No less am I encouraged by the example of that eunuch, whom faith carried off to grace before his chariot could carry him back to India and home (Acts 8). Add to this the wonderful proof given by the thief, who seized paradise at the very moment he was hung up to pay the penalty of his robbery (Luke 23). Therefore, little children, since you have so arranged the time of your regeneration that we cannot say what is necessary and you cannot hear what is fitting, entrusting faith to faith, we hand on briefly what we cannot commend at greater length. For how could you grasp the mystery of the Creed from our explanation, when you are scarcely able to hold the Creed itself in memory? This alone we urge: let no one entrust to letters what he is to commit to the heart in order to believe, as the Apostle urges: “With the heart one believes unto righteousness, but with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Rom 10:10). As you are about to hear the form of faith, the rule of belief, the order of confession, make ready the hearing of body and heart together. As a spring flowing from a narrow mouth is widened into the great waters of rivers, so the faith of the Creed, in a short discourse, opens the broadest channels of belief. And as a root fixed deep stretches upward into a lofty shoot, so faith, rooted in the depth of the breast, is raised to the lofty summit of belief. So purge from your hearts the mire of faithlessness, that the pure streams of faith may run through you; cut off at the root the thickets of unbelief within you, that the sturdy plantings of your belief may grow on high. And since, on the Apostle's authority, “with the heart one believes unto righteousness, with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Rom 10:10), give now to the voice of confession what your hearts already believe. “I believe in God the Father almighty.” Let him who believes in God not presume to examine God; it is enough to know that God is. He who asks whence God is, how great God is, what God is, does not know this. The sun darkens the gaze that presses on it; whoever approaches God without leave is blinded. Let him who wants to see God learn to keep to the measure of seeing him; let him who wants to know his God not know the gods of the nations; he who speaks of gods contradicts God. To serve one is freedom; to serve many is captivity. Believe that the God you have confessed is Father, so that, believing in the Father, you may learn that there is a Son; saying “Son”, you may recognize that he is begotten of the Father; recognizing him begotten of the Father, you may not ask how he was begotten, since you have said, “I believe in God the Father almighty.” The Almighty can do all things; and if he can do all things, who will deny that he has the Son in himself, from himself, and always with himself? The generation of God has no beginning, knows no end, admits no departure, since the Begotten continues to abide in the Begetter, as the Lord himself says: “I am in the Father, and the Father is in me” (John 10:38); “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). You have confessed the Father, you have confessed the Son, you have confessed the secret of the Godhead; now confess the mystery of the Lord's incarnation. “And in Christ Jesus his Son.” Christ is named from the heavenly anointing, for he is filled with the whole fullness of the Godhead; Jesus is a name from salvation, the name which everything in heaven and everything in the underworld confesses, trembling, on bended knee, with bowed head (Phil 2:10). “And in Christ Jesus his only Son, our Lord.” As the Godhead of Father and Son is one for us, so let the lordship be one for us. “Who was born of the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary.” The Spirit and a virgin are no earthly union but a heavenly secret; hence what is born is divine. That he was born, then, must be confessed; how he was born must be passed over in silence, because what is secret cannot be known, what is closed cannot be opened, what is unique is not explained by an example. “Who under Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried.” You hear the judge's name so that you may not be ignorant of the time; you hear “crucified” so that the manner of the death may be made known to you, and you may understand what he spent for you who for your sake underwent the penalty of so great a death. You hear “buried” so that you may know the death was not a pretence but real. Not wanting to die belongs to human fear; to have risen from death belongs to divine power. So let the mention of death not offend here, where the glory of the resurrection hides the injury of death. “On the third day he rose again.” For what dies belongs to the man; what rises belongs to the Trinity. “He ascended into heaven,” bearing the man to the place where he always remained. “He sits at the right hand of the Father.” He sits at the right hand because the Godhead has nothing on the left. “From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.” He will judge the living and the dead, because those will rise to judgment who are thought not to exist after death, whom paganism supposes to have perished with the world. “I believe in the Holy Spirit”: so that you may believe and understand that in Father and Son and Holy Spirit there is one Godhead. “I believe the holy church”: so that you may confess that the church, the bride of Christ, will remain in Christ's everlasting fellowship. “I believe the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the flesh.” Whoever does not believe the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the flesh takes pardon away from himself and himself withdraws life. What you have heard and believed, what you have confessed, let the heart hold and memory keep; let paper not know it and the writer be ignorant of it, so that the mystery of faith may not be spread abroad in public and the secret of faith may not pass to an unbeliever. May God, who has given you both to hear and to believe the mystery of faith, himself bring you to eternal salvation.

