Sermons 94–97

[On the same, and on the Pharisee's grumbling and Christ's answer.] In the last sermon we went through the first part of today's reading, and together we wondered with what fervour, what faith, what daring and what novelty of service the sinful woman touched the very footsteps of the Saviour; now let us hear what the Pharisee said in silence, and what Christ, to whom silent things speak, answered. “When the Pharisee who had invited him saw it,” it says, “he said within himself: If this man were a prophet, he would surely know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him” (Luke 7:39). Pharisee, what you see is not ignorance but power; it belongs to divine judgment, not to human error. Pharisee, you are wrong: had he been a prophet, he could have known less, because prophecy is not a matter of human choice but of divine gift; so a prophet knows not as much as he wishes, but as much as he who grants prophecy has given. “If this man were a prophet, he would surely know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him.” The touch of a bad woman burns one with a bad conscience, defiles one like her, brands one already suspected, disgraces a man of bad will; but the sinful woman becomes good, becomes holy, becomes innocent, when she has touched the giver of pardon. Dung touches the sun but does not defile it. When wounds touch the physician, the pus does not pollute him. Though a guilty man touches the judge, he cannot stain him when he supplicates. So when a sinner touches the Lord, he does not soil the Lord; rather he himself is freed of all sin and suddenly seizes holiness. The woman with the flow of blood proves this: when she touched the Lord's fringe, she did not defile the fringe, but was herself at once freed from the defilement of her long affliction (Matt 9:20–22). “If this man were a prophet, he would surely know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him.” The Pharisee would believe Christ a prophet if he saw that he knew things exposed to the eyes and known to the people. What do you think he will believe when he presently learns that Christ is the arbiter of his mind, the judge of his heart, the witness of his conscience, the examiner of his thoughts? Do you think he will even then confess him as God, when now, after so many mighty works, he does not judge him even a teacher? “If this man were a prophet, he would surely know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him.” The woman had a wound; she knew it, and so she sought out the physician of so great a wound in this way; the Pharisee, wounded with the disease of faithlessness and feverish with the flame of pride, in his frenzy did not know that he was mad. That is why Christ turned his care first to the place where an unrecognized infirmity was raging, so that the heavenly physician might heal two patients with one medicine. “When the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said within himself.” Because the Pharisee had thought within himself, Christ answered him aloud; and by laying open the secret of the Pharisee's heart he shows that he himself was the author of all prophecy. “Jesus answered,” it says, “and said: Simon, I have something to say to you.” To you, who need medicine and do not know how to seek medicine; to you, who call God teacher and abandon God's teaching. Do you not know that he does great injury to a teacher who professes himself the disciple of one whose instruction he does not follow? For as a disciple's uprightness is the praise of the teacher, so a disciple who does not know the teaching is a reproach to the teacher. “Simon, I have something to say to you. He answered: Teacher, say it.” Again “Teacher, say it,” and not “God, say it.” Even now, now he senses God, whom he calls teacher. “A certain creditor,” he says, “had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they had nothing with which to pay, he forgave them both. Which of them, then, will love him more? Simon answered: I suppose the one to whom he forgave more. And the Lord: You have judged rightly.” You have heard how the heavenly creditor offsets the whole debt with love, and for the increase on the whole loan demands and requires the interest of love alone. Deserving punishment is the debtor who neglects to redeem his bond by love alone. Do you want to know, O man, what you owe God? That you were made is God's loan; that you are capable of reason is God's interest; that you possess the discernment of evil and good, you have received; and that you have received the rule of living by the bond of the law, you cannot deny that you pledged to God who stipulated it. But while you plunge yourself through the vices of the flesh into the mud like a pig, and, living like a four-footed beast, deprive yourself of the reason with which you were endowed, and, having lost the discernment of good and evil, confuse them in the whirlpool of crimes, and squander the substance of the divine law, captive to worldly pleasure, you have become the mournful debtor of a glorious loan, and as the profits of the virtues fail, the interest of crimes is multiplied against you. But though you have fallen in this matter, though you have rolled down into this, see that you do not despair: O man, there remains to you the means of satisfying your most loving creditor. Do you want to be acquitted? Love. “Charity will cover a multitude of sins” (1 Pet 4:8). What is worse than the crime of denial? And yet Peter was able to blot it out by love alone, as the Lord proves when he says: “Peter, do you love me?” (John 21:15). Among all God's precepts love holds the first place: “You shall love,” he says, “the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). So love God, O man, and love him wholly, so that you may overcome everything and blot out your sins without labour. It belongs to a tender warfare and a gentle combat to win the victory over all crimes by love alone, as becomes clear from what follows. “Turning,” it says, “to the woman, he said to Simon.” Why does Christ, turned toward the woman, speak to Simon? Because while he looks at the penitent he rebukes the one who barks. “He said to Simon: Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore I tell you, her many sins are forgiven her, because she loved much; but the one to whom less is forgiven loves less.” It is proved that love blots out and washes away all sins. But what does he mean when he says, “The one to whom less is forgiven loves less”? Is it enough, then, to sin so that greater charity may be obtained? Far from it. Charity helps with past sins; it does not free us for future ones. Charity does not know how to sin while it loves; charity is not charity if it offends; the charity of God is the guardian of holiness. Brothers, if we know that we are sinners and do not wish to be sinners, let us give tears to Christ's feet, spread out our hair, press kisses, pour out the oil of devotion with all our heart, so that it may be said to us: “Your many sins are forgiven you, because you have loved much.” Let us imitate this woman, whom we see not only to have been freed from her sins but to have reached the very summit of holiness. But who this woman is, since today's sermon on charity has delayed us, we shall disclose in what follows, as we have already promised, God being our guide.

