Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Have regard, O Lord, to Thy covenant, and forsake not to the end of souls of Thy poor: cause, and forget not the voices of them that seek Thee.
(From the introit of the day's Mass, Ps. 73. 20, 19, 23)
Collect of the Day
Omnipotens sempitérne Deus, da nobis fídei, spei, et caritátis augméntum: et, ut mereámur ássequi quod promíttis, fac nos amáre quod præcipis. Per Dóminum…
Almighty everlasting God, give to us increase of Faith, Hope and Charity: and that we may deserve to obtain what Thou dost promise, make us love what Thou dost command. Through...This day last week we were considering how important are faith and charity to a Christian who is living under the Law of grace. There is another virtue of equal necessity: it is hope; for, although he already have the substantial possession of the good things which will constitute his future happiness, the Christian is prevented by the gloom of this land of exile from seeing them. Moreover, this mortal life being essentially a period of trial, wherein each one is to win his crown, the struggle makes even the very best feel, and that right to the end, the weight of incertitude and anguish. Let us, therefore, pray with the Church, in her Collect, for an increase of the three fundamental virtues of faith, hope and charity; and, that we may deserve to reach the perfection of the good which is promised us in heaven, let us sue for the grace of devotedness to the commandments of God, which lead us to our eternal home. Let us remember how the Gospel last included them all in love.
--Dom Guéranger, O.S.B.
In the last part of the Collect for today’s Mass we ask God for the grace to love His commandments—to love His Law. Is this not a contradiction? How can we love what we are commanded to do? Surely, the most we can expect is to obey these laws, not to love them. The solution is in the first part of the Collect. Here we pray for an increase in faith, hope and charity, we realize that God’s Laws are not just rules forbidding what our fallen natures are inclined to. By loving God above all things, eventually we can come to love other things in an ordered way, that is, only so far as they lead us to God. With the help of God’s grace, we will reject those things which lead us away from God. We will come to see that God’s Laws aren’t just arbitrary do’s and don’ts, but rather signposts leading to heaven—to God whom we love.
--Fr. Brian McDonnell, F.S.S.P.
Epistle - Galatians, 3. 16-22
From
The Liturgical Year
by Dom Guéranger, O.S.B.
“Look up to heaven, and number the stars, if thou canst! So shall thy seed be!” (Gen. XV. 5). Abraham was almost a hundred years old, and Sara’s barrenness deprived him of all natural hope of posterity, when these words were spoken to him by God. Abraham, nevertheless, believed God, says the Scripture, and it was reputed to him unto justice (Gen. XV. 6). And when, later on, that same faith would have led him to sacrifice, on the mount, that son of the promise, his one only hope, God renewed His promise, and added: “In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Gen. XXII. 18).
It is now that the promise is fulfilled; the event justifies Abraham’s faith. He believed against all hope, trusting to that God who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things that are not, as those that are (Rom. IV. 17, 18); and, according to the expression of John the Baptist, from the very stones of the gentile world there rise up, in all places, children to Abraham (Matt. III. 9).
His faith, firm and, at the same time, so simple, gave to God the glory (Rom. IV. 20), which He looks for from His creatures. Man can add nothing to the divine perfections; but—agreeable to God’s own words—though he sees them not directly here below, he acknowledge those perfections by adoring and loving them; he makes his faith tell upon his whole life; and this use which he freely makes of his faculties—this voluntary devotedness of an intelligent being—magnifies God, by adding to His extrinsic glory.
Following in Abraham’s steps, there have come those multitudes, born for heaven, the children of his faith (Rom. IV. 12). They live by faith (Rom. I. 17); and thereby in all their acts they give to God the homage of confession and praise, through His Son Christ Jesus; and, like Abraham, they receive in return the blessing of an ever-increasing justice (Rom. IV. 23, 24; Gal. III. 9). The magnificent development of the Church, which gives this new posterity to Abraham, is greater and more visible since the fall of Israel. In countries the remotest, in the midst of cities that once were all pagan, we see crowds of men, women, and children imitating Abraham (Gen. XII. 1), that is, leaving at heaven’s call, if not their country, at least everything that once made earth dear to them; and like him, trusting in the fidelity and power of God to fulfill His promises (Rom. IV. 20, 21), they live as strangers amidst their neighbours, yea, and in their very homes, using this world as though they did not use it. In the tumult of cities as in the desert, in the midst of the vain pleasures of the world, whose fashion and figure passeth away (1 Cor. VII. 31), they have no other thought than that of the unseen realities (Heb. XI. 1), no other care than that of pleasing God (1 Cor. VII. 32). They take to themselves the word that was spoken to their father: “Walk before me, and be perfect!” (Gen. XVII. 1). In truth, it was spoken to all of them; it was the condition in the alliance, concluded by God with those of His faithful servants of all ages, in the person of the grand patriarch, who was not only their progenitor, but their model too. And God responds also to their faith, either by private manifestations, or by the still surer voice of His Scriptures (2 Pet. I. 19), saying: “Fear not! I am thy protector, and thy reward exceeding great!” (Gen. XV. I).
