Pharaoh therefore harnessed his chariots, and took all his army with him, and he took six hundred chariots and all the cavalry of the Egyptians, and armed men in them all; he took up arms, he snatched his chariots, he went forth, he pressed on, he raved. He prepared to announce to the fleeing what disasters, what terrors he had promised to their forefathers. Terrible he stood, that he might fall; trembling he had come, that he might perish. On went the ill-trusting multitude with gleaming arms, the throng surpassing all bounds, the host outstripping its own armament. The rolling chariots turned light with precious flashings, and the fires spread over the poles blaze forth from the flashing reins. Amid flames there lived an army that was destined to perish in the waves.
A terrible splendour rose upon the helmets, and the flame, kindled to a ruddy glow, flashed with gleaming, jewelled rays. The light was strewn over the open plains, and the far-stretched reaches of the hidden roads grew red with the poured-out radiance. The serene view of men's eyes swims, and the crimson brightness of the sun blushes before those paler rays. This showy condemnation had outshone the daylight, and the crests, brazen with gleaming scales, radiated the splendour of light. Learn what sort of man might come running—one who had come to fight against God. But Moses, after the wondrous displays of the powers of heaven and earth, was commanded also to stretch out his hand over the sea, and to demonstrate the might of the Lord amid the billows.
So the glorious Moses trod the bosom of the avenging deep, and amid the murmuring roar of the whistling waves he entered the muttering storms. He drove together the masses with their swimming foam, and, sporting over the flood, he led away the whirlpools of the storms heaped up in the billows as the waters moved apart. He shuddered at the blow of the oncoming wave, and his hand feared the striking sea. The divine host snatched its passage through the parted waters, and opened the beaten gate of the avenging sea. It enters, it goes forth, it closes. He whom Justice could not know—for him even the sea learned to serve. That furious enemy follows, inflamed by an inescapable doom, and with blazing spirits trampled the avenging paths.
The swelling billow bent its locks in curling waves, and among the liquid walls and fragile props it invited the guilty living man with flattering sounds. Amid its steady motions the anxious storm hung poised, and amid its unmoving assaults the punishment stood suspended. But when Pharaoh rashly entered, the waves return, the sea joins together, and the waters, dashed against themselves with mingled crashings, are bound fast with brawling foam. At command the sea thrusts its limbs into the walling waters, and the seas, bent back upon themselves with recoiling waves, laid down their whirlpools curved into a downward plunge. The sea rages against the foes, the waves do battle. In itself the punishment had taken its stand, with itself the punishment moved on.
Now the water lifts up those who hang from the entangled chariots, now the greedy wave with gaping heaps twists them about. Now the deep upheaval spews forth those it had seized, now the changed submersion casts them down into the depths; it shows them to the underworld, it stretches them up to heaven; those flung in it scatters, those drawn down it swallows. The sea is broken, the deep is shattered, and the shores, shaken by its own assaults, dash inward with thundering waves. For what less did he take toward glory, through whom God willed to have His vengeance? Attend now, O Egypt once so furious: learn to perish, learn to sin, slay the just, scourge the captives. For what crime did you commit too little, you who, while snatching life from those newly born among the just, denied what is worse still—burial? SERMON XIV. On the same subject.
He who does not understand himself as man, neither acknowledges the Lord as his Maker. He who is ignorant of his own frailty, how shall he be able to know the divine benefits? He who has refused to hear the one who admonishes will lie subject to penance. He who despises the one who commands will grievously stir up against himself the indignation of the commander. He who has refused to obey God's precepts will remain liable to vengeance. For that pagan tyrant of Egypt resisted obeying the Lord with backward efforts, and had set his heart, laden with mad swellings, against him, odious in his own evils. For he was borne along in his fury with hair upraised, encompassed by the terror of arms, and with the outrage of sin waging war, he had become estranged from his own senses.
