Whence also that word of the Lord: If these shall hold their peace, the stones will cry out. Nor indeed is it a wonder if the rocks, against their own nature, should answer with the praises of the Lord, whom the murderers, harder than the crags, proclaim; or perhaps because, when the Jews fell silent after the Lord's passion, there were living stones, according to Peter, that were to cry out. Therefore, although its affections fight against one another, the crowd nevertheless leads God to his temple with praise. But God wills his temple to be not a merchant's lodging-house but a dwelling of holiness, and he shapes the use of the priestly ministry not by a saleable service of religion but by a freely-given obedience. Consider, then, what the Lord's deeds prescribe to you as an example for living.
And he cast out all who sold and bought in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves. Generally, therefore, he taught above that worldly transactions ought to be far from the temple of God, but specifically he drove out the money-changers. Who are the money-changers but those who seek gain from the Lord's money and do not distinguish between good and bad? For the Lord's money is the divine Scripture. For he both distributed denarii to his servants when about to set out, and divided talents, and left two coins with the innkeeper for the health of the wounded man; for our wounds are healed by the two testaments.
But you, like a good money-changer, store up the utterances of the Lord, the chaste utterances, silver tried in the fire, purified by the sevenfold Spirit; and do not, by an impious exchange, take up an adulterous image of the king — for Satan also transfigures himself into an angel of light — nor mingle into your treasure the diminished figure of your prince by the deceit of Arian unbelief; nor tempt the ear of the faithful with the ring of coin, so that the jingle of bronze might shut out the hearing of the religious Scriptures, or the greed of possessing might be insinuated into religious affections. Therefore not all money-changers are to be shut out; for there are good ones too. Indeed: You should have given my money, he says, to the money-changers, and I at my coming would have received it back with interest. But if there is a coinage of the Scriptures, there is also interest of the Scriptures.
But why he overturned the seats of those who sold doves, I do not understand according to the letter; for the petty dealers in birds could not claim for themselves the dignity of any honored seat in the markets. For what prerogative of dignity is there in doves? Yet the figure of the Lord's baptism gives the admonition: when the Holy Spirit descended in the dove, by the type of such merchants cast out of the temple, that those who would peddle the grace of the Holy Spirit cannot have fellowship in the Church of God. For 'freely,' he says, 'you have received, freely give.' Indeed to Simon, who thought that the office of sanctifying could be conferred upon him for a price, Peter answered: Your money, he says, be with you unto perdition, since you think that the grace of God can be obtained by you with money.
You have neither part nor lot in this faith. The sellers of sheep and oxen, too, I take to be those who, from another's labor or simplicity, hunt out certain markets as foul auctioneers; or because the sheep are cast out and the oxen, while the doves are ordered to be taken away, the Jewish people seems to be excluded; for Ephraim is like a dove, since their lord hates both their successions and their labors. Bronze is poured out that grace may be gathered; the table of the money-changers is overturned that the Lord's may be substituted; the altar is thrown down that altars may be raised. And this he did, not girded with any band or with riches, but with a scourge of cords he drove out the crowds, and no one dared to resist.
And now he uses the rod, now the scourge — for the rod is straight, the rod of your kingdom — the rod, that he may correct, the scourge, that he may persuade. There the precept is direct, here moral, as it were bent, by which the conscience of the sinner is scourged as by a slow lash. For the terrors of the prophets are of one kind, the persuasions of the apostles of another: yet in both there is the discipline of one Word. And therefore he made a scourge of cords, because 'the lines have fallen unto me in pleasant places; for my inheritance is excellent unto me'; for 'cords' are what the land-surveyors use to divide the boundaries of the fields to be measured. And therefore, like a good land-surveyor, he marked off the boundaries of the synagogue and of the Church, and ordered the sacrilegious to depart from the temple;
for a new surveyor had come, of fruitful souls, who would measure the kinds of fields, not their extents. Yet beautifully, no measure of possession is enclosed by stretched-out cords, nor are the boundaries of faith bounded as of some defined thing; but by the scourge, free unto immensity, the borders of the Church are extended, the Jews are eliminated, not by any prescribed exile but by one without limit, so that nowhere in the world might a place of the synagogue remain. A man planted a vineyard. Most derive various significations from the name of the vineyard, but plainly Isaiah recorded that the vineyard of the Lord of Sabaoth is the house of Israel. Who else founded this vineyard but God?
