Sermons to the People 216.1–217.3

The beginnings of our ministry, and your conception, by which you are being conceived in the womb of faith to be born by heavenly grace, must be helped by the voice: so that our sermon may address you to your salvation, and your conception may usefully console us. We instruct by sermons; you make progress by your conduct. We scatter the seed of the word; you return the fruit of faith. Let all of us, according to the calling with which we have been called by the Lord, run in his way and path; let no one look back. For the Truth, which neither deceives nor can deceive, plainly declares: “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of heaven.” That this is what you desire, what you strive for with all the efforts of your mind, your very name shows, since you are called competentes. For what are competentes but those who seek together? For as condocentes, concurrentes, considentes mean nothing else than teaching together, running together, sitting together, so the word competentes is formed from nothing else than seeking together and aiming at one thing. And what is that one thing which you seek or desire, if not what a certain man cries out fearlessly, having cast off fleshly desires and overcome the terrors of the world? “If armies encamp against me, my heart will not fear; if war rises against me, in this will I hope.” And expressing what that is, he added and said: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, this will I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.” And explaining the blessedness of this region and dwelling, he goes on and says: “That I may contemplate the delight of the Lord, and be protected by his temple.”

Do you see, my fellow recruits, to what delight of the Lord you will come when you cast off the delight of the world? If you despise the world (mundum), you will have a clean (mundum) heart, and you will see him who made the world; and as he overcame, so you too by his grace will overcome this world. You will surely soon overcome it and trample it down, if you rely not on your own strength but on the help of most merciful God. Do not despise yourselves because it has not yet appeared what you will be. But know that when it appears you will be like him. Know also that you will see him, not as he came to us in the fullness of time, but as, ever abiding, he made us. Strip off the old man, so that you may be clothed with the new. The Lord is entering into a covenant with you. You have lived for the world, you have given yourselves to flesh and blood, you have borne the image of the earthly man. As, then, you have borne the image of him who is from the earth, so from now on bear also the image of him who is from heaven. I speak in human terms, since the Word became flesh for this purpose: that as you presented your bodies to sin as weapons of iniquity, so now you may present your members to God as weapons of righteousness. Your assailant used to arm himself against you with your own darts for your destruction; let your protector in turn be armed against him with your members for your salvation. The enemy will do you no harm if you take your members away from him and he does not hold them. He will rightly abandon you if your vow and your will disagree with him.

See, by the auction and market of faith the kingdom of heaven is put up for sale to you: examine and gather the resources of your conscience, collect with one mind the treasures of your heart. And yet you buy it for nothing, if you recognize the welcome grace that is offered you. You spend nothing, and yet what you acquire is great. Do not be cheap in your own eyes, you whom the Creator of all, and your own Creator, values so dearly that every day he pours out for you the most precious blood of his only-begotten. You will not be cheap if you distinguish the precious from the cheap; if you serve not the creature but the Creator; if what is lower in you has not dominated you, so that you may be cleansed spotless from great and capital sin; if the seed of the word of God, which even now the heavenly farmer scatters in the field of your heart, is not trampled in you by the passing of the unworthy, as on the path, or crushed as it sprouts by the dullness of your hardest conscience, as among stony places, or choked among the thorns of your desires by their deadly spikes. If you shrink from the barrenness of such ruinous and damnable soil, fruitful and most fertile ground will surely receive you, and with great joy you will return to your sower and your sender of rain a hundredfold harvest; or if perhaps you are unequal to that, you will pay the interest of sixtyfold fruit; and if you do not reach even that, your thirtyfold yield too will not be unwelcome: for all will be received in the heavenly granaries, all will be stored up in eternal rest. From the fruits of all that heavenly bread will be made, and every laborer working without guile in the Lord's vineyard will be abundantly and wholesomely filled with it, while the glory of so great a sower, sender of rain, waterer, and giver of growth itself is spread abroad by the preaching of the gospel.

Come to him, then, in contrition of heart, for he is near to all who are contrite of heart, and he will save you who are humble in spirit. Come eagerly, so that you may be enlightened. For you are still in darkness, and darkness is in you. But you will be light in the Lord, who enlightens every man coming into this world. Be unshaped to the world; be reshaped to God. Let the Babylonian captivity at last weary you. See, Jerusalem, that heavenly mother, comes to meet you in the streets, cheerfully inviting you, and begs you to want life and to love to see good days, which you have never had and will never have in this world. For there your days failed like smoke: days for which to be increased was to be diminished, to grow was to fail, to rise was to vanish. You who have lived many and evil years for sin, long to live for God: not many years that will some day end and run toward perishing in the shadow of death, but good years, close in truth to living life, where no hunger, no thirst will weary you; for your food will be faith, your drink wisdom. For now in the Church you bless the Lord in faith; but then in sight you will be most abundantly watered from the fountains of Israel.

