Four codices of notable authority agree in ascribing the author of this homily to St. Maximus: namely three of Holy Cross in Jerusalem, and that of St. Gall. The older codex of Holy Cross, which is no. 90 among the homilies of St. Maximus, has this as no. 36 with the title: 'On that which is written: The foxes have holes, etc.' The second codex, no. 99, has it under no. 83: 'On that which was said, when the Lord said: The foxes have holes, etc.' The third codex of Holy Cross in Jerusalem is a lectionary, where, after the passage of the Gospel is cited, as in codex 90, is read: 'A homily of the blessed bishop Maximus.' The codex of St. Gall, finally, homily 50, is fully conformable to the title of codex 90 of Holy Cross in Jerusalem.
Supported by these clear testimonies, we easily refute the charge of forgery against the Laurentian codex mentioned in the previous admonition, and against the editors of Ambrose's works, who published this same piece among the sermons of St. Ambrose. We add a fragment drawn from the St. Gall codex, by which the homily, hitherto mutilated, is rendered complete. If your beloved company diligently attended to the evangelical chapter that was read, that very chapter could penetrate your understanding: why the Lord, as Scripture relates, when He was entreated by one man to let him follow wherever He went, for the sake of religious service, said rather to another: 'Follow me';
and, having spurned and despised the former, He rather chose the other, who was silent and did not expect it. And since a voluntary service is usually more acceptable than a compelled one, and a service pleases more, not that which is exacted by command, but that which is offered of one's own accord: why then is this man rejected, why is he refused as even unworthy? For the Lord says to him: 'The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.' First, then, we ought to consider this, that the Lord is no respecter of persons. For He is a fair and just Judge;
but according to the quality of these men He requites the affection of love, and chooses him, not who is ready in words but sluggish in devotion, but who has been silent in tongue yet devout in mind, of whom the Prophet says: 'Making yourself silent, you will be seen to be wise.' But concerning him who speaks wantonly, Scripture relates: 'Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he who does my will.' Hence therefore we learn that to the Lord we must cry out not so much with the mouth as with the heart.
Therefore our Savior, who sees through the thoughts and feelings of men, hearing indeed the compliance of the voice, but recognizing the craftiness of the mind, compares that man to such an animal as signals one thing by its voice and works another by its habits. For the fox resounds with the barking of a dog, yet by guile it practices the plunder of fraud. Therefore He takes up the one who was silent and did not expect it. He was indeed silent in tongue, but he spoke in spirit. For we understand how devout he was who, as he himself declared, left his dead father in order to find the Lord of life. For he says: 'Permit me first to go and bury my father.' He had therefore left him dead, whom, on returning, he begs to bury.
For grief had not held him back, nor had death delayed him, because he was hastening to life. Not yet had he closed the eyes of the dying man, not yet had he laid out the stiffening limbs: as soon as he learned that the Lord had come, forgetting the affection of paternal piety, by a greater piety he believed that he should love Christ more than his parent. For he had perhaps read the prophetic lesson which says: 'Forget your people, and the house of your father.' Therefore he forgot his father, while he was mindful of the Savior. He had also heard the Lord's Gospel: 'He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.' Thus, just as Tobit is justified for having abandoned his meal for the sake of a burial,
so this man is approved, since for Christ's sake he left the burial of his father. For the former did not fear lest, through the intervening work of an earthly meal, he should omit the feast; this man feared lest, through an intervening delay, he should lose the refreshment of the heavenly bread. Whence, although out of contemplation of Christ we owe burial to all, this man out of love of Christ forsook his father's burial. Let us therefore first examine that man's interpretation and the response of the Lord Savior. He says to Him: 'I will follow you wherever you go.' A prompt reply indeed, but a proud one. For the Lord was about to go to His Passion, to descend to the depths, to ascend to heaven: can human frailty accompany Him in all these things?
This is a foolish presumption rather than a religious confession. For indeed it is said to the apostle Peter by the Lord, when he supposed that he could follow the Savior in all things: 'Where I go, you cannot now follow me.' And when he obstinately said that he would not be separated from Him even by death, he hears, as one condemned for boasting, that he would deny the Lord three times. And so he who was promising that he could not be torn from the confession of Christ even by death, is separated from His fellowship by the questioning of a little maidservant; and unless the Lord had, as it were, set a certain limit by saying he would deny Him three times, perhaps, being questioned more often, he would have denied Him repeatedly. What then is answered to that wanton man?
'The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, and the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.' See to what thing he is subtly compared. For this kind of animal is deceitful, and always bent on plunder, practicing rapine by fraud, one which allows nothing to be safe, nothing at rest, nothing secure, which seeks its prey even among the very dwellings of men. Which comparison I think was written not only on account of that man, but also on account of the many Christians who confess the Lord with their mouth, but in their habits dwell amid the deceit of foxes. For every Christian who wishes to conceal his sins is spiritually a fox. For just as the fox, because of its frauds, lurks in hiding-places;
so too the sinner who is silent, because of the consciousness of his sins, hides himself in holes. And just as the fox does not dare to display the deceit of its ways amid the crowds of men, so too this man is ashamed to confess the wickedness of his manner of life in the midst of the church. I would plainly call a fox every Christian who lies in wait for his neighbor, who daily strives to gnaw at others' boundaries, to invade their fruits, to devour their animals, and—what is common to this age—not so much to snatch chicks after the manner of foxes, but to seize swine after the manner of wolves: who, though he could live by his own labor, with the rage of wild beasts snatches at another's prey.
I judge that all heretics too are to be compared to foxes, who, since they cannot dwell in the house of the Lord, prepare for themselves certain conventicles, like dark holes, in which, obstinately hiding, they lie in wait for the Church, so that if any innocent soul should perhaps come forth, they may swallow it up like a chick of the mother hen. The foxes, I say, lie in wait for the Church, that is, for that evangelical hen concerning whom the Lord says: 'How often would I have gathered your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.' Let us therefore shun, brethren, let us shun the pestilent wiles of the lurking foxes, let us shun the deadly snares of these most wicked creatures, lest, like the foxes which Samson,
that most mighty man, once sent into the field of the Philistines those foxes armed with torches, which burned up with flames all that they touched with their tracks; so the foxes of perverse doctrines may either take captive the fruits of our crops by the deception of their snares, or consume them by the burning of their flames. Let us therefore be, as we read, both simple as doves and cunning as serpents, so that the cunning of the serpents may protect the simplicity of the doves, and that we may thus not know how to do evil, yet be able to avoid it; through our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be honor and glory, etc.