This, then, is he who let it out and went into a far country, not because the Lord went from place to place — he who is everywhere always — but because he is more present to those who love him, and absent to those who neglect him. But he was absent for a long time, lest the exaction should seem premature. For the more indulgent the generosity, the more inexcusable the obstinacy. Whence well according to Matthew you have it that he also 'set a hedge round about,' that is, he fortified it with the rampart of divine protection, lest it should easily lie open to the incursions of spiritual beasts. And he dug a winepress in it.
How do we understand what the winepress is, unless perhaps because certain psalms are inscribed 'concerning the winepresses,' in that in these the mysteries of the Lord's passion, as with new wine in the holy fervor of the prophetic Spirit, more abundantly boiled up? Indeed those upon whom the Holy Spirit overflowed were thought to be drunk. Therefore here too he dug a winepress, into which the inner fruit of the rational grape might flow down by spiritual infusion. He built a tower — raising up, that is, the summit of the law — and thus he let out to the Jews this vineyard, fortified, equipped, adorned. And at the time of the fruits he sent his servants. Well did he set 'the time of fruits,' not 'the yield'; for there was no fruit of the Jews, no yield of this vineyard, of which the Lord says:
I looked that it should bring forth grapes, but it brought forth thorns. And so the winepresses overflowed not with the wine of gladness, not with spiritual new wine, but with the bloody blood of the prophets. Indeed Jeremiah was cast into the pit; for these were now the winepresses of the Jews, filled not with wine but with mire. And although in general the prophets seem to be expressed, yet the reading allows us to believe that the one who was stoned was Naboth, of whom, even though we have received no prophetic word, we have nevertheless received a prophetic deed, because by his own blood he prophesied that there would be many martyrs to come for this vineyard. But who is that one who is wounded in the head?
Doubtless Isaiah, whose bodily frame the saw divided more easily than it bent his faith or wore down his constancy or cut out the vigor of his mind. It came about therefore that, when he had sent several others, whom the Jews dismissed as dishonored and empty to themselves, from whom they could profit nothing, at the last he sent even his only-begotten Son, whom the faithless, desiring to remove him as it were the heir, killed by crucifying, cast out by denying. Briefly, then, how great, how many things! First, because the goodness is natural which very often trusts the unworthy; next, because Christ came as the last remedy of evils; then, because he who denies the heir despairs of the author. But Christ is heir and at the same time testator:
heir, because he outlives his own death and obtains, as it were hereditary, the profits of the testaments which he himself established in our advancement. Beautifully, then, he questions them, that they may condemn themselves by their own verdict. And he says that the lord of the vineyard will come, because in the Son there is present also the paternal majesty, or because in the last times he breathes more present upon human affections. They therefore pronounce sentence upon themselves, that the wicked should perish, and that the vineyard should be transferred to other husbandmen. Let us therefore consider who the husbandmen are, what the vineyard is.
The vineyard is a type of us, because the people of God, founded on the root of the eternal vine, rises above the lands, and veiling over the lowly soil, now grows young with budding flower, now is clothed with verdure poured round about, now takes the gentle yoke, when with riper arms it has grown up like the branches of a fruitful vine. For the husbandman is the almighty Father, the vine is Christ, but we indeed are the branches, who, unless we bear fruit in Christ, are cut down by the pruning-hook of the eternal cultivator.