But meanwhile, in this pilgrimage, let your tears be your bread day and night, while people say to you every day, “Where is your God?” and you cannot show the carnal what eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man. Until you come and appear before the eyes of your God, do not lose heart. For he will come to pay what he promised, he who of his own accord declared himself a debtor: who borrowed nothing from anyone, and yet deigned to be a debtor by his own promise. We were in debt; and we owed as much as we had sinned. He came without debt, because without any sin; he found us crushed under ruinous and damnable interest, and, paying what he had not stolen, he mercifully freed us from everlasting debt. We had committed the fault, we were awaiting the punishment; he, not becoming a partner in our fault but becoming a sharer in the punishment, willed to be the forgiver at once of the fault and of the punishment. For he it is who will redeem the souls of believers from usury and iniquity, and from the heart in each of those who say, “I believe that I shall see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.” This land is to be longed for, not with an earthly or dead heart, but with one that is in some way heavenly and living. For this is the land of which in another psalm someone burning with love of it and singing eagerly says: “You are my hope, my portion in the land of the living.” To it those are heading who in a life-giving way put to death their members upon the earth: not the members of which the frame of the body in this world consists, but those members by which the manliness of the soul is wretchedly weakened. Most plainly listing and marking them, the vessel of election, the apostle Paul, says: “Put to death your members which are upon the earth: sexual immorality, impurity, agitation, evil desire, and greed, which is the service of idols.” See what you must put to death in this land of the dying, you who long to live in that land of the living. So become members of Christ in such a way that you do not take them and make them members of a harlot. For what harlot is more shameful, what more disgraceful, than sexual immorality, which is set first, and greed, which is set last? This he rightly called the service of idols, since you must recognize and avoid it not only in the luxury of the body but also in the looseness of the soul, lest you incur that destruction from the threatening and chaste bridegroom and just judge to whom it is said: “You have destroyed everyone who is unfaithful to you.” How much more justly, how much more usefully, will each of you cry to him in chastity of heart: “For me it is good to cling to God”! This clinging is granted by that love of which it is likewise said: “Love without pretense; hating evil, clinging to good.” [6] See where your stadium is, see where the wrestling of the contestants is, see where the course of the runners is, see where the boxing of those who strike is. If you want to throw down with the arms of faith the most pernicious wrestler, lay low evil things and embrace good ones. If you want to run so as to obtain the prize, flee the wicked one and pursue the just. If you want to box so as not to beat the air but to strike the enemy manfully, chastise your body and bring it into subjection, so that, abstaining from all things and contending lawfully, you may triumph as partakers of the heavenly prize and the incorruptible crown. What we do in you by adjuring the name of your Redeemer, complete by the searching and crushing of your heart. We resist the wiles of the ancient enemy with prayers to God and with rebukes; you persist in vows and in contrition of heart, so that you may be rescued from the power of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of his brightness. This is now your work, and this your labor. We heap on him the curses his wickedness deserves; you rather declare a most glorious contest against him by turning away from him and by devout renunciation. He must be worn down, bound, and shut out, the enemy of God and of you, and rather of himself. For his fury is shown to be insolent against God, wicked against you, and ruinous to himself. Let him pant for slaughter everywhere, set his traps, sharpen his many and deceitful tongues: by invoking the name of the Savior, pour out from your hearts all his poisons.

Whatever he sent in by most criminal suggestions, whatever by most shameful allurements, will now be drained out, now be exposed. Now the captivity in which he held you tyrannically will be plundered. The yoke with which he cruelly pressed you down will be turned away from you and laid on his own neck: only give your consent to your Redeemer for your liberation. Hope in him, whole assembly of the new people; and you, people being born, whom the Lord has made, strive to be born in health, lest you be miscarried to your death. See the womb of mother Church; see, she labors in her groaning to bring you forth and lead you into the light of faith. Do not by your impatience shake your mother's womb and narrow the doors of your birth. People being created, praise your God; praise, you who are being created, praise your Lord. Because you are being nursed, praise; because you are being fed, praise; because you are being nourished, grow in wisdom and age. He too accepted these delays of a temporal birth, he who neither fails through shortness of time nor gains through any length of time, but from the days of eternity has shut out all narrowness and time. Do not, as a kindly nurse of little ones warns, become children in mind; but be little children in malice, that you may be mature in mind. As competentes, grow up competently in Christ, so that you may grow with youthful vigor into a perfect man. Gladden your father, as it is written, by the progress of your wisdom, and do not sadden your mother by your failing.