Truly, then, the benediction of Abraham has been poured forth on the Gentiles (Gal. III. 14). Christ Jesus, the true Son of the promise, the only seed of salvation, has, by faith in His Resurrection (Rom. IV. 24), assembled from every nation them that are of a good will (Gal. III. 258; Luke II. 14), making them all one in Him, making them, like Himself, children of Abraham (Gal. III. 29), and, what is better still, children of God (Gal. IV. 5-7). For the benediction that was promised, at the beginning of the alliance, was the Holy Ghost Himself (Gal. III. 14), the Spirit of adoption of children that came down into our hearts, to make us all heirs of God and joint-heirs of Christ (Rom. VIII. 15-17). O mighty power of faith, which breaks down the former walls of division, unites nations together (Eph. II. 14-18), and substitutes the love and freedom of children of the Most High for the law of bondage and fear! (Rom. VIII. 2).
And yet, grand as was this spectacle of the Gentiles becoming incorporated into the chosen race, and being made sharers, in Christ, of the holy promises (Eph. III. 6), it did not please all people. The carnal Jew, who boasts of having Abraham for his father, though he cares little about imitating his works (John VIII. 39)—the circumcised who vaunts the bearing in his flesh the sign of a faith which dwells not in the heart (Rom. IV. 11)—these men who have rejected Christ now reject His members, and would fain destroy His Church, or, at least, trammel it. They are enraged at seeing crowding in, from every portion of the globe (Luke XIII. 29), that immense concourse, which their vile jealousy has vainly sought to keep back. Whilst their wounded pride kept them from going in (Luke XV. 28), the Gentiles were sitting down with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets, at the banquet of God’s kingdom (Luke XIII. 28); the last became the first (Luke XIII. 30). Even to the end of time, Israel—who, by his own obstinacy, has forfeited his ancient glory—will continue to be the enemy of this spiritual posterity of Abraham, which has supplanted him (Gen. XXVII. 36); but his persecutions against the children of the promise and of the lawful Bride will but result in showing that he is, as St. Paul says, the son of Agar, the son of the bondwoman, who, together with her child, is excluded from the inheritance and from the kingdom (Gal. IV. 22-31).
He prefers to refuse the liberty offered him by the Lord, rather than acknowledge the definitive abrogation of his now dead Law. Be it so! His hatred will not induce the children of the Church (who are prefigured by Sara, the freewoman) to reject the grace of their God, for the sake of pleasing their enemy; it will not induce them to abandon the justice of faith, and the riches of the Spirit, and the life in Christ, in order to go back again to the yoke of slavery, which, let the Jew do what he will, was broken into pieces by the cross he himself set up on Calvary (Gal. II. 19-21). Up to the last, the true Jerusalem, the free city, our mother—she that was once the barren woman, but now is so glad a bride with her children around her—will meet the superannuated, yet ever busy, pretensions of the Synagogue by reading to her assembled sons and daughters the Epistle we are having today. Up to the last St. Paul, in her name—speaking of the law of Sinai, which was made known to its subjects through the mediation of Moses and the angels—will prove its inferiority as compared to the covenant made by Abraham directly with God; each year, as emphatically as on the day he wrote his Epistle, Paul will declare the transient character of that legislation, which came four hundred and thirty years after a promise which could not be changed; neither was such legislation to continue, when the time should come for that Son of Abraham to appear, from whom the world was waiting to receive the promised benediction.