Rightly, then, is the people of Christ named a vineyard, either because it is marked on the forehead with the sign of the cross, or because its fruit is gathered at the latest season of the year, or because, just as in the ranks of the vines, so among the poor and the rich, the humble and the powerful, slaves and masters, there is in the Church of God an equal measure and no distinction. As the vine is wedded to the trees, so the body is joined to the soul, the soul also to the body. As the vine, while it is tied up, is raised, as when pruned it is not lessened but increased, so the holy people, while it is bound, is stripped, while it is humbled, is exalted, while it is cut back, is crowned.
Moreover, just as a tender shoot, cut from an old tree, is grafted into the offspring of another root, so this holy people, with the scars of the old shoot smoothed away, takes root and grows in that wood of the cross, as in the bosom of a loving parent, fostered; and the Holy Spirit, just as it is sent down into the deep trenches of the earth, so poured into this prison-like body, with the watering of the saving water washes away whatever is foul, and raises the condition of our members into heavenly discipline.
This vineyard the loving husbandman is wont to dig, to bind up, to prune, and, the mounds of the earthen mass being cleared away, the covered surface of our body now to scorch with sun, now to drench with rain, accustomed to clear the field, lest the bud be harmed by brambles, lest the shade of leaves run riot and the unfruitful boasting of words, by overshadowing the virtues, hinder the ripeness of the natural disposition. But far be it that we should fear anything adverse for this vineyard, which the ever-watchful guardian, the saving Lord, has fenced with the wall of eternal life against all the enticements of worldly wickedness. He has stretched out its branches even to the sea; for the earth is the Lord's. Everywhere God the Father is worshipped, everywhere Christ the Lord is adored. This is our vintage.
Joyful, then, and secure, let some load their bosom with the cords of mild clusters of grapes; let others of us pour out heavenly gifts with the mouth; let very many, expressing by the steps of good wills the fruit of the divine gift, dip our footsteps, bare with the buskins torn off, in the flowing new wine; for the place in which we stand is holy ground, and therefore the sandals are to be loosed, that the spiritual footstep, ascending the tribunal of the most sacred seat, may be freed from the bonds of bodily fetters; for it is fitting that here be the vintage of the whole world, where is the vineyard of the whole world.
Behold the acceptable time, in which the year does not stiffen with the wintry frosts of darkening unbelief, nor does a shapeless crust of blasphemy congeal with hardening ice under deep snows, but the earth, freed from the storms of sacrilege, now brings forth new fruits, gives birth to the old; for the storm of all dissensions has subsided, and all the ardors of worldly desire and every heat, by which the people of Italy was once scorched through the conflagrations of Jewish, and lately of Arian, savagery, is now tempered by a serene breath. The tempest is stilled, concord sails, faith breathes; eagerly the sailors seek again the harbors of faith which they had left, and fasten sweet kisses on their native shores, rejoicing that they have been freed from dangers, released from errors.
Hail, vineyard worthy of so great a guardian: not the blood of one Naboth, but of innumerable prophets, and what is more, the precious gore of the Lord, has consecrated you. Though he, not terrified by royal threats, pressed down his constancy by fear, nor, provoked by most lavish rewards, sold his religious devotion, but, resisting the king's zeal, lest in his little gardens, with the vine cut down, a crop of mallows should be sown, when he could do nothing else, with his own blood quenched the fires prepared for the vines — yet he was defending a temporal vineyard: but you, the destruction of many martyrs has planted for us forever; you the cross of the apostles, rival of the Lord's passion, has propagated even to the ends of the whole world. Whose image and inscription does it have?
In this place the Lord teaches that we ought to be circumspect in answering against heretics or Jews. Elsewhere he said: Be wise as serpents. Most take this passage thus: that, because by the serpent lifted up the cross of Christ was announced, by which he might abolish the serpentine venom of spiritual wickedness, one ought to be wise just as Christ, simple as the Spirit. Behold for you that serpent, which always guards its head, shuts out the deadly wound. Asked by the Jews whether he had received his power from heaven, he answered: The baptism of John, whence is it, from heaven or from men? so that, while they dared not deny that it was from heaven, they themselves might convict themselves of madness, who denied that its author was from heaven.
