Does he not seem to you to be some heretic, when you hear him disputing about the Lord's generation after the fashion of the world, rich in words, poor in strength? He thinks that in this present time he possesses riches in abundance, but in the time to come he will discover the poverty of his own faith; and steeped in the eternal fast of faith he will know that the food of perfidy, which he has belched forth in this present age, is the cause of so great a punishment. And there will come a time when those who now laugh at our words will lament their own laughter. To them it is well said: 'Woe to you, when all men shall speak well of you!' Does he not seem to you to be speaking to those men who, lately authors of treacherous prevarication at the Council of Ariminum, while they followed the favor of the emperor, lost the favor of God?
For when they go hunting to please the powerful, they have subjected themselves to a perpetual curse. Therefore, just as holy Matthew summoned the peoples to virtue and faith by rewards, so here too he deterred them from crimes and sins by announcing future punishments; and not idly, having advanced through an enumeration of very many heavenly deeds, he comes rather late to the place of the beatitudes, so that he might teach the peoples, strengthened by divine miracles, to advance by the footsteps of the virtues beyond the path of the Law. Caution was needful there, where the hearts of a still feeble people were wavering; here virtue had to be roused by the blast of the trumpet. The discourse that is opened both in the prologues and in the course of the address teaches this concerning this book.
There those who are still weak are given a certain milk of the Law to drink, and so are led through the path of the Law to grace—they hear the things of the Law, that by following the Law they may go beyond the Law—but here the Church, now more firmly grounded, is not nourished with milk but feeds on solid food; for the stronger food is love. Indeed, among the three greatest things—hope, faith, love—the greatest is love. Love therefore is set in order, when it is said: 'Love your enemies,' so that what was said before concerning the Church might be fulfilled: 'Set love in order within me'; for love is set in order when the precepts of love are formed. See how he began from loftier things, and cast the Law behind the back of the gospel blessing.
The Law commands retaliation in revenge; the Gospel imparts love for enmities, kindness for hatreds, prayers for curses, aid for persecutors, patience to the hungry, and the grace of recompense. How much more perfect is the athlete who does not feel the injury! And lest the Lord should seem to dissolve the Law, in benefits He keeps that reciprocity which He disregards in injuries. Yet by saying, 'As you wish that men should do to you, do you also to them likewise,' the very reciprocity is made more abundant, when the deed is matched to the wishes. For virtue knows no measure of favor, nor, content to return what it has received, does it wish merely to repay; it wishes to heap up what it has taken, lest it be inferior in benefit, even though it be equal in service.
For benefits are weighed not only by their abundance but also by order and time, since in an equal benefit the one who began first is first; for he is the benefactor who first bestowed the favor, and a debtor he who has repaid it. And so the precedence of a benefit is itself another benefit; for if someone has repaid money, he has not paid off the favor and remains a debtor of the favor, even though he is no longer a debtor of the money. Why should we think that a favor can be emptied out by being returned, since the return of it is rather a testimony that it was received than that it was discharged? Therefore the Christian is imbued with a good example, that not content with the right of nature he should seek its grace. For if it is common to all, even to sinners, to love in return, then to one whose kind of profession is more exalted, the zeal for virtue too ought to be more abundant, so that he may love even those who do not love him.
For even if no deserts exclude the exercise of loving, they still cannot exclude that of virtue. For just as in the case of him who loves you it is shameful not to return the favor, and through love of the favor to be returned the love of him whom before you did not love grows upon you, so also in the case of him who does not love you, you ought to love virtue, so that while you love virtue you may begin to love the one whom you did not love—since the recompense of the one who loves is rare and fleeting, but that of virtue is everlasting. And what is so marvelous as to offer the other cheek to the one who strikes? Is not every assault of the angry man broken, his wrath calmed? Is it not brought about through patience that you strike back the striker the more with his own repentance? So it will come about that you both repel the injury and seek out grace.
And often the greatest occasions of love arise when patience is set against insolence, and grace is returned for injury. Indeed, as I recall hearing, we reckon the proud brow of philosophy to be confounded by this one thing alone, that it seems to have divided justice into three parts: one toward God, which is called piety; the second toward parents or the rest of the human race; the third toward the dead, that to these the due rites of burial may be discharged. But the Lord Jesus, surpassing the oracle of the Law and the summit of philosophy, extended the office of piety even toward those who had done harm.
