Epistle – Romans vi. 3‒11
Brethren, all we who are baptised in Christ Jesus are baptised in His death. For we are buried together with Him by baptism unto death; that as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we will also be in the likeness of His resurrection. Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Him, that the body of sin may be destroyed, to the end that we may serve Him no longer. For he that is dead is justified from sin. Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we will live also together with Christ, knowing that Christ, rising again from the dead, dies now no more, death will no more have dominion over Him. For, in that He died to sin, He died once: but in that He lives, He lives unto God. So do you also reckon that you are dead indeed to sin, but alive unto, God, in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Dom Prosper Guéranger:
The Masses of the Sundays after Pentecost have so far given us but once a passage from St Paul’s Epistles. It has been to Saints Peter and John that the preference has been until now given of addressing the Faithful at the commencement of the sacred Mysteries. It may be that the Church during these weeks, which represent the early days of the apostolic preaching, has intended by this to show us the disciple of faith and the disciple of love as being the two most prominent in the first promulgation of the new Covenant which was committed, at the onset, to the Jewish people. At that time Paul was but Saul the persecutor, and was putting himself forward as the most rabid opponent of that Gospel which, later on, he would so zealously carry to the furthest parts of the Earth. If his subsequent conversion made him become an ardent and enlightened apostle even to the Jews, it soon became evident that the house of Jacob was not the mission that was to be specially the one of his apostolate (Galatians ii. 9). After publicly announcing his faith in Jesus the Son of God, after confounding the synagogue by the weight of his testimony (Acts ix. 20, 22), he waited in silence for the termination of the period accorded to Judah for the acceptance of the covenant. He withdrew into privacy (Galatians i. 17‒22), waiting for the Vicar of the Man-God, the Head of the apostolic college, to give the signal for the vocation of the Gentiles and open, in person, the door of the Church to these new children of Abraham (Acts x.)
But Israel has too long abused God’s patience. The day of the ungrateful Jerusalem’s repudiation is approaching (Isaias l. 1), and the divine Spouse, after all this long forbearance with His once chosen but now faithless Bride, the Synagogue, has gone to the Gentile nations. Now is the time for the Doctor of the Gentiles to speak. He will go on speaking and preaching to them,to his dying day. The will not cease proclaiming the word to them until he has brought them back, and lifted them up to God, and consolidated them in faith and love. He will not rest until he has led this once poor despised Gentile world to the nuptial union with Christ (2 Corinthians xi. 2), yes, to the full fecundity of that divine union of which, on the 24th and last Sunday after Pentecost, we will hear him thus speaking: “We cease not to pray for you, and to beg that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will, in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that you may walk worthy of God, in all things pleasing Him; being fruitful in every good work. Giving thanks to God the Father, who has made us worthy to be partakers of the lot of the Saints in light, and has translated us into the kingdom of His beloved Son” (Colossians i. 9‒13. Epistle for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost).
It is to the Romans that are addressed today’s inspired instructions of the great Apostle. For the reading of these admirable Epistles of Saint Paul, the Church, during the Sundays after Pentecost, will follow the order in which they stand in the canon of Scripture: the epistle to the Romans, the two to the Corinthians, then those to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, will be read to us in their turns. They make up the sublimest correspondence that was ever written, a correspondence where we find Paul’s whole soul giving us both precept and example how best we may love our Lord: “I beseech you,” so he speaks to his Corinthians, “be followers of me, as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians iv. 16; xi. 1; Philippians iii. 17; 1 Thessalonians i. 6).
Indeed, the Gospel (1 Thessalonians i. 5), the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians iv. 20), the Christian life, is not an affair of mere words. Nothing is less speculative than the science of salvation. Nothing makes it penetrate so deep in the souls of men as the holy life of him that teaches it. It is for this reason that the Christian world counts him alone as Apostle or Teacher who, in his one person, holds the double teaching of doctrine and works. Thus, Jesus, the Prince of Pastors (1 Peter v. 4), manifested eternal truth to men, not alone by the words uttered by His divine lips, but likewise by the works He did during His life on Earth. So too, the Apostle, having become a pattern of the flock (1 Peter v. 3), shows us all in his own person what marvellous progress a faithful soul may make under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of sanctification.