Asked for the didrachma, he inquires about the image; for one is the image of God, another the image of the world. Whence he also admonishes us: As we have borne the image of that earthly one, let us bear also the image of this heavenly one. Christ does not have the image of Caesar, because he is the image of God. Peter does not have the image of Caesar, because he said: We have left all and followed you. The image of Caesar is not found in James or John, because they are the sons of thunder, but it is found in the sea, where those dragons, their heads crushed upon the water, and the great dragon itself, broken in pieces, has its head given as food to the peoples of the Ethiopians. If, then, he did not have the image of Caesar, why did he pay the tribute? He did not give of his own, but rendered to the world what was the world's.
And you, if you wish not to be liable to Caesar, do not have the things that are the world's. But you have riches: you are liable to Caesar. If you wish to owe nothing to an earthly king, leave all that is yours and follow Christ. And well does he decree that first the things which are Caesar's are to be rendered; for no one can be the Lord's, unless he has first renounced the world. But we all renounce in words, we do not renounce in affection; for when we receive the sacraments, we renounce. How grievous it is to promise to God and not to fulfill! 'It is better,' he says, 'not to vow than to vow and not to render.' The contract of faith is greater than that of money. Render what you have promised while you are in this body, before the exactor comes and casts you into prison.
Amen I say to you, you shall not come out thence until you pay the last farthing. If anyone's brother has died. The Sadducees, that is, the more detestable portion of the Jews, tempt the Lord in this place. Their folly is openly rebuked, but mystically their opinion is turned back upon them: what an example of chastity did they give of their own, while according to the letter a woman is compelled even against her will to marry, that the brother may raise up seed for the deceased? Therefore the letter kills, like a procuress of vices, but the spirit is the master of chastity. So let us see whether this woman is the synagogue, which had seven husbands, as is said to the Samaritan woman:
For you have had five husbands, because the Samaritan woman follows only the five books of Moses, the synagogue chiefly the seven, and from none, because of its unbelief, did it receive the seed of a hereditary posterity. And therefore it cannot have a part with its husbands in the resurrection, because it perverts the spiritual precept according to the sense of the flesh;
for no carnal brother was enjoined to raise up the seed of his deceased brother, but that brother who from the dead people of the Jews would take to himself the wisdom of divine worship as a wife, and from her would raise up seed in the apostles, who, like the formless remnants of the deceased Jews still left behind in the womb of the synagogue, according to the election of grace, deserved to be reserved by the admixture of a new seed. But the synagogue often receives the robe, which is the badge of marriage, as it were the author of the faithful; it is also often introduced as repudiated, because it is the mother of the faithless. For it the bodily law has died, that the spiritual might rise again.
Therefore the holy people of God, if it loves the seven books of the law with a certain marital affection and obeys them as it were marital commands, will have in the resurrection a heavenly fellowship, not confounded by the shame of bodily defilement, but enriched with the gifts of divine grace. BOOK TEN. The Lord said to my Lord. The Lord, about to complete his precepts, also concludes by the end of his testament the faith and mercy preliminary to his passion: faith, in that we believe Christ to be both Lord and God our God, and to sit at the right hand of God, not that he sits bodily who is everywhere. Indeed he himself is in the Father, because in the substance of God, because one power, one majesty. He himself, then, is in the Father and the Father in him, because the Word is in God, God in the Word;
he himself is in the Father, he himself is at the right hand of the Father, because a partner with the Father, second to none; he himself is sent by the Father, because he descended from heaven to fulfill the paternal will. Take away from here the questions of unbelief, and the religion is complete. He is neither preferred, because he sits at the right hand, nor does he suffer injury, because he is sent. No degree of dignity is sought, where there is the fullness of divinity. This also is to be considered: that he rebukes those who say Christ is the Son of David. And how did that blind man, by confessing the Son of David, deserve healing? How did the children, saying Hosanna to the Son of David, render glory to God by a most exalted proclamation? But they are not rebuked in this place because they confess the Son of David, but because they do not believe him the Son of God.