For indeed, if an enemy who has contended against you in war and arms, having laid down his weapons, obtains the mercy of his own safety—and this is for the most part granted either out of regard for nature or by the very law of war, that life be granted to those who have submitted—how much more, with a better regard for religion, ought it to be granted! For when consideration of his sought-for safety does not move the warrior, what does it require of the soldier of peace? And so we see that apostolic saying, 'because love is patient, is kind, is not jealous, is not puffed up,' brought to its consummation in these precepts. If it is patient, it owes patience to the one who strikes; if it is kind, it ought not to answer curses with curses; if it does not seek its own, it ought not to resist the one who plunders; if it is not jealous, it ought not to hate the enemy.
And yet the precepts of divine piety overflow beyond the apostolic ones; for it is more to give than to yield, more to love enemies than not to be jealous. All these things the Lord both said and did. He who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He was struck, did not strike back; when He was despoiled, did not resist; when He was crucified, asked pardon for His very persecutors, saying: 'Father, forgive them the sin, for they know not what they do.' He excused His accusers from their crime. They were preparing the cross; He was repaying salvation and grace. And yet, since the very zeal for the virtues grows sluggish without recompense, He both brought us an example and promised a reward from heaven, pledging that those who became His imitators would be sons of God.
For he who hastens toward the reward ought not to disdain the example, since the more excellent the reward, the more costly the duty. And how great is the recompense of mercy, which is admitted into the right of divine adoption! Follow mercy, therefore, that you may merit grace. The kindness of God spreads far and wide: He rains upon the ungrateful, the fruitful earth does not deny her produce to the wicked, the same sun of the world enlightens alike the sacrilegious and the religious.
Or, that we may weigh these things mystically: the Lord watered the people of the Jews with prophetic rains and shone upon them with the rays of the eternal Sun, even though they did not deserve it; but because they grew sodden with worldly dew, the Church of God is admitted to the heavenly light, yet in such a way that the prerogative of mercy is reserved for them too, if they should believe. He added that one must not judge rashly, lest, being yourself conscious of your own fault, you be compelled to pronounce sentence against another. It is a great discipline of virtue, too, that you should not seek fruitful things from the unfruitful, nor expect a harvest of fecundity from the untilled. For to each his own cultivation gives its fruits:
Among the thorns of this world that fig cannot be found, which, because it is better than fertile fruits, is fittingly applied to the figure of the resurrection; or because, as you have read, 'the fig trees put forth their unripe figs,' inasmuch as in the Synagogue an unripe and useless and perishable fruit went before; or because our life is unripe in the body, but ripe in the resurrection. And therefore we ought to put away from us, far off, the worldly anxieties that gnaw the soul and inflame the mind, so that we may be able to obtain the ripe fruits of diligent cultivation, which we cannot find among the untilled places of this world, since men do not gather figs from thorns nor harvest a grape from brambles.
The one is referred to the world and the resurrection, the other to the soul and the body; or because no one acquires fruit for his own soul by sins, which, like a grape near the ground, is corrupted, but ripens in the higher places; or because no one can escape the condemnation of the flesh except one whom Christ has redeemed, who like a grape hung upon the tree. Far off, therefore, from that flesh which has been bidden to bring forth brambles for condemned man, let us lift up our spiritual eyes, let us stretch out our hands, that we may be able to harvest Christ.
He teaches, moreover, that the foundation of all virtues is obedience to the heavenly precepts, through which this house of ours cannot be shaken by the flood of pleasures, nor by the assault of spiritual wickedness, nor by worldly rain, nor by the cloudy disputations of heretics. Beautifully, too, when He had fulfilled the precepts, He teaches us to carry out the pattern of His precepts; for immediately the servant of a Gentile centurion is offered to the Lord to be healed, in whom is portrayed the people of the nations, which was held by the bonds of worldly servitude, sick with deadly passions, to be healed by the kindness of the Lord. And in saying that he was about to die, the evangelist did not deceive; for he was about to die, had he not been healed by Christ.
Therefore he fulfilled the precept with heavenly love, who so loved his enemies that he rescued them from death and admitted them to the hope of everlasting salvation. And how great a mark of divine humility, that the Lord of heaven in no way disdained to visit the little servant of a centurion! Faith shines forth in works, but humanity works more in the affections. This indeed He did, not because being absent He could not heal, but that He might give you a pattern of humility to be imitated, by which He might teach that deference is to be shown to those lower as well as to those higher. Hence elsewhere He says to the official: 'Go, your son lives,' that you may know both the power of His divinity and the grace of His humility.
There He was unwilling to go, lest in the official's son He should seem to have deferred rather to riches; here He Himself went, lest He should seem to have despised the servile condition in the centurion's servant; for all of us, slave and free, are one in Christ. But see that faith is the prerogative of healing. Notice too that even in that Gentile people there is the keen perception of the mystery. The Lord goes; the centurion makes excuse, and laying aside his military arrogance takes on reverence, both ready for faith and prompt for showing honor. And well does Luke say that the centurion sent friends to meet Him, lest by his own presence he should seem to burden the Lord's modesty and to have challenged courtesy with courtesy. This is the moral sense.