[On the same, where it treats of Magdalene's conversion allegorically.] All the things reported as done bodily by Christ are so firmly grounded in historical truth that they are always shown to be full of heavenly mysteries. And since we have already touched in two sermons on what lay on the surface of the reading, pray that, as we promised, we may disclose its inner meaning, with the Holy Spirit revealing it. That speech is unworthy which sets out God's deeds by human exposition alone. “A certain Pharisee,” it says, “asked the Lord to eat with him” (Luke 7:36). The Pharisee, brothers, is called the catholic of the Jews; for he believes in the resurrection and disagrees with the Sadducee who denies the resurrection. That is why he asks Christ, that is, the author of the resurrection, to eat with him: because he who lives with Christ does not know how to die, but surely lives for ever. “He asked the Lord to eat with him.” You ask, Pharisee, to eat with him: believe, become a Christian, so that you may eat of him. “I am,” he says, “the bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:41). God always grants more than he is asked; for he gave himself to be eaten, he who was asked to grant the confidence of eating with him; and yet he gave this in such a way as not to deny what he was asked. Does he not also promise this of his own accord to his disciples? “You who have stayed with me will eat and drink at my table in my kingdom” (Luke 22:28–30). Christian, he who gave himself here to be eaten by you, what of his own can he deny you in the future? And he who prepared such provision for your journey as your food, what has he not prepared for you in that everlasting dwelling? “You will eat at my table in my kingdom.” You have heard of God's banquet; do not be anxious about the quality of the banquet. He who deserves to come to the king's table will eat whatever the lordship and power of the kingdom possesses; so he who comes to the Creator's banquet will have among his delights whatever is contained in creation. But let us return to our subject. “And entering the Pharisee's house.” What house? He entered the synagogue, surely, and reclined. In the synagogue, brothers, Christ reclined when he lay down in death; but he passed his body on to the church's table, so that the heavenly flesh might be for the salvation of the nations who would eat it. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you” (John 6:53). How the flesh of Christ is eaten and his blood drunk, those there know who have been instructed in the heavenly sacraments. “Behold,” it says, “a woman who was a sinner in the city.” What woman? The church, without doubt. “A sinner in the city.” What city? The one of which the prophet had said: “How has the faithful city Zion become a harlot?” (Isa 1:21). And elsewhere: “I have seen iniquity and contradiction in the city; iniquity and toil are in its midst, and injustice; and usury and deceit have not departed from its streets” (Ps 55:9–11). So in the city of faithlessness, enclosed by walls, fortified with the towers of pride, laid out in streets of iniquities, barred with gates of contradictions, painted with the cosmetics of deceit, hardened with the flints of usury, weighed down with the sorrows of business, disgraced by brothels, that is, by temples of idols, this woman, that is, the church, was carrying the heaviest guilt from so great a filth of earlier sins. But she heard that Christ had come to the Pharisee's house, that is, to the synagogue; that there, that is, at the Jewish Passover, he had handed over the mysteries of his passion, opened the sacrament of his body and blood, and made manifest the secret of our redemption, despising the scribes as the worst of doorkeepers: “Woe to you lawyers, who have taken away the key of knowledge” (Luke 11:52). So she broke through the doors of contradictions, despised the very leadership of the Pharisaic band, and, burning, panting, seething, reached the innermost room of the banquet of the law; and there she found Christ, betrayed amid the feast of love and the sweet cups, laid low by Jewish fraud, according to the prophet's word: “For if an enemy had reproached me, I would have borne it; and if he who hated me had spoken evil against me, I would have hidden myself from him; but you, a man of one mind with me, my guide and my familiar friend, who took sweet food with me; in the house of the Lord we walked in harmony” (Ps 55:12–14). “When she learned that the Lord was reclining in the Pharisee's house,” that is, that in the synagogue he had been handed over by every deceit and every fraud, had suffered, was crucified and buried, still she is not held back from the fervour of faith by so great an injury, but brings ointment, brings the oil of Christian chrism; and because she was not found worthy to see Christ's bodily face, she stands behind, not in place but in time; she clings to his footsteps so as to follow; and she now pours out tears more of desire than of conscience, so that she may be found worthy to see returning him whom she was not worthy to see departing. So she pours out tears at the Lord's feet with flowing love: while she holds with the hands of good works the feet of those who preach his kingdom, she washes them