But because grievous envy suggests torments to itself, while it seethes at the goading of calumny, so he learned to be tortured as the punishment deserved. He is hurled into fury by his seething evils, and, growing strong in the savagery of his stubborn breast, he had raged in his own torments, doomed to perish. For while the Hebrew stock had flourished by the gift of blessing, he, kindled as if by the passion of a blind mind, crushed the trembling life of the just through toil. For the fruitful wombs of the mothers were cherished, and the offspring of the holy seed brought forth had increased. The more the Egyptians pressed them down, the more numerous they became. New the glory of holiness, new too are the ruins of the persecutor.
While the enemy exulted in his harsh batterings, all the more did the people of God grow by the very help of their affliction. For they were driven, laboring under harsh burdens, and their entrails, shut in by their labors, were forced under cruel lashings, being enslaved. A plan is devised against the foes: that he might proclaim a mourning of pitiless slaughter for the boys. The wretched are commanded to die before they had learned life; and they were being condemned who were not sought out to be slain. What groanings were there among the mothers, who through grief were bringing forth children to hasten to their own funeral rites? And how did the royal wrath condemn the fathers, to whom it was not even permitted to weep for their sons? For to this end he had ordered the males to be slain, that, as the people increased, by killing he might overcome the innocent. Alas, the grief!
the mothers were forced to bewail the burial while the child was yet in the womb, and before she had beheld her newborn, the pitiable mother bewailed the deaths that were to fall. But while, as the savagery grew strong with unending bruisings, they were battered, and a hard succession of torments entangled them with dreadful horrors, they knocked at heaven, bewailing their life in silence with a fearful murmur. For they murmured with silent griefs in their fear, and their breasts, shut in by wounds, they pressed down with dark sorrows. What sort of deaths were those of the murmurers, who dared not even entrust their voices to such sorrows? Consider with what tears, with what showers of the eyes, one could burst forth, who was not even allowed to weep in grief. At last the Lord, struck without outcry, heard, and heaven knew the message of grief that had no voice.
For the glorious Moses is sent, who, by requiting the wounds, might repay that which the Egyptian had inflicted. And taking up the rod, mistress of miracles, God entered in through a man to do battle. The powers of God pass into the power of a man, and Moses without care bore the heavenly offices in his rod. The enemy is compelled to listen patiently, and, hardened in his own evils, he is made such that his torments were kept in step with his own paces. For no guilty man could die before he was tortured, and truth's outcome is brought forth no sooner than after he has been led to the ruin of vengeance's punishment. So too the tyrannical error had taken hold, that, the ranks being numbered, he might have found one whom punishment might torment.
The royal treachery, unfolded upon itself, falls, and, growing cold as it exhausted itself in its own sentences, it feared those whom it held. So Moses, that craftsman of miracles, goes forth, and, about to lead the peoples of God away from their foes, he was appointed leader of the columns in the desert. For they were led through the dry places of the plains, and, advancing through the pure regions of the way, they were kept safe under the Lord's guidance. And drawing near to unknown shores, it repents the enemy that he has let the peoples go, so that his own doom of death might find him out. Straightway he rises up, kindled with fire, armed with ardour; the power doomed to die shuts up with itself its own snare. Once more he had risen up to his own destruction, doomed to perish. Chariots are fitted with firmer four-horse teams, that swift to punishment they might hasten to their own ruin.
So they were borne along, encompassed by the terrors of arms, that the Egyptian din might perhaps threaten them. Israel hears the murmur of the foes growing louder, and, troubled by the crash of the wheels, lost its boldness in fear. For learn what sort of foes they were, whom even Moses himself seemed to dread. At once the seas, struck by the powers of the rod, vanished, and the sea, disturbed against its own laws, is blocked by the chariots of captivity. The waves are raised up with the hands set aside, and the waters were dried up upon the moist flint. Prompt he enters, animated by insolent snares, and secure in dangers he followed them through every peril. He enters trusting, as if for him too the waves had been servile through fear. It pleases him to turn back, but now it is not even permitted to turn back.
The waters are commanded to celebrate their own outcomes, and, their powers unbound, the seas took up their commanded office upon those returning. What now, O treacherous Pharaoh? Fair-seeming you were hastening to death. Where do you think you are going, unjust foe? They do not die by the wound with which you struck. For to your punishments no toil is proclaimed, no cloud of swords is rained down, for there is nothing grievous that you might feel. For your destruction one single rod has been kept in store. SERMON XV. On the subject above. When the people of Israel, long since forgetful of the divine benefits, snatched by the heavenly arm from the servitude of the tyrant's power, had crossed the depths of the sea with dry foot, and the walls of the waters, curbed, hung suspended, its own ferocity gave the most savage tyrant to drink with its greatest depths.
There he perished with all his own, he who before hurrying on, girded for war, that he might take the innocent captive. With the waves arched over, amid the perils a wall of billows is set up, and God enters in with His peoples, about to show the victory of salvation. The wave is trodden by the footsteps of the multitudes, and there is no moisture on their soles. Pharaoh enters, mad and blind, doomed by his own counsel to perish in the waves. At last it crushed with the fury of its bubbling waters those whom, inspired, it knew to be furious.
But he understood that he could not escape, since the Lord God gave passage to His peoples; and while in the secret masses the curbed waters raged, the waves of burial roll back upon themselves for Pharaoh, and a place is prepared for his armies, and the Lord led His own people unharmed to the shore, while Pharaoh with his own men remained sunk in the sea by shipwreck. The people of God furrowed the wave in the marine field, and the shipwreck provoked Pharaoh to a death close at hand. Moses stands beside the sea, and with his cries he rouses heaven, because he saw Pharaoh joining battle with him. And the Lord said: 'Moses, Moses, why do you cry out? Now you rejoice over your enemies. Moses, Moses, why do you shout?'
'I have measured heaven with a span, and grasped the world in my fist; and do you suppose that I am not fighting with Pharaoh?' The people enters the sea, and the devil arms Pharaoh for shipwreck; the Lord led the Hebrews unharmed to the bank. For Pharaoh with his six hundred chosen chariots he left drowned in the sea. Pharaoh the presumptuous enters the sea, as though the waves were saying to him: 'A safe coming to you, traveller! Great is it that you have come forth, presumptuous one; great is it that sweat overtakes you in your running. This is more magnificent still, that the cold overtakes you now in your swimming. You have come to fight with us; just now we carried the people of God to the bank, and so with you we return to battle.'
'For you we make ready the field of the deep, and to your soul we bring destruction. Come, secure, never again to return to your own, whence the waves of the deceiving deep are fed with tranquillity—the deep that arms the four-footed beasts, nor are the swift wanting whom wrath had kindled against the foes.' By Your command, O Lord, the people of the Israelites, fleeing the rage of Egypt with Moses as leader, at last escaped happy and free, so that even to the sea's boundary that fury itself came to naught. The people stands amid the discordant waves, and, hemmed in by the terrors of arms, sought its flight among the billows. The cleft sea was scourged by the prophetic blow, and the rod rebuked the beaten waters. The secret of the deep fell silent, fixed in a steady, glassy structure; the fabric stood, and the sea went to meet the foes, about to do battle.
The sword of the shipwrecked cruelty swam abroad; the presumptuous man enters the sea with the swirling hooves of his four-horse chariots, whence they suffer violence. And behold, suddenly the wave, as if awakened from sleep—a grim image of the dreadful night, mournful against the Egyptians—untimely binds fast the boundaries; the adverse wave prepares its bosom to receive the enemies of the people, and with curling billows it overwhelmed the ranks in the morning watch. 'Ho there, traveller of the waters, why do you suffer the violence of the waves? No one fights, yet you perish, traveller. Strike the waves, if you can. Slay the billows, if you prevail. O the concord of the waters!' It sank the army of the Egyptians, and their fury went astray. The people of Israel crosses the sea with dry feet, and Pharaoh follows, seated in his chariots.
about to be drowned in the billows. The wave is trodden by footsteps, it is beaten by the hooves of the four-horse chariots. And gladly the wave endured the slaughter of its adversaries, for whom it was procuring shipwreck. The tyrant enters, hemmed in by a multitude of armed men, and over the yielding waves he dared to guide the steps of his chariots and horses. O most impious darkness of blindness! Peter with Christ wavered, and had sunk; and Pharaoh thought that he alone would cross over. But to the sinking apostle a hand is stretched out by Christ, and he is lifted up; Pharaoh, deserted by Christ, is devoured by the raging waves. Who would not be in such turmoil? Here the water foams, there the arms flash. Here the sound of the waters, there the clash of arms.
So God is wont to work, so to be present, that where human counsel has failed, there the divine help may all the sooner intervene. Straightway, at the blow of the rod with Moses' hand upraised, the sea is broken, and the secrets of the deep are laid open. A shore comes to be where the deep had been. The wave, upturned, is turned back, and the shores are filled with corpses. For these the punishment was greater in death itself, in that, after their soul had been wrenched out by the avenging waters, they did not even deserve burial itself. Before all the rest Pharaoh went forth to the bank, but now, life being lost, no one set up a battle, and from the enemies came forth an entire victory. SERMON XVI. On Jonah. When Jonah was sent to preach destruction to the Ninevites, at once a wicked vanity put into him the counsel of flight;
and hastening he went down to Joppa, and took ship to flee to Tarshish, despising God, as though he could hide from the divine knowledge, and as if there were (which is not permitted) any region outside the orb of God. The whole world is a small place for God, since it is smaller than His arm—God who cannot let the fugitives from their own Author be hidden in any shadowy recesses, beneath whose gaze it is beheld trembling. No hidden place lies empty, but all things are occupied by their Author. Just as the most holy Isaiah declares that God holds all things within His fist, saying (Isa. XL, 12): 'He has measured the heaven with a span, He has comprehended it with His fist, and He has gathered the orb of the lands within the enclosure of His right hand.' And again: 'With His hand He occupies the world as a nest.'
As though he could hide from Him who occupies the orb of the lands in His fist, who holds fixed the bounds of the heavens, of the earth, and of the abyss, who shakes the world with murmuring thunders, when the heaven is cleft by the quivering fire. Whose power no one can flee, from whom nothing is hidden. And, to speak more expressly, whatever He does not look upon He yet sees. All things are naked to God, as He Himself testifies: 'I am a God at hand, and not a God afar off. If a man be hidden in secret places, shall I then not see him? Do I not fill heaven and earth?' (Jer. XXIII, 23, 24). For the prophet too rejoices, saying: 'The eyes of the Lord in every place behold the good and the evil' (Prov. XV, 3). And David says:
'What was imperfect in me Your eyes have seen, and in Your book all things are written' (Psal. CXXXVIII, 16). And again: 'Man looks on the outward appearance, but God on the heart' (I Reg. XVI, 7). And: 'All the churches shall know that I am God, the searcher of the reins and of the heart' (Apoc. II, 23). Therefore, to Him for whom the secrets of hearts are foreknown, there is no hiding-place which does not lie open to His gaze. Absent, He conquers all things, He who present is seen by none. In vain then did the most holy prophet, spurning God, flee with a deep resolve, he who was unwilling to flee without God as his companion; he thinks he has fled the One who follows joined to him, or rather goes before him.
And when he, thus boarding ship, had sailed guilty away from the God who was present, at the nod of the Divinity the abyss was straightway overturned, and, torn up from its beds by its streams, with upreared crest the seething foam cast its shadow. With the perils raging, the wood was pounded, and the gaping wave hesitated to swallow the mass with fiercest force. For the discord of the waves lashed the ship with the most repeated blows upon the fugitive. The deep bellows with its flood, and gnashing with billows it roars against the fugitive, and, with the barking waves, the swell of the deep, restless and turbid, curling at its head, went raving astray through the air. For a dreadful confusion had invaded the abyss. The deck too, with the sea brawling, is shaken and battered.
For the raging waves in varied strife gnashed against the fugitive, and rearing up they ran barking at the ship. The whole deep around the fugitive was without patience. And so under the turbid blows the keel trembled with whistling tongues. The sea, this way and that with beating billows, loosened the joinings of the planks. So then we read: 'And the Lord raised up a spirit in the sea, and there arose a great tempest in the sea, and the ship was in peril of being broken up' (Jonah I, 4). The sailors therefore express themselves not by voice alone, but by tears. Showers of tears, poured out with joined groaning, flow abundantly down their cheeks, and moisten copiously the whole region of the eyes. With hands too outstretched in supplication, they besought the various gods with pious voice.
So then all of them, seized, cast every weight into the deadly deep, sparing nothing, and vied in striving to overcome the perils—whether by losses or by prizes they might soften the swelling waves of the brawling deep; striving to conquer the danger, in their devotion they incur the loss. There too we read thus: 'And the sailors feared with a great fear, and they cried out every man to his neighbour, and they cast the vessels that were in the ship into the sea, that it might be lightened of them' (ibidem). This the wretched men did, weeping, who could not be safe even with their merchandise lost. More and more the ship was flooded by the densest billows and the hardest blows. But of these things the fugitive was ignorant.
For he was beneath the covering of the ship, steeping the members of his own body in sleep, a fugitive. To him the pilot came, an outcry having arisen, and, striking him, said: 'Why do you snore? Rise and call upon your Lord, that God may deliver us, and that we perish not' (ibid., 6). At last the guilty one is awakened by the pilot's striking, and is pointed out by the lot's declaring. The lot declares, the guilty one does not deny. What they were to do with such a man they were pondering. And when, roused, he had seen the keel roaring with tearful clamours, and the deep, with billows torn up from the bottom, arraigning him as its cause, and had marked how the sky was confounded against him with a black array, he asked, with the deep raving, to be cast forth by them. 'Take me,' he said, 'and cast me into the sea, and the sea shall be calm for you.'
'For I know that because of me this great tempest is upon you' (ibid., 12). But they, trembling to yield the just man to peril, strove to row back and to defer the voyage. But the harshness of the clamours would not be bent, nor did all that region wish to right the ship's balance. Therefore the yard-arm, trembling under the blow, was unmanageable, but the waves swelled all the more, raging far more, and, seized up, they struck at heaven. Heaven becomes deep to the sea, while the sea becomes near to heaven. Then indeed, with the waves crying back and brawling, the prophet is cast headlong.
And now a huge, devouring whale (Jonah II, 1), rising from the depths, hurried on, and, cleaving its course through the fiercest waves, understanding by the divine nod the prey cast down from the ship, drew it in with dreadful jaws, yet neither tore it with tooth nor slew it with a bite. Jonah is led down unharmed through the perils of the raging maw, blunted, into the deep belly, and is held captive, shut in the recesses of the innards for three days. Even then he bore the illustrious and excellent person of the Lord Christ, in that He was to search out the hidden things of the earth in His passion for the space of three days, as we read in the Gospel: 'An evil and adulterous generation,' He says, 'seeks a sign, and no sign shall be given it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah.'
'For as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so shall the Son of man also be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights' (Matth. XII, 39, 40). Here, however, He calmed the rugged perils of the deep, which were stirred by His command. With the gloom of sadness fleeing, the air cleared, and heaven becomes clean. With the perils appeased too, the keel sails over a serene marble; and cleaving the waves with a sail running before the moist breath of the wind, secure it sails on. The prophet, buried in the waters, is outside the waves; cleaving the waters, he is dry beneath the waters. But the monstrous size of the whale, which had shut the captive within the inner lodging of its innards, kept him exempt from its own digestion.
The sea-beast is consumed, because that which it carries in its own belly is denied to it. Though the whale be fattened, it hungers undigested. The rage of the belly, though sated, wasted the beast for three days. 'You are consumed by rawness, O beast. That which you hold is denied to you.' The seething monster, then, sailing through the vast expanse of the sea, pregnant and yet taking no food, brought forth undigested. Then the huge whale, laden with its meal, dry with fasting, at the command of its inmost Master hastened to the boundaries of the sea, cleaving the ranks of the waters with its swimming, and from the dark and black prison of its innards it brought forth the poured-out fugitive as prey, and poured him out upon the shore, unharmed, to the coast. SERMON XVII. On the man born blind. The mirror passes by, the mirror wipes clean.
For He Himself is the true mirror of the Father, who enlightens every man that comes into this world (John I, 9). Christ, I say, passes by as the mirror of the Father, and from the one who does not see He wipes clean the mirror of blindness. Christ passes by, coming from heaven, that all flesh might see Him, according to the prophetic voice of that blessed old man Simeon, who received the Word as an infant in his hands, and, at once beholding, said: 'Now You dismiss Your servant, O Lord, in peace, for my eyes have seen Your salvation' (Luke II, 29, 30). The blind man alone, then, had no means of seeing the mirror of the Father. And where was that faithful proclamation of the prophets:
'Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall hear. And the lame shall leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall be made plain' (Isa. XXXV, 5, 6)? And so the mirror of the blind man, and the face of the beggar, had as it were a certain closed case which covered his darkened face. That very case Christ unfastened, wiped clean the mirror, and in Christ the blind man beheld the mirror of the Father. A mighty medicine against nature! His eyes were not damaged, but wholly denied. He was blind by birth, not by mishap. And because the first man had been made luminous, but departed blinded by the serpent, he began to be born again, now believing though blind, because his corrupted nature had been feeble in body, lacking light from his seed, who did not blush at his own nakedness.
So the blind man sat by the public thoroughfare, clothed, naked in the straits of poverty, despoiled of his natural light: he sat, I say, and asked for nothing, sought no eye-salve from any physician. For what was against human nature undoubtedly had no need of a necessary medicine. The Craftsman came to the mirror of His image; He beheld the misery of the blind man sitting and suppliantly asking for alms. O miracle of divine power! What He looks upon He heals, what He visits He enlightens. At last the disciples ask, and say: 'Who sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?' (John IX, 2). The Lord said: 'Neither did this man sin, nor his parents; but that the glory of God might appear in him. For I must work the works of My Father,'
(ibid., 3, 4). All things, then, were held under sin, under a harsh punishment. The blind, the lame, the deaf, the blear-eyed, the dead were held, I say, under the custody of the first punishment. There came a Deliverer who had been the Judge. He beheld the blind man and he saw; He touched the deaf man and he heard; He cleansed the leper and he shone; He raised the lame man and he ran; He descended to the dead man, and from death He rose, and now the penal prisons began to be emptied, the gates of hell broken by the bars of the wood on which the Lord of heaven hung. Now therefore He who made the orb of the lands opened the orbs of the blind. O turning Potter! He was turned by a word, and sight was granted to the blind. For the potter, when he winds up vessels to be formed from the clay, touches with his feet the whirling wheel.
And our Potter saw the empty wheels of the blind man's eyes, and touched them, not with foot, but with voice. He touched them by moving, and formed the eyes by laying on clay. What is this? Whence such an eye-salve? Not an eye-salve from the pigments of herbs. Not one ground in the mortar by the labors of physicians. A man from clay, an eye-salve from mud. For just as the goldsmith does not renew a broken necklace with silver's appearance, nor the silversmith recast silver vessels from the metal of gold: so also our Craftsman-Potter, the Lord Christ, the vessel which He made from clay, He remade from mud. And from that whence He formed the first eyes, thence He renewed the second eyes. Which is the greater glory—to form the orb of the sun, or to reform the eyes of the man born blind?
He made the sun to be enlightened while sitting on His throne; He granted the blind man to see while walking through the streets of the age. And so the brightness came unasked, and without the labor of prayers the natural blindness departed. He is sent to the pool, he washes his eyes, he receives brightness, and he is led to the contest. O enlightened mirror! Before, he could not fight and conquer, unless he adored Christ with enlightened eyes. The mirror of the blind man was enlightened, and the Jews were covered with darkness. They will not see in another's light: therefore the proud could not behold the true light in God. The wrestling-ground is made ready after the light, and the Author of light does not desert the contest of His enlightened servant. O delightful wrestling-ground, the battle of brightness against the darkness of blindness!