But mystically, the people of the nations desires that He whom the people of the Jews crucified should remain inviolate from injury, and as regards faith it believed the word, that is, inferring that health is given to men by the power not of a man but of God by Christ. But as regards the mystery, he saw that Christ was not yet penetrable into the breasts of the Gentiles. And therefore one who had not yet washed away the stains of his past thought reckoned that he was more burdened than helped by the Lord's condescension. So that widow of Sarepta judged herself unworthy of the prophet's lodging. And therefore the Lord in this one man prefers the faith of the Gentiles. And indeed, if you read thus: 'In no one have I found such faith in Israel,' the meaning is simple and easy; but if according to the Greeks:
'Not even in Israel have I found such faith,' the faith of this man is preferred even to the more select and to those who see God. But behold the dispensation: the faith of the master is approved, and the health of the servant is strengthened. The merit of the master can therefore avail even for the servants, not only by the merit of faith but also by the zeal of discipline. Behold also another dispensation of the Lord's humility. He works what He does not promise; for although He had not yet commanded the healing, nevertheless the servants who had been sent found the little servant whole. 'And as He drew near the gate of the city, behold, there was being carried out one who had died, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and a great crowd was with her. And when the Lord saw her, moved with mercy He said to her: Do not weep.'
'And He came near and touched the bier.' And this passage redounds to a twofold grace: that we may believe both that the divine mercy is quickly bent by the lamentation of a widowed mother—especially of one who is broken by the toil or death of her only son, for whom nevertheless the crowd of the funeral procession wins the merit of a widow's dignity—and that this widow, hedged about by a multitude of peoples, seems to be more than a woman. She by her tears deserved to obtain the resurrection of her only adolescent son, in that the holy Church recalls the younger people from the pomp of the funeral and the last rites of the tomb to life by the contemplation of her tears, she who is forbidden to weep for him to whom resurrection is due.
He indeed who was dead was being carried in the bier to the tomb by the four material elements, but he had the hope of rising, because he was being carried on wood. And though this did not profit us before, yet after Jesus touched it, it began to avail unto life, so that it might be a sign that salvation was to be poured back upon the people through the gibbet of the cross. Therefore, when the word of God had been heard, those bitter bearers of the funeral stood still, who were pressing the human body down with the deadly flux of material nature.
For what else but as it were on a kind of bier—that is, the instrument of a final funeral—do we lie lifeless, when either the fire of immoderate desire boils up, or the cold humor floods over, or by a certain sluggish habit of the body the vigor of our spirits is dulled, or our spirit, empty of pure light, feeds the mind with a thickened stain? These are the bearers of our funeral. But although the last things of death have abolished every hope of life, and the bodies of the dead lie next to the grave, yet by the word of God the corpses, already about to die, rise again. The voice returns, the son is given back to his mother, he is recalled from the grave, snatched from the tomb. What is this tomb of yours but evil habits? Your tomb is perfidy, your sepulcher is your throat;
for 'their throat is an open sepulcher,' from which dead words are brought forth. From this sepulcher Christ frees you; from this tomb you will rise, if you hear the word of God. Even though the sin be grave, which you yourself cannot wash away by the tears of your repentance, let mother Church weep for you, who as a widowed mother intervenes for each one as for her only sons; for she suffers together with a certain spiritual pain of nature, when she sees her own children pressed toward death by deadly vices. We are inward parts from her inward parts; for there are also spiritual inward parts, which Paul has, saying: 'Yes, brother, may I have profit of you in the Lord: refresh my inward parts in Christ.'
We therefore are the inward parts of the Church, since we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. Let the holy mother therefore grieve, let the crowd stand by, and not only the crowd, but let many suffer together with the good parent. Now you will rise in your funeral, now you will be freed from the sepulcher; those ministers of your funeral will stand still, you will begin to speak words of life, all will be afraid; for by the example of one, very many will be corrected. They will also praise God, who has granted us such remedies for escaping death. 'And John, having called two of his disciples, sent them to Him, saying: Are you He who is to come, or do we look for another?' The meaning is not simple in these simple words; otherwise the things that follow conflict with what precedes.