with tears of charity, kisses them with the lips of confession, and pours out the whole ointment of mercy, until, turned toward her (what is “turned”? that is, returned), he says to Simon, says to the Pharisees, says to those who deny, says to the Jewish people: “I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet.” And when will he say this? When he comes in the majesty of his Father and separates the righteous from the unrighteous as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and says: “I was hungry, and you gave me no food; I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and you did not welcome me” (Matt 25:31–43). That is to say: You gave me no water for my feet; but she, while she washes the feet of my own, anoints their feet and kisses their feet, has done for the servants what you did not do for the Lord, has done for the feet what you refused the head, has spent on the least what you denied your author. Then he will say to the church: “Your many sins are forgiven you, because you have loved much.” For then there will be forgiveness of sins, when all matter for sinning is taken away, when corruption puts on incorruption, when mortality attains immortality, when the flesh of sin becomes the flesh of complete holiness, when earthly servitude is changed into heavenly lordship, when human warfare is promoted to the divine kingdom. Pray, brothers, that we too, placed within the church, may be found worthy to come to the things we have listed, with Christ himself as our guide, to whom be honour and glory with the Holy Spirit for ages of ages. Amen.

[On the parable of the weeds.] If the words or deeds of Christ were everywhere subject to the senses of the flesh, my mind would grow torpid, my wit would be idle and fall asleep, my heart would waste away, and all that is of human vigour and warmth would be extinguished. “He put before them a parable,” it says (Matt 13:24). As fire is cold in a stone and lies hidden in iron, yet fire is kindled by striking iron and stone together, so an obscure word shines out when word is struck against meaning. Certainly, if there were no mysteries, no distinction would remain between faithful and unfaithful, between impious and pious, and the devout would be like the stubborn, the idle like the one who toils, the wakeful like the one asleep; but now, when the soul asks, the mind knocks, understanding seeks, piety hopes, faith demands, effort merits, there appear both the fruit of the one who sweats and the punishment of the lazy, and at the same time the justice of the giver; because what is received is more relished than what is owned, and what is found delights more than what is set before us. That is why Christ veils his teaching in parables, covers it with figures, wraps it in sacraments and makes it obscure with mysteries. “He put before them a parable.” Before them: that is, not his own but outsiders, enemies surely, not friends; those watching to slander, not listening for salvation. “That is why,” he says, “I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor understand” (Matt 13:13). Why? Because he who slanders the past does not deserve to see the present, nor is he worthy to recognize grace who hid the law so that it might not be known. “Woe to you lawyers,” he says, “because you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering” (Luke 11:52). “He put before them a parable, saying: The kingdom of heaven is like a man.” And whom does Christ offend if he was made in the likeness of men to help the perishing human race? Does the Lord give scandal if, to set servants free, he is found in the form of a servant, when whatever belongs to the majesty to come, to the coming and the kingdom, is here compared to a man? “The kingdom of heaven,” he says, “is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds over it among the wheat, and went away.” You have heard how the sower of the world sowed good beginnings of things, and no evil came from the author of the origin; evil was sown over it by the enemy; evil was not produced by the parent of things. “And God saw,” it says, “all that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:31). Good, and very good: for what God in making called the world, the clean thing, the enemy by staining made unclean; the man whom God placed in the paradise of delights for life, the enemy dragged down into this life of toil for death; and the affection that God implanted in the flesh by nature, the enemy turned through envy into the murder of kin. Cain proves this, who first dyed the earth with a brother's blood and proved himself the dedicator of death by his brother's end (Gen 4). So death, born of discord, always splits and separates human charity. And since it would take long to go through every point, we are compelled to disclose at least in a few words how the enemy has always sown, for our ruin, evils over goods, vices over virtues, deadly things over living ones. Did not God fill the whole earth from one man, and the loving sower multiply the whole human race from one seed into so great a harvest? But the enemy soon drove all men into one evil, and by sowing evils over it caused what had been well sown to be drowned by the flood, not watered. So he coloured the law, sown with