Let us, then, be attentive to every word that comes from this mouth, ever open to speak to the whole Earth (2 Corinthians vi. 11), but at the same time let us fix the eyes of our soul on the works achieved by our Apostle, and let us walk in his footsteps (Philippians iii. 16). He lives in his Epistles. He abides and continues with us all, as he himself assures us, for the furtherance and joy of our faith (Philippians i. 25, 26).
Nor is this all. If we value, as we ought, the example and the teaching of this father of the Gentiles (1 Corinthians iv. 14, 15), we must not forget his labours, and sufferings, and solicitudes, and the intense love he bore towards all those who never had seen, or were to see, his face in the flesh (Colossians ii. 1‒5). Let us make him the return of dilating our hearts with affectionate admiration of him. Let us love not only the light, but him also who brings it to us. Yes, and all them that, like him, have been getting for us the exquisite brightness from the treasures of God the Father and his Christ. It is the recommendation made so feelingly by Saint Paul himself (2 Corinthians vi. 11‒13; Hebrews xiii. 7). It is the intention willed by God Himself, by the fact of His confiding to men like ourselves the charge of sharing with Him the imparting this heavenly light to us. Eternal Wisdom does not show herself directly here below. She is hid, with all her treasures, in the Man-God (Colossians ii. 3) she reveals herself by Him (1 Corinthians i. 24), and by the Church (Ephesians iii. 10), which is the mystical body of that Man-God (Ephesians i. 23), and by the chosen members of that Church, the Apostles (1 Corinthians ii. 6, 7). We cannot either love or know our Lord Jesus Christ, save by and in Him (1 Corinthians ii. 8), but we cannot love or understand Jesus unless we love and understand His Church (John xv. 14; Luke x. 16).
Now in this Church, the glorious aggregate of the elect both of Heaven and Earth, we should especially love and venerate those who are in a special manner associated with our Lord’s sacred humanity in making the divine Word manifest — that Word who is the one centre of our thoughts both in this world and in the world to come. According to this standard, who was there that had a stronger claim than Paul, to the veneration, gratitude, and love of the Faithful? Who of the Prophets and holy Apostles went deeper into the mystery of Christ? (Ephesians iii. 4, 5). Who was there like him, in revealing to the world the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Christ Jesus? (2 Corinthians iv. 6). Was there ever a more perfect teacher, or a more eloquent interpreter, of the life of union — we mean of that marvellous union which brings regenerated humanity into the embrace of God, union which continues and repeats the life of the Word Incarnate in each Christian? To him, the last and least of the saints, (as he humbly calls himself,) was given the grace of proclaiming to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ. To him was confided the mission of teaching to all nations the mystery of creation —mystery, hidden so long in God, as the secret to be, at some distant day, revealed to men, and would show them what was the one only meaning of the world’s history— the mystery, that is, of the manifestation, through the Church, of the infinite Wisdom which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Ephesians iii. 8‒11).
For, as the Church is neither more nor less than the body and mystical complement of the Man-God, so, in Saint Paul’s mind, the formation and growth of the Church are but the sequel of the Incarnation. They are but the continued development of the mystery shown to the angelic hosts when this Word Incarnate made Himself visible to them in the crib at Bethlehem. After the Incarnation God was the better known of his Angels. Though ever the selfsame in His own unchanging essence, yet, to them He appeared grander and more magnificent in the brilliant reflection of His infinite perfections as seen in the Flesh of His Word. So, too, although no increase in them was possible, and their plenitude was their fixed measure, yet the created perfection and holiness of the Man-God have their fuller and clearer revelation in proportion as the marvels of perfection and holiness which dwell in Him, as in their source, are multiplied in the world.
Starting from Him, flowing ever from His fullness (John i. 16), the stream of grace and truth (John i. 14) ceaselessly laves each member of the body of the Church. Principle of spiritual growth, mysterious sap, it has its divinely appointed channels. And these unite the Church more closely to her Head than the nerves and vessels which convey movement and life to the extremities of our body, unite its several parts to the head which directs and governs the whole frame. But, just as in the human body the life of the head and of the members is one, giving to each of them the proportion and harmony which go to make up the perfect man, so in the Church there is but one life — the life of the Man-God, of Christ the head, forming His mystical Body and perfecting, in the Holy Ghost, its several members (Ephesians iv. 12‒16). The time will come when this perfection will have attained its full development. Then will human nature, united with its divine Head in the measure and beauty of the perfect age due to Christ, appear on the throne of the Word (Ephesians ii. 6), an object of admiration to the Angels and of delight to the most Holy Trinity. Meanwhile, Christ is being completed in all things and in all men (Ephesians i. 23), as heretofore at Nazareth, Jesus is still growing (Luke ii. 40), and these His advancings are gradual fresh manifestations of the beauty of infinite Wisdom (Luke ii. 52).
The holiness, the sufferings, and then the glory of the Lord Jesus — in a word, His life continued in His members (2 Corinthians iv. 10, 11) — this is Saint Paul’s notion of the Christian life: a notion most simple and sublime which, in the Apostle’s mind, resumes the whole commencement, progress and consummation of the work of the Spirit of love in every soul that is sanctified. We will find him, later on, developing this practical truth of which the Epistle read to us today merely gives the leading principle. After all, what is Baptism, that first step made on the road which leads to Heaven — what else is it but the neophyte’s incorporation with the Man-God, who died once to sin, that he might for ever live in God his Father? On Holy Saturday, after having assisted at the blessing of the font, we had read to us a similar passage from another Epistle of Saint Paul (Colossians iii. 1‒4) which put before us the divine realities achieved beneath the mysterious waters. Holy Church returns to the same teaching today, in order that she may recall to our minds this great principle of the commencement of the Christian life, and make it the basis of the instructions she is here going to give us. If the very first effect of the sanctification of one who, by Baptism, is buried together with Christ, be the making him a new man, the creating him afresh in this Man-God (Ephesians ii. 10), the grafting his new life on the life of Jesus by which to bring forth new fruits, we cannot wonder at the Apostle’s unwillingness to give us any other rule for our contemplation or our practice, than the study and imitation of this divine model. There, and there only, is man’s perfection (Colossians i. 28), there is his happiness (Colossians ii. 10). “As, then, you have received the knowledge of Jesus Christ the Lord, walk in him (Colossians ii. 6) for, as many of you as have been baptised in Christ, have put on Christ (Galatians iii. 27).
Our Apostle emphatically tells us that he knows nothing, and will preach nothing, but Jesus (1 Corinthians ii. 2). If we be of Saint Paul’s school, adopting, as we will then do, the sentiments of our Lord Jesus Christ, and making them our own (Philippians ii. 15), we will become other Christs or, rather, one only Christ with the Man-God, by the sameness of thoughts and virtues, under the impulse of the same sanctifying Spirit.
Gospel – Mark viii. 1‒9
At that time, when there was a great multitude with Jesus and they had nothing to eat, calling His disciples together He said to them, “I have compassion on the multitude, for behold they have now been with me three days and have nothing to eat. If I send them away fasting to their home, they will faint on the way, for some of them came from away.” And His disciples answered Him, “From where can anyone fill them here with bread in the wilderness?” And He asked them, “How many loaves do you have?” They said, “Seven.” And He commanded the people to sit down on the ground. Taking the seven loaves, giving thanks, He broke them and gave them to His disciples to set before them, and they set them before the people. They had a few little fishes, and He blessed them, and commanded them to be set before them. They ate and were filled, and they took up what was left of the fragments, seven baskets. They who had eaten were about four thousand, and He sent them away.
Praise to you, O Christ.
Dom Prosper Guéranger:
The interpretation of the sacred text is given to us by Saint Ambrose in his Homily which has been chosen for this Sunday. We will there find the same vein of thought as is suggested by the whole tenor of the Liturgy assigned for this portion of the Year. The holy Doctor thus begins: “After the woman, who is the type of the Church, has been cured of the flow of blood — and after the Apostles have received their commission to preach the Gospel — the nourishment of heavenly grace is imparted.” He had just been asking, a few lines previous, what this signified, and his answer was: “The Old Law had been insufficient to feed the hungry hearts of the nations, so the Gospel food was given to them.”
We were observing this day week that the Law of Sinai, because of its weakness (Hebrews vii. 18, 19) had made way for the Testament of the universal covenant. And yet it is from Sion itself that the Law of Grace has issued. Here again, it is Jerusalem that is the first to whom the word of the Lord is spoken (Isaias ii. 3). But the bearers of the Good Tidings have been rejected by the obdurate and jealous Jews. They, therefore, turn to the Gentiles (Acts xiii. 46) and shake off Jerusalem’s dust from their feet. That dust, however, is to be an accusing testimony (Luke ix. 5). It is soon to be turned into a rain showering down on the proud city a more terrible vengeance than was that of fire which once fell on Sodom and Gomorrha (Matthew x. 15). The superiority of Judah over the rest of the human race had lasted for ages. But now, all that ancient privilege of Israel, and all his rights of primogeniture, are gone. The primacy has followed Simon Peter to the west, and the crown of Sion, which is fallen from off her guilty head (Lamentations v. 16) now glitters, and will so forever, on the consecrated brow of the queen of nations.
Like the poor woman of the Gospel who had spent all her substance over useless remedies, the Gentile world had grown weaker and weaker by the effects of original and subsequent sins. She had put herself under the treatment of false teachers who gradually reduced her to the loss of that law and gifts of nature which, as Saint Ambrose expresses it, had been her “vital patrimony.” At length the day came for her hearing of the arrival of the heavenly Physician. She at once roused herself. The consciousness of her miserable condition urged her on. Her faith got the upper hand of her human respect, and brought her to the presence of the Incarnate Word. Her humble confidence, which so strongly contrasted with the insulting arrogance of the Synagogue, lead her into contact with Christ, and she touched Him. Virtue went forth from Him (Luke viii. 46), cured her original wound and at once restored to her all the strength she had lost by her long period of languor.
Having thus cured human nature, our Lord bids her cease her fast which had lasted for ages. He gives her the excellent nourishment she required. Saint Ambrose, whose comment we are following, compares the miraculous repast mentioned in today’s Gospel with the other multiplication of loaves brought before us on the fourth Sunday of Lent. And he remarks how, both in spiritual nourishment, and in that which refreshes the body, there are various degrees of excellence. The Bridegroom does not ordinarily serve up the choicest wine, he does not produce the daintiest dishes, at the beginning of the banquet he has prepared for his dear ones (John ii. 10). Besides, there are many souls here below who are incapable of rising beyond a certain limit towards the divine and substantial Light which is the nourishment of the spirit. To these, therefore, and they are the majority, and are represented by the five thousand men who were present at the first miraculous multiplication, the five loaves of inferior quality (John vi. 9) are an appropriate food and one that, by its very number, is in keeping with the five senses which, more or less, have dominion over the multitude. But, as for the privileged favourites of grace — as for those men who are not distracted by the cares of this present life, who scorn to use its permitted pleasures, and who, even while in the flesh, make God the only king of their soul — for these, and for these only, the Bridegroom reserves the pure wheat of the seven loaves which by their number express the plenitude of the Holy Spirit, and mysteries in abundance.
“Although they are in the world,” says Saint Ambrose, “yet these men, to whom is given the nourishment of mystical rest, are not of the world.” In the beginning God was, for six days, giving to the universe he had created its perfection and beauty. He consecrated the seventh to the enjoyment of His works (Genesis ii. 1‒3). Seven is the number of the divine rest. It was also to be that of the fruitful rest of the Son of God, the perfecting souls in that peace which makes love secure and is the source of the invincible power of the Bride, as mentioned in the Canticle (Canticles viii. 10). It is for this reason, that the Man-God, when proclaiming on the mount the Beatitudes of the law of love, attributed the seventh to the peace-makers, or peaceable, as deserving to be called by excellence the Sons of God (Matthew ii. 9), It is in them alone that is fully developed the germ of divine sonship (Hebrews iii. 14) which is put into the soul at Baptism. Thanks to the silence to which the passions have been reduced, their spirit, now master of the flesh and itself subject to God, is a stranger to those inward storms, those sudden changes, and even those inequalities of temperature which are all unfavourable to the growth of the precious seed (1 John iii. 9). Warmed by the Sun of Justice in an atmosphere which is ever serene and unclouded, there is no obstacle to its coming up, there is no ill-shapen growth: absorbing all the human moisture of this Earth in which it is set, assimilating the very Earth itself, it soon leaves nothing else to be seen in these men but the divine, for they have become in the eyes of the Father who is in Heaven a most faithful image of His first-born Son (Romans viii. 29).