For how does John, whom in the foregoing he recognized when God the Father pointed Him out, here not know Him? How both there did he acknowledge Him whom he had not known before, and here is he ignorant of Him whom he already knew? 'I did not know Him,' he says, 'but He who sent me to baptize, He Himself said to me: Upon whom you shall see the Holy Spirit descending from heaven.' And he believed the word, and acknowledged Him who was pointed out, and adored Him who was baptized, and prophesied of Him who came. Finally, 'I,' he says, 'saw and bore witness that this is the chosen one of God.' What then? Could it come to pass that so great a prophet should err so far that he should not believe Him to be the Son of God, of whom he had said: 'Behold, He who takes away the sins of the world'? For it is either insolence to attribute divine things to one whom you do not know, or it is perfidy to have doubted concerning the Son of God.
The suspicion of so great an error therefore does not fall upon such a prophet. And so, if the form of the simple meaning conflicts, let us seek a spiritual figure. And since we have already said above that in John there is a type of the Law, which was the herald of Christ, rightly the Law—which was held bodily enclosed in the breasts of the perfidious as in prisons emptied of eternal light, which the womb fertile in punishments and the gates of madness confined—cannot carry through to its full issue the testimony of the Lord's dispensation without the corroboration of the Gospel. The Law indeed prophesied in Exodus the grace of baptism through the cloud and the sea, it foretold spiritual food in the lamb, it designated the perennial fount in the rock;
it revealed the remission of sins in Leviticus, it announced the kingdom of heaven in the Psalms, it most clearly declared the land of promise in Joshua son of Nun—all these things agree also with the testimony of John—but nevertheless, being shut in by the tyrannical powers of this world, it is held back from pouring forth the light of the Lord's resurrection.
John therefore sends his disciples to Christ, that they may attain a supplement of knowledge, because the fullness of the Law is Christ; so that—since for the most part words waver without deeds, and a fuller faith is exhibited by the testimonies of deeds than by the promises of words—what was then wavering in the breasts of the Jews, as in a bolted-up Law, might be laid open by the very spectacle of the Lord's cross and the full testimony of the resurrection. And perhaps these disciples are the two peoples, of whom one believed from among the Jews, the other from among the Gentiles, which therefore believed because it heard. These men therefore wished to see, on account of that saying: 'But blessed are your eyes which see, and your ears which hear.'
But we also have seen in John, we have perceived with our eyes in the apostles, and with our hands we have searched out in the fingers of Thomas; for 'that which was from the beginning, which we have heard and which we have seen, we have perceived with our eyes, and our hands have searched out concerning the Word of life: and life appeared.' When did it appear? When we saw. It did not appear so before it was seen. Thanks therefore to the Lord, who was crucified for our faith, was crucified for our desires. My mind is crucified in Him. And so even now those who review the Old Testament, before they come to know the Gospel and read as it were certain traces of the Lord's body, think He is to come and inquire whether He Himself is the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come.
And when they read of when He spoke with Abraham, or when He showed Himself as the captain of the heavenly host, they say indeed: 'Are You He who is to come, or do we look for another?' But when they have come to the Gospel and have learned that the blind are enlightened, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the lepers are cleansed, the dead rise again, then they say: 'We have seen Him and perceived Him with our eyes, and we have inserted our fingers into the prints of His nails.' For we seem to ourselves to have seen Him whom we read of, to have beheld Him hanging, and to have handled His wounds with the Church's searching spirit; for if demons are cast out by the finger of God, faith too is found by the finger of the Church.
Or perhaps in some operative part of our body we all seem to have investigated the sequence of the Lord's passion; for faith comes through a few to the many. The Law therefore announces that Christ is to come, the Scripture of the Gospel confirms that He has come. Some also understand thus concerning John himself: that he was indeed so great a prophet as to acknowledge Christ, to announce the future remission of sins, but nevertheless not as one in doubt, but as a devout seer, who had believed that He was to come, yet did not believe that He was to die. He doubted, therefore, not in faith but in piety. Peter too doubted, saying: 'Be it far from You, Lord! This shall not happen.'
That prince of faith, to whom Christ had not yet declared Himself to be the Son of God, and yet who had believed it, did not believe Christ even when Christ spoke of His own death. It was an affection of piety, not a lapse of irreverence. Finally, elsewhere he refuses to have his feet washed, where he does not recognize the mystery, being burdened by the Lord's service. Therefore not even the holy ones believed that Christ would die; for 'what eye has not seen nor ear heard nor has ascended into the heart of man, these things has God prepared for those who love Him.' And so for the religious a lapse of love does not impede faith. Finally, the Lord, knowing that no one without the Gospel can fully believe—because just as faith begins from the Old Testament so it is fulfilled in the New—when questioned about Himself, signified what He was not by any word, but by deeds.
