In readiness for war, the watches of the soldiers are always distributed, so that nothing may be permitted to ambushes, nothing lie open to treacheries. A sudden enemy is exceedingly most destructive; for he either forestalls the unaware, or takes the incautious by surprise, or crushes the sleeping. Hence it is that Christ our King, before the ages, throughout the whole night of the world, has admonished His soldiers by the prescribed changes of the watches against the most subtle guile of the devil — that is, of the ancient enemy — against the hidden assaults of vices, against the ambushes of crimes rushing upon us, against the scandals which arise for us from various causes, against the temptations of the present life, against the burning battle-lines of worldly afflictions, admonishing thus: 'Watch and pray, that you enter not into temptation' (Matthew XXVI, 41).
And establishing how a watch should be kept, He added: 'And if He comes in the second watch, and if He comes in the third watch, and finds it so; blessed are those servants whom, when He comes, He shall find watching' (Luke 12:39, 37). And blessed indeed, because those who keep watch and forestall the snares of the enemy will glory in the coming of their Lord. Yet today the Lord has roused up the very watches of our leaders against the scandals, and has armed them, saying to the disciples: 'It is impossible that scandals should not come' (Luke 17). That is, it is impossible that enemies should not come. And first, brethren, it befits us to know what these scandals are. The kinds of scandal are diverse, and the first are those which the deceit of the devil brings forth.
The second are those which human craftiness engenders. The third are those which our own suspicious and incautious nature brings forth from within us. And those from the devil are the ones that deceive by their appearance, that hold out good things while they bring in evil: as that word to Adam, when it took away from us what is human while promising what is divine (Genesis 3). And that word spoken through Peter: 'This shall not be unto Thee, Lord' (Matthew 16). He strives to empty out the triumph of the Cross, while he feigns to burn with excessive love. For when the Lord was speaking of the glory of His Passion, Peter answered: 'This shall not be unto Thee, Lord.' How sweet the serpent's venom: it makes the king's own soldier deny his victory sooner than the servant himself would deny his Lord. Whence the Lord sends the servant behind Him, and sends back the scandal to its author:
saying to Peter: 'Go behind Me'; and to the devil: 'Satan, thou art a scandal to Me' (Matthew 16:23). And Peter truly goes behind the Lord, because in order to follow Him to heaven he willingly ascended the Cross. But that too is such a scandal, which he wrought against the Jews. For a stone laid broad for the steadying of one's steps he furrowed into a total stumbling-block, and made the offense harsh, and turned the rock of the whole foundation into a scandal, so that it might be a ruin to the wretched. 'Behold,' He says, 'I place in Zion a stone of offense and a rock of scandal' (Isaiah 8:14). Hence the Psalmist begs in anxious supplication: 'Keep me from the snare which they have laid for me, and from the scandals of them that work iniquity' (Psalm 140:9). And because he had leaped over the offense, had conquered the scandal, he thus glories:
'Thou hast exalted me upon a rock, and hast led me, for Thou art become my hope' (Psalm 60:3-4). We have spoken of the first kind of scandal; let us speak also of the second, which we said comes from human craftiness. Balaam the diviner cast a scandal against the people of Israel (Numbers 31; Apocalypse 2:14), when he met the warriors, not with iron-clad men, but with girls decked out in every allurement, so that he might turn arms into wantonness, change triumph into infamy, and summon avengers into guilt upon guilt, and, in sum, profane all their holiness through baseness. Hence also Moses branded him with this sentence when he punished him. 'And Balaam,' he says, 'the diviner, slay ye, for he cast a scandal before the sons of Israel.' Jeroboam devised a scandal (3 Kings
12), who by a wretched fiction set up golden calves as gods for the people, so that the people might not seek the living God, nor the true temple, nor the divine law, nor legitimate kings, nor ancestral rites: thus the people, enslaved to error, commits a scandal according to the Apostle (1 Corinthians 8), when someone eats things sacrificed to idols as though they would do no harm, and reckons that senseless stones and wooden gods, which can neither sanctify nor pollute anything, ought by such a deed to be despised. But what that one supposes to be an example of faith becomes for the ignorant an occasion of error, because it provokes those who know not, not to contempt, but to worship, and makes what is a mockery of religion seem to the unknowing a banquet of religion, while he who knows destroys them in his zeal for derision. Whence the Apostle well concludes and lays open.
'And through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ died' (1 Corinthians 8). The third kind of scandal is that which is engendered in us from our own senses, when we are deceived by our eyes, when we are led astray by our hearing, are captivated by smell, and corrupted by taste. Whence Eve was thus wounded in taste by the forbidden and deadly food, thus in sight. 'And the woman saw,' it says, 'that the tree was good for eating, and pleasant to the eyes to behold, and fair to look upon' (Genesis 3). Well then did the Lord add that the very senses cause scandal, saying: 'If thine eye, or thy hand, cause thee to be scandalized, cut it off and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to come to life without an eye and a hand, than to enter into gehenna with thy whole body' (Matthew 5:18; Mark 9).
And although the Lord has commanded us thus to cut off our lapses and vices, not our members; nevertheless, if Eve, the mother of the human race, had done this, she would better have come to life without an eye and a hand, than have sent all her lamentable posterity into death. We must therefore beware, brethren, lest we cause a scandal to others, and lest we ourselves suffer it when another causes it. A scandal is that which offends the senses, which disturbs the mind, which confounds the purity of the understanding. A scandal is that which made a devil out of an angel, which turned an apostle into a betrayer, which brought sin into the world, which led man down to death. Hear the Lord saying: 'Woe to the world because of scandals' (Matthew 16).
A scandal tempts the saints, wears out the cautious, casts down the incautious, confounds all things, throws all men into turmoil: and although in the present passage the Lord speaks of the scandal of His own Passion, and they point out Judas, through whom came that very scandal of scandals; nevertheless, lest anyone should fall into this, He admonished, saying: 'It is impossible that scandals should not come; woe, however, to him through whom they come. It is better for him that a millstone be hung about his neck and he be cast into the sea, than that he should scandalize one of these little ones' (Luke 15). Why not a stone, but a millstone: because the millstone, while it grinds the wheat, while it pours out the flour, while it separates the bran from the fine meal, supplies bread to those who labor devoutly.
Rightly then, to him who chooses to be a minister of scandal rather than of peace, a millstone is bound about his neck, so that that which ought to have drawn him to life may draw him to death: because he has turned the senses given for life into a scandal of death, by persuading men to see one thing, hear another, feel another, taste another, than what was in Christ, than what was in the knowledge of salvation. Hence the cornerstone (Isaiah 28:16), hence the stone of help (1 Kings 7:12), hence the stone cut without hands (Daniel 2:45), which is Christ, he so carries the little ones about and draws them to scandal, that they make not the bread of life, but the bread of tears and of sorrow, as the prophet testifies, saying: 'Ye who eat the bread of sorrow' (Psalm 126:4).
Rightly then, as He said elsewhere, 'Let an ass's millstone be bound about his neck' (Matthew 18:6), and let him take his punishment from that whence he took also his understanding, and let him who refused to be compared with men who savor the things above be made equal to senseless beasts of burden.