But what is to be said of the incapability of the Mosaic ministration to give man strength, and enable him to rise up from his fall? The Gospel on which we were meditating eight days back, and which formerly was assigned to this present Sunday, gave a symbolical and striking commentary on the uselessness of the old Law in regard to this; at the same time, it showed us the remedial power which resided in Christ, and was by Him transmitted to the ministers of the new Law. “Every portion of the Office of the thirteenth Sunday,” says Abbot Rupert, “bears on the history of that Samaritan, whose name signifies keeper; it is our Lord Jesus Christ who, by His Incarnation, comes to the rescue of man, whom the old Law was not able to keep from harm; and when Jesus leaves the world, He consigns the poor sufferer to the care of the apostles and apostolic men, in the house of the Church. The intentional selection of this Gospel for today throws a great light on our Epistle, as also on the whole letter to the Galatians, from which it is taken. Thus, the priest and the Levite of the parable are a figure of the Law; and their passing by the half-dead man, seeing him, indeed, but without making an attempt to heal him, is expressive of what that Law did. True, it did not go counter to God’s promises; but, of itself, it could justify no man. A physician who does not himself intend to visit a patient will sometimes send a servant who is expert in the knowledge of the cause of the malady, yet who has not the skill needed for mixing the remedy required, but can merely tell the sick man what diet and what drinks he must avoid, if he would prevent his aliment from causing death. Such was the law, set, as the Epistle tells us, because of transgressions, as a simple safeguard, until such time as there should come the Good Samaritan, the heavenly physician. Having, from his very first coming into this world, fallen among robbers, man is stripped of his supernatural goods, and is covered with the wounds inflicted on him by original sin; if he did not abstain from actual sins, from those transgressions against which the law was set as a monitor, he runs the risk of dying altogether.
It is on this account that the Gradual repeats the supplication of the Introit:
Respice Domine, in testamentum tuum; for, as Rupert observes, it was the cry of the ancient people, who, sighing at the weakness of the powerless Law of Sinai, besought God to fulfill the covenant He had promised to Abraham’s faith. They cried out to Christ, as the poor creature might have done to the Good Samaritan, after he had seen the priest and the Levite pass him by, without an effort made to save.
Gospel - St. Luke, 17. 11-19
From
The Liturgical Year
by Dom Guéranger, O.S.B.
The Samaritan leper, cured of that hideous malady which is an apt figure of sin, in company with nine lepers of Jewish nationality, represents the despised race of gentiles, who were at first admitted, by stealth, so to say, and by extraordinary privilege, into a share of the graces belonging to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matt. XV. 24). The conduct of these ten men, on occasion of their miraculous cure, is in keeping with the attitude assumed by the two peoples they typify, regarding the salvation offered to the world by the Son of God. It is a fresh demonstration of what the apostle says: “All are not Israelites that are of Israel; neither are all they who are the seed of Abraham, children; “but,” says the Scripture, “in Isaac shall thy seed be called” (Gen. XXI. 12); that is to say, not they who are the children of the flesh are the children of God: but they that are the children of the promise are counted for the seed (Rom. IX. 6-8); they are born of the faith of Abraham, and are, in the eyes of the Lord, His true progeny.
Our holy mother the Church is never tired of this subject, the comparison of the two Testaments, and the contrast there is between the two peoples. We deem it our duty, before proceeding further, to explain how this is; for there are many persons who cannot understand what benefit can come to us Christians from hearing this subject preached to us. The kind of spirituality which, with many of us, has nowadays been substituted for the liturgical life so thoroughly lived by, and so precious to, our Catholic ancestors, gives a certain disrelish for the ideas which the church perseveringly brings before them during so many of her Sundays. They have become habituated to live in an atmosphere of very limited truth; it is all subjective, as well as little; and they consider it a very excellent thing, to forget all other teaching, except what they happen to possess, and beyond which it is a trouble to go. It is not surprising that Christians of this class feel puzzled at finding the Church continually urging them to take an interest in a long past, which they consider of no practical utility to them! But the interior life, truly worthy of the name, is not what these good people imagine. No school of spirituality either now makes, nor ever made, the ideal of virtue consist in indifference for those great historic facts which are evidently so precious in the eyes of the Church, and of God Himself. And from their mother’s most cherished appreciations? It is, that by thus determinedly shutting themselves up in their own private prayers, they, by a just punishment, lose sight of the true end of prayer, which is union with, and love of, God. Their mediation is deprived of that element of intimate and fruitful converse with God, which is assigned it by all the masters of the spiritual life; it soon becomes an unproductive exercise of analysis and reasoning, in which there is nothing but abstract conclusions.