'Go,' He says, 'tell John what you have seen and heard. The blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the lepers are cleansed, the dead rise, the poor have the gospel preached to them.' A full testimony indeed, by which the prophet might recognize the Lord; for it had been prophesied concerning Him, not concerning another, that 'the Lord gives food to the hungry, the Lord raises up those who are cast down, the Lord looses those who are bound, the Lord enlightens the blind, the Lord loves the just, the Lord guards the strangers, He will receive the orphan and the widow, and will destroy the way of sinners. He who does these things,' He says, 'the Lord shall reign forever.'
These therefore are not the marks of human, but of divine power: to open the perpetual darkness of night to the blind and to heal the wounds of sunken eyes by light poured in, to instill hearing into the ears of the deaf, to restore the loosened limbs by re-tightened joints, and to recall the dead to light by restoring the vigor of living. Such things, before the Gospel, were either rare or nonexistent. Tobias received his eyes back: he is one in the example, and yet that medicine was of an angel, not of a man. Elijah raised a dead man: yet he prayed and wept, while this one commanded. Elisha made a leper to be cleansed: yet there the authority of the command did not prevail, but the figure of a mystery. He did not fail for the food of the hungry widow, multiplying himself in the meal by prophetic commands:
yet that meal preserved one widow only, or rather the prefigured species of the sacrament preserved the same one. But these examples of the Lord's testimony are still small: the fullness of faith is the cross of the Lord, His death, His burial. And therefore, when He had said those former things, He added: 'Blessed,' He says, 'is he who shall not have been scandalized in Me.' For the cross could bring a scandal even to the elect, but there is no greater testimony of the divine person than this; there is nothing that more seems to be beyond human things than that He offered Himself, one, wholly for the world; by this alone the Lord is fully declared. Finally, He was thus designated by John: 'Behold the Lamb of God, behold Him who takes away the sins of the world.'
But these things are answered not to those two men, the disciples of John, but to all of us, that we may so believe in Christ if the deeds correspond. For one will come who usurps this name for himself, whom, though you cannot distinguish him by the appellation of the name, you may nevertheless discern by the consideration of his deeds. 'What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed shaken by the wind?'
When He had forewarned the disciples of John that one must believe in the Lord's cross, as they were returning He turned to the crowds and began to summon the poor to virtue, lest, exalted in heart, unstable in mind, weak in counsel, they should prefer the showy to the useful, the perishable to the eternal; but rather with a humble spirit they should take up the cross than exalt the trappings of this world, and, as blessed poor who have nothing of the world that they might lose, should gladly exchange the life of the body for immortal glory. Not idly therefore is the person of holy John here praised, who, putting the love of life behind him, did not change the form of justice even through the terror of death.
'What,' He says, 'did you go out into the desert to see?' This world seems to be likened to a desert—still untilled, still barren, still unfruitful—into which the Lord denies that we are so to go forth as to think that we should imitate, as a kind of model and image, men puffed up with the mind of the flesh and empty of inner virtue, who boast themselves in the fragile loftiness of worldly glory; men subject to the storms of this world, whom a fickle life disquiets, rightly to be compared to a reed, in whom there is no fruit of solid justice, who, plumed with showy trappings, beset with knots, sounding with an empty noise, of no usefulness to themselves, inwardly hollow and giving frequent offense, pursue things outwardly fair.
We are reeds, grounded by no root of a stronger nature, and if a slight breeze of more prosperous success breathes upon us, with wavering motion we lash those near us, powerless to help, ready to harm. Reeds love the rivers, and we delight in the falling, perishable things of the world. Yet this reed, if someone should pluck it from the plantings of the earth and strip it of its superfluities, putting off the old man with his deeds, and temper it with the hand of a swift-writing scribe, it begins to be not a reed but a pen, which may imprint the precepts of the heavenly Scriptures upon the inner chambers of the mind, and inscribe them on the tablets of the heart. Concerning which pen you have it said: 'My tongue is the pen of a swift-writing scribe,' which others wish to refer to Christ.
In one place, therefore, there is read both the Word and the pen and the scribe: the Word, because He proceeded from the inmost secret of the Father—'My heart has uttered forth a good word'—the pen, because the flesh of Christ expressed the sequence of the Father's will and fulfilled the commands of the divine tongue by the outpouring of His sacred blood; the scribe, because by His pen, with a certain twofold distinction, He revealed to us the mysteries of the dispensation of the New and Old Testament, or of the divinity and of the paternal flesh. Imitate this pen by the tempering of your flesh; this pen of yours, that is, your flesh, dip not in ink, but in the Spirit of the living God, that what you write may be eternal. With such a pen Paul wrote that epistle of which he says: