Lesson at Matins – Isaiah i. 16‒18
“Wash yourselves, be clean, take away the evil of your devices from my eyes: cease to do perversely, learn to do well: seek judgement, relieve the oppressed, judge for the fatherless, defend the widow. And then come, and accuse me,” says the Lord. “If your sins be as scarlet, they will be made as white as snow, and if they be red as crimson, they will be white as wool.”
Thanks be to God.
Dom Prosper Guéranger:
The Saviour who is so soon to be with us and to save us, warns us not only to prepare ourselves to appear before Him, but also to purify our souls. “It is most just,” says Saint Bernard, “that the soul which was the first to fall should be the first to rise. Let us therefore defer caring for the body until the day when Jesus Christ will come and reform it by the Resurrection, for, in the first Coming, the Precursor says to us: ‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.’ Observe, he says not the maladies of the body, nor the miseries of the flesh. He says sins, which are the malady of the soul and the corruption of the spirit. Take heed then, you my body, and wait for your turn and time. You can hinder the salvation of the soul, and your own safety is not within your reach. Let the soul labour for herself, and strive you too to help her, for if you share in her sufferings, you will share in her glory. Retard her perfection, and you retard your own. You will not be regenerated until God sees His own image restored in the soul.”
Let us, then, purify our souls. Let us do the works of the spirit, not the deeds of the flesh. Our Saviour’s promise is most clear. He will turn the deep dye of our iniquities into the purest whiteness. He asks but one thing of us: that we sin no more. He says to us: “Cease to do perversely, and then come and accuse me, come and complain against me if I do not cleanse you.” O Jesus, we will not defer a single day of this holy season. We accept, from this moment, the conditions you offer us. We sincerely desire to make our peace with you, to bring the flesh into subjection to our spirit, to make good all the injustice we have committed against our neighbour, and to hush, by the sighs of our heart-felt compunction, that voice of our sins which has so long cried to you for vengeance.