divine and true precepts, with human and lying inventions, so that from priest came a persecutor, from teacher a corrupter, from defender of the law an enemy. So, that God might not be known, he lyingly made gods of the creatures made for the knowledge of the Creator. So he made the wise of the world fools, taught the observers of the world to see nothing, made the professors of knowledge have no knowledge, and left the inquirers into all things ignorant. So the enemy confused the gospel crop, sown with heavenly seed, by sowing heretical weeds over it, to make the sheaves of faith into bundles for Gehenna, lest it become wheat for the heavenly barns. And what more? After he himself was turned from an angel into a demon, he strove by art, tricks, contrivances and fraud that no creature should remain in its own state. But now let us open the words of the present parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like a man.” To whom? Surely to Christ. “Who sowed good seed”: because in the very seed of things the Creator's ordering knows no evil. “In his field”: that is, in the world, as the Lord himself says: “The field is the world” (Matt 13:38). “But while men were sleeping”: that is, the holy fathers, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, sleeping for a time in the slumber of death, because the death of the saints is sleep; but the death of sinners is death, because sinners live on in the punishment of hell and perish to life. “His enemy came”: that is, the devil. “He sowed weeds over it.” “Sowed over,” not “sowed.” The good things of the Creator come first, the evils of the devil follow after, so that the evil which is from the devil may be an accident, not a nature. “He sowed weeds over it among the wheat”: because the devil is accustomed to sow, for no gain, heresies among the faithful, sin among the saints, quarrels among the peaceable, tricks among the simple, wickedness among the innocent; not to gain weeds but to destroy wheat; not to capture the guilty but to carry off the innocent. An enemy seeks the general more than the soldier; he does not besiege the dead but attacks the living; so the devil does not seek to capture sinners, whom he holds subjugated, but labours to capture the righteous. “He sowed weeds over it among the wheat, and went away”: because the devil drives men with force to ruin, but once he has laid them low, he abandons them; the devil does not seek man, he seeks man's destruction. Brothers, he rejoices in our evils, swells at our ruins, grows strong on our wounds, thirsts for our blood, is sated with our flesh, lives from our deaths. The devil does not want to have man but to destroy him. Why? Because he does not want, does not bear, does not endure that man should come to the heaven from which he fell. And since the sermon draws us out too long today, let us put off the rest, both to relieve our common labour and to carry out more fully what is to be said. May our God deign to give me the grace of speaking and you the desire of hearing.

[On the same.] Since the earlier sermon, hurried so as to lighten our common labour, could not reach the whole secret of the parable as it passed by, let us now disclose the rest, with the Lord revealing it. “He put before them a parable, saying: The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds over it among the wheat, and went away.” “But while men were sleeping” (Matt 13:25). The ambusher lurks by night, flees the wakeful by day, and goes after those who sleep; the strong man seeks combat, issues his challenge openly with everyone looking on, and wants to win before the people. It is a sign of the greatest weakness to have attacked men asleep. “But while men were sleeping, his enemy came.” The wicked one is never anything but foolish. What did this enemy accomplish? Granted that the servants slept, was the Lord sleeping too? Granted that sleep had closed the servants' eyes after their labour, had any weariness overcome the master's eyes? Enemy, fugitive from the light, you kept watch, you laboured, but you were not hidden: for while the servants slept, the Lord himself sees you; deserter of heaven, you anticipated them and you acted, but you did not profit. What God himself guards cannot perish for God. Author of fraud, your offence is not against the Lord but against the servants, since you cause what belongs to your fraud to be ascribed to their negligence. He, he sees you, who is witness of all fraud and of all labour. So the fruits of his labour await the one who does well, and the punishments of his wickedness await the defrauder: they will carry the wheat to the heavenly barn; you will carry the bundles of your weeds to Gehenna for yourself. “But while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds over it.” For what purpose? That the Lord's harvest might perish. And what did this have to do with the enemy's gain, except that the spirit of envy counts the loss of men its own gain, and reckons that it has acquired whatever men have lost? But the devil, as we said, contrived this under cover of darkness, so that the harm of the adulterated harvest might fall back on the servants, and they might receive punishment from where they had hoped for the palm. Then the servants, wakeful