[On the same.] A loving nurse never brings a little child to perfect manhood unless he makes himself wholly a little child. So he thins his voice, lays words aside, acts by nods, sets aside his own good sense, softens his heart, throws off his strength, loosens his limbs, slows his step, is eager not to walk but to crawl; he pretends to laugh, feigns fear, makes a show of weeping, because in him falsehood is love, playing the fool is wisdom, weakness is strength. I think blessed Paul did this when he says: “I became a little one among you, as if a nurse were cherishing her children” (1 Thess 2:7). But perhaps someone is astonished to see a nurse doing these things: if he is a parent he does not laugh at it; if he is a father he does not wonder; whoever knows how to love cannot call this folly. So I beg you, who are already fathers, already strong, already wise, to allow me to pay to the little ones of my Lord the due services of nursing, and today to bring out words suited to coaxing rather than to skill; not to square off my discourse but to make it run, and to pour it like milk into throats still tender, as the Apostle teaches: “I gave you milk to drink, not solid food” (1 Cor 3:2); to change my voice, to love varied feelings, and, in short, to be occupied in mind, heart and body with the weak minds of little ones. But now, loving shoots of the church, I address you in the prophet's words: “Come, children, listen to me” (Ps 34:11); or rather, through me and through my voice, listen to the commands of your true Father, because God calls you by my mouth. “Come, children.” Come where? And to what? “The fear of the Lord,” it says, “I will teach you.” And who comes to fear? He who wants life, he who longs to see good days; he who wants to do good and flee evil; he who, after the conflict of flesh and spirit, longs to obtain the rest of divine peace. “Come, children, listen to me: the fear of the Lord,” it says, “I will teach you. Who is the man who wants life and longs to see good days? Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit.” As crimes corrupt the conscience, so deceit pollutes the lips and curses defile the tongue; and so one defiled in lips and tongue cannot confess God. And since “with the heart one believes unto righteousness, but with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Rom 10:10), sanctify your hearts, cleanse your lips, make your tongue righteous, so that the voice that carries the faith may come forth from a pure breast as a full example of holiness. Sign yourselves. An agreement or compact containing the hope of gain, present or future, is called a symbolum: even human contracts teach us this. Yet among men a written document made in duplicate always confirms the symbolum between two parties, and human caution makes it secure by a stipulation, lest bad faith, always the enemy of contracts, steal up on anyone or deceive anyone. But this is among men, among whom fraud always does harm, either to the one who commits it or to the one against whom it is committed. Between God and men, however, the symbol of faith is confirmed by faith alone: credit is given not to letters but to the spirit, and it is committed to the heart, not to paper, because what God lends needs no human security. God does not know how to commit fraud and cannot suffer it, because he is not shut out by time, not overcome by age, not deceived by concealment; he sees what is hidden, holds what is stolen, possesses what is denied. God's account is always safe, because what he has lent has nowhere to be lost; and if it is lost when a man, not God, denies it, it is lost to the one who denies, not to the lender. But you say: He who cannot be deceived, why does he demand an agreement? Why does he seek a symbol? He seeks it for your sake, not for his own; not because he doubts, but so that you may believe. He seeks a symbol because, having come to your lot, he does not disdain to come to your contract; he seeks a symbol because, though he always lends everything himself, he wants to be owed; he seeks a symbol because he now calls you not to the thing itself but to faith, and by a present agreement draws you toward the future and invites you to gain. The Apostle recalls this when he says: “From faith to faith” (Rom 1:17); and elsewhere: “The righteous lives by faith” (Heb 10:38). So let no one be unmindful of the Creed, let no one forget the agreement made with God; let no one, having only now received faith, demand the thing itself; let no one, having come to hope, complain that he does not at once receive what he hopes for. Hear the Apostle saying: “In hope we have been saved; but hope that is seen is not hope; for what someone sees, why does he hope for it? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom 8:24–25). Hope stretches toward things to come; faith carries us over to the things promised; when the realities come and the promises arrive, hope ends and faith ceases. A letter is sweet, but only until the one who sent it comes himself; a bond is necessary, but only until the debt is paid; flowers are pleasing, but only until the fruit comes. Presence cancels the letter, payment breaks the bond, the flowers are consumed by the fruit. And so know that you are now designated by faith a son of the heavenly Father, an heir of God, a co-heir of Christ, a sharer in the heavenly kingdom, a confessor of the divine Judge, a citizen of heaven, an owner of paradise; know that you are now promoted in hope, not in reality. So receive the faith, hold fast to hope, say the Creed, that you may come to the reality and to those good things we spoke of. Sign yourselves. Today, O man, your soul has been presented to God. “I believe in God.” For a long time it spoke of God but did not know him, called on God but was ignorant of him; ignorant indeed, since it sought him in this way through stones and wood. Let it now say, then, let it say: “I believe in God the Father almighty.” For a long time, while it saw stones, it did not see in whom to believe; but he is truly God who has granted you to see by not seeing, whereas the gods of the nations, by being seen, had made you not see. Hear the Lord saying: “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind” (John 9:39). “I believe in God the Father.” There is fatherly love in God, affection is always in God, fatherhood abides with him; so believe that the Son always existed, lest you blaspheme that the Father did not always exist. But you say: If he begot, how did he always have him? How did he beget? You who ask in this way deny the faith you profess. You said, “I believe”; if you believe, where does “how” come from? “How” is the word of one who doubts, not of one who believes. You said, “I believe in God the Father almighty”; if there is anything he cannot do, he is not almighty. But you think he begot the Son from something, he whom you confess made everything from nothing; from something indeed, if from time. But if the Father is not contained by time, the Son knows no beginning. How wretched, that you should make him temporal who has granted you to be everlasting! Not by a conception in time, not by suffering in the womb, does the Father beget the Son, but while he reveals him to us. “And in Christ Jesus his only Son, our Lord.” Notice, O man, with what reverence the faith is instilled and handed on to you. Hear “the Father,” so that you may perceive, understand and believe the Son, not examine him; and confess that he is, without inquiring as a rash investigator whence and when and how he is. That is why the heavenly word, as soon as it has announced the Father, sends you with your whole mind to Christ, to Jesus, to the Son, to the only one, our Lord: so that when you see that you cannot attain, estimate or grasp even the human things about him, you may not dare to touch the divine. “Who was born of the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary.” Come, O man, if indeed you are a man: go forward in your heart, rise up in your mind, broaden your senses, sharpen the edge of your wit, rouse the powers of your knowledge; whatever reason is in you, wake it up, examine, discuss, search out; and now, though astonished, explain on your own what it means that the Spirit begets, a Virgin conceives, a Virgin gives birth, and remains a virgin after giving birth; how the Word becomes flesh, God becomes man, man is carried over into God; how a cradle holds him whom heaven does not hold; how he who sustains the whole world is carried on shoulders; why he who made all things, established the universe and governs everything, willed to be born of you, to be guided by you, and arranged to be nursed, so as to live with you as his parent, on whose servile state he had earlier looked down. And if you can reach this from the treasury of the Godhead and bring it out from the secret of the deity, then go further in, climb higher, gaze more freely, and then, as a new explorer, a unique discoverer, a betrayer of the Godhead, set out the times of the Father and the beginnings of the Son. Be greater than Isaiah, who said: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer, without a voice, so he did not open his mouth; in humiliation his judgment was taken away; who will tell his generation?” (Isa 53:7–8). Whose? The generation of him who was led like a sheep to the slaughter. If Christ's generation, whether human or divine, took place, and if how he is begotten cannot be told, what wave, O man, what billows have carried you to this shipwreck? What wind drove you to fly through the air to your ruin? Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one Godhead, one power, one eternity, one majesty; whatever the Son is lessened in, receives, or grows in belongs to my body, not to his own substance. Or are you amazed, O man, that he who deigns to have a mother on earth calls on a Father in heaven? “Who under Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried.” Why, O man, do you accuse him, who in himself is equal to the Father, in this alone, that he willed to be less in you? You hear that he stood while Pilate sat, that he was judged while Pilate examined him; why do you take hold of this alone, that he was handed over to criminal accusers and condemned by the sentence of a guilty man? But he willed to be born of your flesh, willed to be busy at your breasts, to lie on your bosom, willed to be carried on your shoulders, he who always wished to be loved by you, not feared. Ask what he commanded first in the law, and then you will see what he sought in grace. The