For it is not one thing or the other, but each in turn that is found in the true faith; for although in the beginning we judged to know nothing save Christ and him crucified, yet now, since by the judgment of nearness he was crucified, we no longer know Christ after the flesh, but we await him coming in the clouds. The unbeliever looks upon the wounds; the faithful, caught up to meet Christ in the air, runs to encounter him. Therefore let us believe Christ to be both God and man, one in both, not another, to whom by the Father his enemies are made subject, not through any weakness of his own power, but through the unity of nature, because the one works in the other. For the Son also subjects his enemies to the Father, he who glorifies the Father upon the earth, and the Father gave to the Son the name which is above every name. But the Son also says to the Father:
'I have manifested your name to the men whom you gave me.' But in giving the name which is above every name, the Father did not give more than he had, but gave all that he had. And he gave this name, that every tongue should confess to God that the Lord Jesus is in the glory of God the Father. Consider then each point. The Father subjects to the Son, the Son subjects to the Father; the Father raises up the Son, the Son raises up himself. Whence he says: 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.' And the Father is Lord and the Son is Lord — 'The Lord said to my Lord' — yet they are not two Lords, but one Lord, because both the Father is God and the Son is God, yet one God, because the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father.
One God, because one Godhead — 'Your throne, O God, is for ever and ever; the scepter of your kingdom is a right scepter. You have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore God, your God, has anointed you' — yet one God, in whom the teaching of the New and the Old Testament agrees. For in the Old Testament also it is written: 'You shall love the Lord your God, and the Lord your God you shall worship, and him only shall you serve'; in the New: 'one God and Father of all.' So too the Father is Lord and the Son is Lord, yet one Lord. Finally it is written: 'You shall not serve two masters' — this in the New; but in the Old it is written: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord.'
Whence the Apostle, admirably, lest he should speak of two Gods or name two Lords, or detract from either the Son or the Father, says: 'one God the Father, of whom are all things, and one Lord Jesus, by whom are all things.' For he who is God is also Lord, and he who is Lord is God. Finally it is written: 'Know that the Lord himself is our God.' All things therefore that the Father has, the Son also has. God the Father according to the manner of generation, God the Son according to the unity of the image. The Son is Lord, because he subjected all things to himself by reason, though he could do so by power; the Father is Lord, because he is the root of the Son. Thus for us the Father is distinguished from the Son by the definition of persons, yet joined by the unity of power. And so the one is in the other, and there is unity in each.
For it is the Father's glory if he has not degenerated in the Son, and the Son's grace if the Father is seen in Christ. Therefore he is not degenerate, in whom is the supreme majesty of unity; nor alien, in whom the property of generation is the expression of truth. 'There shall not be left a stone upon a stone that shall not be thrown down.' There followed the passage about the widow, which, since we have already preached upon it in the book we wrote concerning widows, we now set aside. But it was truly said concerning the temple which Solomon built, that it should first be overthrown by an enemy at the time of judgment; for there is nothing made by work and by hand that either age does not consume, or force pull down, or fire burn up.
Yet there is also another temple, built of beautiful stones and adorned with gifts, whose destruction the Lord seems to signify — namely the synagogue of the Jews, whose old structure is dissolved as the Church rises. There is also a temple in each individual, which falls when faith fails, and most of all if anyone falsely puts forward the name of Christ, by which to assail the inner affection. There can also be that interpretation which profits me more. For what does it profit me to know the day of judgment? What does it profit me, conscious of so many sins, if the Lord should come, unless he come into my soul, return into my mind, unless Christ live in me, unless Christ speak in me? Therefore to me Christ ought to come, to me his advent ought to take place.