Now, when God mercifully invited men to the divine nuptials by manifesting to them His Word, it was not by abstraction that He gave to our earth this the Son of His own eternal Substance. As to His Divinity, men could not, in their present state, see it in a direct way. Had God shown us, in this pretended abstract way, that eternal Son of His, in whom are found all beauty, and warmth, and life, the revelation would have been imperfect and cold. This He did not do; but, as St. Paul tells us, He manifested the great mystery of godliness in the flesh (1 Tim. III. 16); the Word became a living soul (Gen. II. 7); eternal Truth assumed to Himself a Body, that so He might converse with men (Baruch III. 38), and grow up like one of themselves (Luke II. 52). And when that Body, which eternal Truth was to hold as His own forever, was taken up in glory (1 Tim. III. 16), the Church, the bride of this Man-God, continued in the world this manifestation of God, by the members of Christ; she continued that historic development (Eph. I. 23) of the Word, which is only to cease when time is no more. This manifestation, this development, surpasses all human calculations, and reveals fresh aspects of the Wisdom of God even to the angels themselves (Eph. I. 23). Let due respect be paid to the axioms of learned men, who have arranged the principles of science in logical order, independently of history and of facts: but this lifeless reasoning has nothing in common with substantial truth which is ever fruitful and necessarily active. In the Church, as in God, truth is life and light (John I. 4), not a mere collection of formulæ. If our Credo rings out so triumphantly through the aisles of our churches, and seems to force the very gates of heaven, it is because each of its articles is presented before God steeped in the blood of martyrs; from age to age is has gathered ever fresh luster from the labours and struggles of so many holy confessors, chosen out of the human race to complete the body of Christ on earth (Col. I. 24, II. 19).
The subject is too full to be treated of here; but this we must say: after the master-fact of the Incarnation of the Word, who came upon our earth to manifest God, through the ages of time, by Christ and His members (2 Cor. IV. 10, 11), there is not one which is more important, not one which has been and still is so dear to God, as the vocation of the two peoples whom He successively called to the blessing of an alliance with Him. The gifts and vocations of God are, as the apostle expresses it, without repentance for regret on His part. Those Jews, who are now His enemies because they reject the Gospel, are still called
charissimi; they are still the beloved and dearly beloved, because of their fathers (Rom. XI. 28, 20). For the same reason, a time will come—and the whole world is waiting for it—when the denial of Juda being revoked and his iniquities blotted out, the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, will be literally fulfilled (Rom. XI. 25-27). Then the divine unity of the two Testaments will be made evident; and the two peoples themselves will be made one, under their one Head, Christ Jesus (Eph. II. 14). The covenant of God with man being then fully realized, such as He had designed it in His eternal wisdom—the earth having yielded its fruit (Ps. LXVI. 7), the world having done its work, the sepulchers will give back their dead (Rom. XI. 15), and history will cease here on earth, leaving glorified human nature to bloom in unreserved fullness of life, under God’s complacent eye.
The truths, then, which are again brought before our notice by today’s Gospel, are anything but dry or old-fashioned; nothing is so grand; and, we must add—though superficial minds will wonder at it—there is nothing more practical in this season of the year, for it is the season consecrated to the mysteries of the unitive life. After all, in what, primarily, does union between God and man consist, but in unanimity of the divine and the human minds? Now, we know that the divine mind has manifested all its designs in the respective histories of the two Testaments and the two peoples; and that the final result which is to bring these two histories to their close, is the one only end which infinite love was in the beginning, and is now, and will forever be, proposing to fulfill. The Church, therefore, far from showing herself to be behind the age by recurring continually to truths such as these, is but clearly proving herself to be the most intelligent bride of Jesus, and evincing the changeless lovely youthfulness of a heart, which ever beats in unison with that of her Spouse.
Let us now resume the literal explanation of our Gospel. As we were observing on a previous Sunday, our Jesus here, again, wishes rather to give us a useful teaching, than to manifest His divine power. It is for this purpose that He does not cure at once these ten lepers who beseech Him to have mercy on them, as, on another occasion, He cured one who was suffering from the same misery. To this latter, who besought Him, He restored cleanliness by a few words. He said: “Be thou made clean!” and forthwith the leprosy was cleansed (Matt. VIII. 3). This was at the beginning of His public life. But the event of our Gospel took place in the latter portion of our Lord’s sojourn amongst men. The lepers are made clean only while on their way to show themselves to the priests. Jesus sends them to the priests, just as He had done in the previous case; and thus, from the beginning to the close of His mortal life, He gave an example of the respect which was to be paid to the old Law, so long as it was not abrogated. That Law gave to the sons of Aaron the power, not of curing, but of discerning leprosy, and passing judgment on its being cured or not (Lev. XIII).