Lord, asked, as the evangelist said, what was the first commandment in the law, said: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matt 22:37). That is why he came to your heart and to your mind, because from the beginning he sought to be loved by you with soul, heart and body. “Who under Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried.” Thus far the Jew; the heretic follows. Let him wait: let none of those who feed and fatten on insults to Christ approach their former things. But you, little children, listen, so that after the passion of death you may drive away the grief of burial with the joys of the resurrection. “On the third day he rose again,” so that the resurrection of our body might be the power, grace and gift of the Trinity. “He ascended into heaven”: through what is mine, he who in himself was never absent from heaven. “He sits at the right hand of the Father”: by the order of divine power, not of human honour. We have said that the Son sits at the right hand in such a way that the Father never sits at the left. “From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.” And what does the dead man owe to the judge? That is why he rises: so that he may owe. “I believe in the Holy Spirit.” He who denies the Holy Spirit denies the one in whom he believes. “In the holy church.” For the church is in Christ, and Christ is in the church; so he who professes the church has confessed that he believed in the church. “The forgiveness of sins.” Grant yourself pardon by believing, O man, you who slid into all sins by despairing. “The resurrection of the flesh.” This is the whole lesson of faith: that you believe that flesh which has been corrupted, which has rotted, which has perished, can rise again, be fitted together again, and return through God, whom you swore can do all things when you confessed him almighty. “Eternal life.” He rightly added “eternal life,” so that one who will rise through him might believe that he will rise; through him who with God the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, now and always, and through the immortal ages of ages. Amen.

[On Lazarus raised from the dead.] After the apostolic reading, as we wished to return to the mighty works of the Gospel, at once Lazarus meets us, returned from the underworld, bringing the pattern of death conquered, carrying the example of resurrection. So, if you please, before we enter the open sea of the reading, before we take on the billows of the question, before we penetrate the depth of such a deed, let us contemplate the sight of the resurrection itself; for we see that this is the sign of signs, we discern that it is the mighty work of mighty works, we perceive it to be the wonder of wonders. The Lord had raised the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, but while the body was still warm, while death was still halfway, while the body was still present, while the person still lingered among people, while the spirit was still on its way, while the soul did not yet know the bars of Tartarus; in short, he gave life back to the dead girl in such a way that the underworld's right remained intact. He also raised the only son of his mother, but in such a way as to stop the bier, anticipate the grave, suspend corruption and forestall the stench, giving life back to the dead man before, wholly dead, he had entered the domain of death. But what is done concerning Lazarus is wholly unique; his death and his resurrection have nothing in common with those just mentioned. In his case the whole force of death was fulfilled, and the full form of resurrection shines out. I dare to say that if Lazarus had returned from the underworld on the third day, he would have snatched away the whole mystery of the Lord's resurrection; for Christ returned after three days as Lord, while Lazarus is called back after four days as servant. But to prove what we have said, let us now taste something of the reading. “His sisters,” it says, “sent to the Lord, saying: ‘Lord, behold, the one you love is sick.’” Speaking thus, they knock at his affection, appeal to his love, call on his charity; they try to remove one need by the claim of kinship. But Christ, for whom it is more to conquer death than to remove illness, and whose love consists not in relieving the beloved but in bringing him back from the underworld, at once prepared for his beloved not a remedy for illness but the glory of resurrection. Then, “when he heard that Lazarus was sick,” as the Evangelist says, “he stayed in the same place two days.” You see how he gives place to death, gives licence to the grave, allows corruption its power, denies nothing to decay, nothing to stench; he allows Tartarus to seize, drag off and hold; he acts so that all human hope perishes and the whole force of worldly despair arrives, so that what he is about to do may be divine, not human. He stays in the place awaiting the death so long that he himself announces the death, and only then announces that he is going to Lazarus. “Lazarus is dead, and I am glad.” Is this what it is to have loved? Christ was glad, because the grief of death was soon to be turned into the joy of resurrection. “And I am glad for your sake.” Why “for your sake”? Because in the death and resurrection of