with fear, are terrified as to why this has happened, fearing that the shoots of the weeds might come back as an offence against them, whose conscience held nothing but the sowing of good seed. That is why they forestalled their master's hearing of it, lest, secure in their innocence, they should bear guilt from their silence: for when an innocent man is called to account, in his eagerness to be cleared he presses and spurs the examiner. “But when the blade had sprung up and borne fruit, then,” it says, “the weeds appeared also.” What lies hidden in the blade is revealed in the ear; what is concealed in the shoot is opened in the fruit. So those whom we think equal as believers we find unequal in faith; so the harvest of judgment reveals what the shoot of the church hides, according to the Lord's word: “By their fruits you will know them” (Matt 7:16). Many blossoms promise a multitude of fruits, but, tested by the blasts of the winds, very few persevere to the fruit; so many believers in Christ are seen in the church in time of peace, but when the storm of persecution has blown, few are found in the fruit of martyrdom. But holy Euphemia paid out more in fruit than she promised in flower: with the flower of her virginity remaining, she came to the abundant fruit of martyrdom. “The servants of the householder came,” it says, “and said to him.” They came, brothers, in mind, not in body; not in place but in faith; they spoke not with the cry of the voice but with the silent grief of the heart: “Lord, did you not sow good seed in your field?” “You sowed,” not “we sowed”: what we do perfectly we always assign to you, our author, and in the things you command us to do you yourself stand by as the worker. So if by your condescension you make us partners in your work, do not ascribe to us alone that weeds are springing up. Lord, either innocence protects us together with you, or guilt touches you together with us; we could not envy our own work, we could not purchase offence with great sweat; you have what you will, from where you will, when you will; we have nothing apart from your grace, through which we stand, live, move and are (Acts 17:28), and without which we lie down, fail and perish. Did we then labour at these things so that they might perish? But who did this, you saw, who alone do not sleep, while we slept; and if you saw, just Judge (who knows the deed? he who keeps watch, not he who sleeps), then expose him, so that you may make us secure, whom you see so anxious. “The master said: An enemy has done this.” “An enemy has done this”; and why, Lord, when you saw it, did you allow it? Why? Because he cannot fear frauds who can lose nothing; because it is more to separate what is mixed than to prevent the mixing, and it is greater to restore what was lost than to keep what is unharmed; and at the same time because “there must be weeds, so that those who are approved may become manifest” (1 Cor 11:19). “The servants said to him: Do you want us to go and gather the weeds?” So devoted servants promise tireless labour and cannot bear to see the ugliness of the Lord's harvest even for a time; but the Lord, whom times do not weary and who can abolish the injury to his harvest when he wishes, forbids it, saying: “No.” And why he forbade it he at once reveals: “Lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.” Were the cultivators so unskilled, so ignorant of the work, so lacking in the knowledge of discernment, that in pulling up weeds they would root up the wheat? Where are the prophets who prophesy by God's Spirit? Where is Peter, to whom the Father reveals (Matt 16:17)? Where is Paul, in whom Christ works (Gal 2:8) and speaks (2 Cor 13:3)? Where are all the saints, truly saints, but servants, knowing only as much as the giver of knowledge has granted each? But you say: This was nothing hidden. Yet there was something hidden there, when one thing was seen in appearance and another held in the flower, and what was weeds today was turned tomorrow into wheat: so today one is held a heretic who tomorrow becomes faithful, and one who is now seen as a sinner will stand righteous in the future. That is why the author referred both to the harvest, that is, to the judgment, the time of divine patience and of our repentance, so that whoever changes himself from evil to good may be counted as the Lord's wheat, to be gathered into the heavenly barns, and whoever makes himself unfaithful from faithful may be assigned to the fire of Gehenna. And what more? If God's patience did not come to the help of the weeds, the church would possess neither Matthew the evangelist from a tax collector nor Paul the apostle from a persecutor. Indeed Ananias was then seeking to root up the wheat, when, sent to Saul, he complained in this way about Paul: “Lord, how much evil he has done to your saints” (Acts 9:13): that is, root up the weeds; why send a sheep to a wolf? a devout man to a stubborn one? such a preacher to a persecutor? But when Ananias saw Saul, the Lord then saw Paul; when Ananias spoke of a persecutor, the Lord then knew a preacher; and when Ananias judged him weeds for hell, Christ was already placing him as a chosen vessel, wheat in the heavenly barn. “Go,” he says, “for he is a chosen vessel to me.”