The time, however, has now come for a Law far above that of Sinai. It has a priesthood, whose judgments are not to concern the state of the body, but, by pronouncing the sentence of absolution, are to effectually remove the leprosy of souls. The cure which the ten lepers felt coming upon them before they had reached the priests, ought to have sufficed to show them, in Jesus, the power of the new priesthood, which had been foretold by the prophets (Isa. LXVI. 21-23); the power which thus forestalls and surpasses the authority of the ancient ministration is sufficient evidence of the superior dignity of Him who exercises it. If only they were in suitable dispositions for the sacred rites, which are going to be used in the ceremony of their purification (Lev. XIV. 1-32), the Holy Ghost, who heretofore had inspired the prophetic details of the mysterious function, would enable them to understand the signification of the expiatory sparrow, whose blood, being sprinkled upon the living water sets free, by the wood, its fellow sparrow. That first bird typifies our Lord Jesus Christ, who likens Himself, in the psalm, to the lonely sparrow (Ps. CI. 8); His immolation on the cross, which gives to water the power of cleansing souls, communicates to the other sparrows, His brethren (Ps. LXXXIII. 4), the purity of the divine Blood.
But the Jew is far from being ready to understand these great mysteries. And yet the Law had been given to him that it might serve him as a hand leading him to Christ, and without exposing him to err (Gal. III. 24). It was a signal favour granted him, not from any merits of his own, but because of his fathers (Deut. IV. 37, IX. 4-6). The favour was all the more precious, inasmuch as it was bestowed at a time when the tradition regarding a future Redeemer was almost entirely lost by the bulk of mankind. Gratitude should have been uppermost in the heart of Juda; but pride took its place. He was so taken up with the honour that had been put on him, that it made him lose all desire for the Messiah. He could not endure the thought that a time would come, when the Sun of Justice having risen for the whole earth, the limited advantage which was given to a few during the hours of night was to be eclipsed by the bright noon of a light which all might enjoy. He, therefore, proclaimed that the old Law was definitive, though the Law declared itself to be but transitory; he, therefore, insisted on the perpetuity of the reign of types and shadows. He laid it down as a dogma that no divine intervention can ever equal that made on Sinai; that every future prophet, everyone sent by God, must be inferior to Moses; that all possible salvation is in the Law, and that from it alone flows every grace.
This explains to us how it was, that of the ten men cured of leprosy by Jesus, nine have not even the remotest thought of coming to their Deliverer to thank Him: these nine are Jews. Jesus, to their minds, is a mere disciple of Moses, a bare instrument of favours, holding His commission from Sinai, and as soon as they have gone through the legal formality of their purification they take it that all their obligations to God are paid. The Samaritan, the despised Gentile, whose sufferings have given him that humility which makes the sinner clear-sighted, is the only one who recognizes God by His divine works, and gives Him thanks for His favours. How many ages of apparent abandonment, of humiliation and suffering, must pass over Juda too, before he will recognize and adore His God, and confess to Him his sins, and give Him his devoted love, and, like this stranger, hear Jesus pronounce his pardon, and say: Arise! Go thy way! Thy faith hath made thee whole and saved thee!
From
The Book of Morals (Reflections on Job)
by Pope St. Gregory the Great
We know that it is so of a truth, and that a man cannot be justified as against God. When God is put out of the consideration, a man may be considered to be just, but considered as against God, his righteousness vanisheth away. When a man measureth himself by his relation to Him, Who is the Author of all good, he doth thereby acknowledge that of himself he hath no good in him, but hath received from God whatsoever he hath. He that glorifieth himself because of good which hath been given him, fighteth against God with God's own gifts. It is just therefore that the grounds upon which he ought to have been humbled, but upon which he hath puffed himself up, should be used to humble his vain-glory. But an holy man, because he perceiveth that the worth of our own good deeds falleth short, when he considereth his own spiritual man, justly saith If He will contend with him, he cannot answer Him one of a thousand.
In the Holy Scriptures the numeral a thousand is used to be taken as signifying a generalization. Thus, the Psalmist saith The word which He commanded to a thousand generations Ps. civ. 8, whereas it is notorious that the Evangelist doth not reckon more then seventy-and-seven generations between the very beginning of the world and the coming of our Redeemer. What therefore is to be understood here by a thousand The general ripeness of the old generation to bring forth a new offspring. Hence also it is said by John And shall reign with Him a thousand years, because the reign of the Holy Church will be over all mankind made perfect.
When times one is ten, and ten times ten is an hundred, and ten times an hundred is a thousand. Observing therefore this connection between one and a thousand, what are we to understand by the one (in the text, connected as it is with the thousand whereby we understand perfection)? Is it not the beginning of a good life, even as the thousand representeth perfection? The contending with God (which is spoken of in the text) is the nonacknowledgment of that which is owed to Him, and the vain-glorying instead in our own strength. But an holy man should see, that even if one had received the gifts of perfection, and were to make them the grounds of self-glorifying, such an one would thereby lose all that he had received.
-From the Roman Breviary