Lazarus the whole figure of the Lord's death and resurrection was being painted, and what was soon to follow in the Lord was already going before in the servant. He had said to his disciples once and again: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death and hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and scourged and crucified” (Matt 20:18–19). And as he said this he saw them become very doubtful, very sad, quite cut off from consolation; and he knew that they would be so crushed by the very weight of the passion that nothing of life, nothing of faith, nothing of light could remain in them, but they would be darkened by almost the whole night of faithlessness. And so he extended the death of Lazarus to the space of four days and let it prevail until the stench, so that the disciples might have no doubt that the Lord could rise after three days while still fresh, when they had seen the servant rise after four days, already stinking; and that they might believe that he could easily give life back to himself who had called another back to life in this way. That is why he says: “I am glad for your sake, that you may believe.” The death of Lazarus was necessary, then, so that the disciples' buried faith might rise along with Lazarus. “Because I was not there.” Was there a place where Christ was not? And how was he not there, when from where he was he announced to the disciples that Lazarus was dead? Brothers, Christ as God was there, but Christ as man was not there. Christ as God was there when Lazarus died; but Christ was to come to the dead man now, when Christ the Lord was about to undergo death. So he said, “Because I was not there”: that is, in death, in the tomb, in the underworld, where through me and my death the whole power of death is to be overthrown. “Martha,” it says, “when she heard that Jesus had come, ran to meet him, saying: ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’” Woman, you confess him to be God, and you say “if you had been here”? Places do not make God absent, nor do times make him present. Lazarus would not have died if the Lord had been there, who was there; that is, if you, woman, had not been in paradise. Woman, you sought tears, you found groans, you bought death at the price of gluttony, and do you accuse God's absence, when you do not deny that your presence was the cause of death? When death was procured by you, then it was matter for lamentation; but now it has become an occasion for power, because then it was given as a penalty to the sinner, now it is permitted for the glory of the one who raises; then Tartarus found man, now it loses him. But now, woman, seek through faith what you lost through faithlessness. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died; but even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” This woman does not believe but tries to believe; her unbelief confuses her belief. “Whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” God gives from himself; he does not ask of himself. Why do you bring in delays of supplication, woman, when he who is about to grant it stands beside you? Woman, the one you want as advocate is himself the judge; in this there is the power of the giver, not the need of one who asks. “I know,” she says, “that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” Woman, to believe this is not to believe; to know this is not to know. The Apostle proved it: when a man thinks he knows something, then he does not know (1 Cor 8:2). But now let us hear what the Lord answered. “Your brother will rise.” And the woman: “I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.” Martha, again you know what you do not know: you know that your brother can rise on the last day, but you do not know that he can rise here too. Or perhaps God, who can then raise all, cannot now raise one dead man? He can, he can: God can raise one dead man as a temporal sign, he who will then raise all the dead to everlasting life. “I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you, and I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.” Martha, the resurrection you send so far off stands before you: “I am,” he says, “the resurrection.” And why “I am the resurrection,” and not “I raise”? Why? Because he took on man, he took on death, so that he who raises one by commanding may raise all by rising in himself; so that for those to whom Adam was the pit of death, Christ may be the spring of life; and so that the Apostle's word may be fulfilled: “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor 15:22). “I am,” he says, “the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he has died, will live; and everyone who lives and believes in me will not die for ever. Do you believe this?” And the woman: “Yes, Lord, I have believed and I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, who came into this world.” He had come to Lazarus; why is he so taken up with Martha? Why? So that she might rise in faith before he was raised in the flesh. So acts the one who came to provide for both the living and the dead; nor does he fear delays in acting, since the power and the accomplishment of the deed remain with him. Brothers, bear with having the word put off today, if you wish to hear more fully what follows.