Epistle – 1 Corinthians x. 6‒13
Brethren, let us not covet evil things as they also coveted. Neither become idolaters as some of them, as it is written: “The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.” Neither let us commit fornication, as some of them committed fornication and there fell in one day three and twenty thousand. Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them tempted and perished by the serpents. Neither murmur, as some of them murmured and were destroyed by the destroyer. Now all these things happened to them in figure, and they are written for our correction upon whom the ends of the world are come. Therefore he that thinks himself to stand, let him take heed lest he fall. Let no temptation take hold of you, but such as is human and, God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able to bear, but will make also with temptation issue that you may be able to bear it.
Thanks be to God.
Dom Prosper Guéranger:
“I have great sadness,” cries out the Apostle of the Gentiles, as he thought of the malediction which was about to fall on the Jews: “Continual sorrow have I in my heart, for I wished myself to be an anathema from Christ for my brethren, who are my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites to whom belongs the adoption of children, and the glory, and the covenant, and the giving of the Law, and the service (the worship of God prescribed by Himself) and the promises; whose are the Fathers, and of whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is over all things, God blessed forever!” (Romans ix. 2‒5). But now they are gone astray by their own fault. They see nothing, they understand nothing (Isaias vi. 9; Matthew xiii. 14, 15). The royal banquet of the Scriptures on which their Fathers feasted (Matthew iv. 4) is now turned by them into an occasion of error. They have made those Scriptures a snare for their own destruction, darkness covers their understanding, and chastisement for all future ages is their own making (Psalms lxviii. 23, 24).
Gentiles! You that have been substituted for those broken branches and are grafted on the stem of the Covenant, (Romans xi. 17), learn a lesson from their fall. God, who has shown you so much and so great gratuity of mercy, and that at the very time He was inflicting on them the chastisements they so richly merited, — no, this good God will not allow His loving designs on you to be frustrated against your own will. If you are faithful to the call of His grace, He will be faithful to you and preserve you from temptations which you could not resist, or He will so watch the combat that His divine help will make your soul rise superior to the trial, and thus in every temptation you will find not defeat, but the merit of a victory, all the more glorious, as it seemed so much above the power of human strength to bear. And yet, never forget that the same causes which brought about the destruction of the Jews would also lead you to ruin. They fell because of their unbelief (Romans xi. 20). You who once had no faith and yet God showed mercy to you (Romans xi. 30) — it is by faith that you now are what you are. Be not, therefore, high-minded with self-complacency but remember how that God, who broke off the natural branches from the glorious tree, will not spare you if you cease to be faithful. And while you do well to admire His mercy, you do not wisely if you forget His inexorable justice (Romans xi. 20‒22).
Well, therefore, does our Mother the Church instruct us in today’s Epistle as to the lamentable antecedents of the Jew. She tells us of that list of sins and chastisements which gradually led on to the final crime and total ruin of the apostate nation. We who live in what the Church calls the “evening of the world” have this great advantage: that we can profit by what the past ages have experienced. The Holy Spirit had no other end in view when He would have the history of the ancient people written. He would have the future ages there learn lessons of salvation: by the various episodes of that history, which form so many groups of prophetic events, He would show us the economy of God’s providence in His government of the world and His Church. Founded, as she has been, by her Divine Spouse in immutable truth, and maintained by the Holy Ghost in unfailing and ever increasing holiness, the Church has nothing to fear of that which happened to the Synagogue — we mean, of that total wreck which the Liturgy brings forward for our consideration today: no, the ruin of the Jews is a prophetic image of the destruction of the world (Matthew xxiv. 3) (which will have rejected the Church) — not of the Church herself, who will then ascend to her Lord, perfected, as she will then be in love and holiness by the trials endured in those latter days (Apocalypse xxii. 17). But the assurance of salvation granted to the Bride of the Son of God does not extend to her children, taken either individually or collectively, that is, men and nations. On each one of us it is incumbent that we meditate on the sad fate which befell Jerusalem, as also on what happened ages before to those ancestors of the Jewish people, that scarce one of those who were living when Moses led them out of Egypt lived to enter into the Promised Land.
And yet, as the Apostle argues, they were all journeying in the path of life protected by the mysterious cloud beneath which Divine Wisdom shaded them by day, and served them as a pillar of fire by night (Wisdom x. 17). Led on by Moses, who was a type of the future divine Head of the Christian people, they had all passed through the sea. All of them thus baptised in that symbolic cloud and in those saving waters which had engulfed their foes, just as the water of the Christian font destroys the sins of them that are washed in it — all of them were fed by the same spiritual food, and all drank at the same holy source which issued from the rock, which was Christ. Yet were there very few out of all those thousands with whom God was pleased (1 Corinthians x. 1‒6). But how much more grievous would the sins of Christians be, who are blessed with the resplendent and solid realities of the Law of Grace, than were the evil desires, and idolatry, and fornication, and murmurings of the Israelites, who had but the figures and foreshadowings of our privileges?
Gospel – Luke xix. 41‒47
At that time, when Jesus drew near to Jerusalem, seeing the city, He wept over it, saying, “If you also had known, and that in this your day, the things that are to your peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, and your enemies will cast a trench about you, and compass you round, and straiten you on every side, and beat you flat to the ground, and your children who are in you: and they will not leave in you a stone upon a stone, because you have not known the time of your visitation.” And entering into the Temple, He began to cast out them that sold in it, and them that bought, saying to them, “It is written, My House is the House of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.” And He was teaching daily in the Temple.
Praise to you, O Christ.