Now the Lord's second advent takes place at the failing of the world, when we are able to say: 'But to me the world is crucified, and I to the world.' But if such a failing of the world finds this man in the upper rooms of the house — so that his manner of life is in heaven — then shall be destroyed the bodily and visible temple, the bodily law, the bodily Pasch and the visible Pasch, the bodily unleavened bread and the visible unleavened bread, and (I dare to say) the temporal Christ, as Christ was to Paul before he believed; because in him for whom the world fails, Christ is eternal. To this man belong the spiritual temple, the spiritual law, the spiritual Pasch too, since Christ is once slain; this man feasts on unleavened bread not from earthly grain, but from the grain of righteousness.
Therefore to this man there comes the presence of wisdom, the presence of virtue and righteousness, the presence of redemption; for Christ indeed once died for the sins of the people, but daily redeems the sins of the people. 'And when you shall hear of battles and rumors of battles.' The Lord, being asked when the destruction of the temple would be and what would be the sign of his advent, teaches concerning the signs, but thinks the time not to be disclosed. But Matthew added a third question, so that both the time of the temple's destruction and the sign of the advent and the consummation of the age might be inquired of by the disciples; Luke thought it sufficiently understood concerning the consummation of the age, if it were discussed concerning the Lord's advent.
Now of these heavenly words no one is a witness more than we, whom the end of the world has found. For how many battles and what rumors of battles have we heard! The Huns rose against the Alans, the Alans against the Goths, the Goths against the Taifals and Sarmatians; we too, exiles of our homeland in Illyricum, were made the banishment of the Goths, and still there is no end. What famine for all, what plague alike of oxen and of men and of the rest of the cattle, so that pestilence has made even us, who have not endured war, equal to those defeated by war! Therefore, since we are at the setting of the age, certain sicknesses of the world go before. The sickness of the world is famine, the sickness of the world is pestilence, the sickness of the world is persecution.
But there are also other wars which the Christian man endures — the battles of diverse desires and the conflicts of pursuits, and the domestic enemies far heavier than those from without. Now avarice goads, now lust inflames, now fear terrifies, now anger drives, now ambition stirs, now the spiritual forces of wickedness which are in the heavenly places attempt to terrify. And so the mobile affection of the wavering soul is pressed as it were by certain battles and shaken by certain earthquakes. But the stronger man says: 'If camps should stand against me, my heart shall not fear; if a battle should rise up against me, in this will I hope.' He stands in the battle-line, presenting his breast to meet the foe;
even if some Goliath should rise up, cruel and lofty, yet while the rest fear, he rises up humble, like David, casting away the arms of the earthly king, taking up the lighter weapons of faith, and hurling the javelin of pure confession with a triple cord, he wounds the impudence of the persecutor, despiser of threats, heedless of the powers. He too is fit, in whom Christ may speak. In one place Christ speaks, in another the Father, in another the Spirit of the Father. These do not disagree but accord. What one speaks, the three speak, because the voice of the Trinity is one. To this victor, who has slain his Goliath with the foe's own sword, while he receives death for Christ, the maidens run to meet him as the aliens are put to flight — those maidens, that is, like eagles, saying:
'Saul has slain his thousands, David his ten thousands.' This is a sign that the victors of the world are preferred to its princes. Indeed, when the kings are dead, the martyrs succeed to the kingdom of heavenly grace with everlasting honor, and those become suppliants, these patrons. There is also another sword of Goliath, another weapon of the devil — namely the speech of the heretics — which the man who knows how to sing the psalms snatches up, that he may conquer his adversary, hearing of these wars yet not suffering, nor restless and moved by any wind of doctrine, knowing no hunger of the word, satisfied with the richness of the heavenly Scripture, who fears not to challenge the heretic resounding with empty cries. Then let him who is weak wait, lest he prejudice the rest by an unequal encounter.