“Rightly then,” continues Saint Ambrose, “the seventh Beatitude is that of the peaceful . To them belong the seven baskets of the crumbs that were over and above. This bread of the Sabbath, this sanctified bread, this bread of rest — yes, it is something great. And I even venture to say that if, after you have eaten of the five loaves, you will have eaten also of the seven, you have no bread on Earth that you can look forward to.” But take notice of the condition specified in our Gospel, as necessary for those who aspire to such nourishment as that. “It is not,” says the Saint, “to lazy people, nor to them that live in cities, nor to them that are great in worldly honours, but to them that seek Christ in the desert, that is given the heavenly nourishment: they only who hunger after it are received by Christ into a participation of the Word and of God’s kingdom.” The more intense their hunger, the more they long for their divine object and for no other, the more will the heavenly food strengthen them with light and love, the more will it satiate them with delight.
All the truth, all the goodness, all the beauty of created things, are incapable of satisfying any single soul. It must have God, and so long as man does not understand this, everything that his senses and his reason can provide him with of good or true, far from its being able to satiate him, is ordinarily nothing more than a something which distracts him from the one object that can make him the happy being he was created to be — a mere something that becomes a hindrance to his living the true life which God willed him to attain. Observe how our Lord waits for all their human schemes to fail, and then he will be their helper, if they will but permit him. The men of today’s Gospel are not afraid to abide with Him in the desert and put up with the consequent privations of meat and drink. Their faith is greater than that of their brethren who have preferred to remain in their home in the cities, and has raised them so much the higher in the order of grace. For that very reason our Lord would not allow them to admit anything of a nature to interfere with the divine food he prepares for their souls. Such is the importance of this entire self-abnegation for souls that aim at the highest perfection of Christian life, such, too, the difficulty which even the bravest find of reaching that total self-abnegation by their own efforts, that we see our Lord Himself acting directly on the souls of his saints in order to create in them that desert, that spiritual vacuum, whose very appearance makes poor nature tremble, and yet which is so indispensable for the reception of his gifts.
Struggling, like another Jacob with God (Genesis xxxii. 24) under the effort of this unsparing purification, the creature feels herself to be undergoing a sort of indescribable martyrdom. She has become the favoured object of Jesus’ research and, as He intends to give Himself unreservedly to her, so He insists on her becoming entirely His. It is with a view to this that He, in the delicate dealings of His mercy, subdues and breaks her in order that He may detach her from creatures and from herself. The piercing eye of the Word perceives every least crease or fold of her spiritual being. His grace carries its jealous work right down to the division of soul and spirit, and reaches to the very joints and marrow, scrutinising and unmercifully probing the thoughts and intents of the heart (Hebrews iv. 12, 13). As the Prophet describes the refiner of the silver and gold which is to form the king’s crown and sceptre (Malachias iii. 3), so our divine Lord: He will sit refining and cleansing in the crucible this soul so dear to Him, that He wishes to wear her as one of the precious jewels of His everlasting diadem. Nothing could exceed His zeal in this work which, in His eyes, is grander far than the creation of a thousand worlds. He watches, He fans the flame of the furnace, and He Himself is called a consuming fire (Deuteronomy iv. 24). When the senses have no more vile vapours to emit, when the dross of the spirit which is the last to yield has got detached from the gold, then does the divine purifier show it with complacency to the gaze of men and angels. Its lustre is all He would have it be so He may safely produce on it a faithful image of Himself.
When the Jewish people were led forth by Moses from Egypt, they said: “The Lord God has called us. We will go three days’ journey into the wilderness, to sacrifice to the Lord our God” (Exodus iii. 18). In like manner the disciples of Jesus have retired into the wilderness, as our today’s Gospel tells us, and after three days they have been fed with a miraculous bread which foretold the victim of the great Sacrifice, of which the Hebrew one was a figure. In a few moments, both the bread and the figure are to make way, on the altar before which we are standing, for the highest possible realities. Let us then go forth from the land of bondage of our sins. And since our Lord’s merciful invitation comes to us so repeatedly, let our souls get the habit of keeping away from the frivolities of Earth, and from worldly thoughts. And let us beseech our Lord that He may graciously give us strength to advance further into that interior desert where He is always the most inclined to hear us, and where He is most liberal with His graces.