Love what you will be. For you will be children of God, children of adoption. This will be given you freely and conferred freely. In it you will abound the more generously and richly, the more grateful you are to him from whom you have received these things. Strive toward him, who knows those who are his. And he will not disdain then to know you among those who are his, if, naming the name of the Lord, you depart from iniquity. You have, or have had, parents of your flesh in the world, who begot you to toil and punishment and death; but because each of you can say of them, with a happier orphanhood, “My father and my mother have forsaken me,” recognize, Christian, that Father who, when they forsook you, took you up from your mother's womb, to whom a certain faithful man faithfully says: “From my mother's womb you are my protector.” The Father is God, the mother the Church. You will be begotten by these far otherwise than you were begotten by those. These births will be met not by toil, not by misery, not by weeping, not by death, but by ease, happiness, joy, and life. Through those, a lamentable generation; through these, a generation to be desired. Those, in begetting, beget us for eternal punishment because of the old fault; these, in regenerating, let neither punishment nor fault remain. This is the regeneration of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob. Seek humbly: when you have found, you will come to a secure height. Your infancy will be innocence, your boyhood reverence, your adolescence patience, your youth virtue, your maturity merit, your old age nothing else than a gray-haired and wise understanding. Through these joints or stages of life you do not roll on, but, abiding, are renewed. For the second will not succeed so that the first falls away, nor will the rise of the third be the death of the second, nor is the fourth born so that the third may die; the third will not envy the fourth in order to remain, nor will the sixth bury the fifth. Though these ages do not come all at once, yet in a devout and justified soul they persevere together and in harmony. They will lead you to the seventh, perennial rest and peace. For, as we read, when you have been freed six times from the necessities of a mortal age, in the seventh no evil will touch you. For things that will not exist will not fight, nor will they prevail that will not even dare. There is secure immortality; there is immortal security.

And whence these things, if not from the change wrought by the right hand of the Most High, who will bless your children in you, who will make peace your borders? Rouse yourselves, then, to these things, joined together and set apart: joined to the good, set apart from the evil; chosen, beloved, foreknown, called, to be justified, to be glorified; so that, growing, becoming young, and growing old in faith and maturity of strength, not in decay of limbs, in a rich old age, you may tranquilly proclaim the works of the Lord, who has done great things for you, he who is mighty; for great is his name, and of his wisdom there is no number. Do you seek life? Run to him who is the fountain of life; and when the darkness of your smoky desires has been put to flight, you will see light in the light of that only-begotten one, your most merciful Redeemer and most radiant enlightener. If you seek salvation, hope in him who saves those who hope in him. If you pursue drunkenness and delights, he will not deny you even these. Only come and worship, fall down and weep before him who made you; and he will make you drunk with the abundance of his house, and give you to drink from the torrent of his delights.

But beware lest the foot of pride come against you; and watch lest the hands of sinners move you. That the first may not happen, pray that he may cleanse you from your hidden faults; and that the second may not rush in and cast you down, ask him to spare you from those of others. Lying down, rise; rising, stand; standing, take your place; having taken your place, persist. Bear the yoke no longer: rather burst their bonds and cast their yoke from you, lest you be held again under the yoke of slavery. The Lord is near; be anxious about nothing. Eat now the bread of sorrow: the time will come when, after the bread of sadness, the bread of joy will be served you. But the merit for that is the endurance of this. Your turning away and flight earned the bread of mourning: turn back, be pierced to the heart, and return to your Lord. He is ready to bestow the bread of joy on one who is pierced to the heart and returns, if you do not neglect or put off praying in tears and wretchedness for your flight. In such great crowds of those who harass you, then, put on sackcloth and humble your soul in fasting. What was denied to pride is given back to humility. And you indeed, when you were being examined, and the one who persuaded you to that very flight and desertion was duly rebuked in the omnipotence of the awesome Trinity, were not clothed in sackcloth; but your feet stood on it in a mystical sense.

Vices are to be trampled underfoot, and goats' fleeces with them: the rags of the goats on the left are to be torn up. The merciful father will come out to meet you of his own accord with the first robe, he who did not delay even to kill the fatted calf to drive away your deadly hunger. With his flesh you will be fed, with his blood you will be given drink; by whose outpouring sins are forgiven, debts are remitted, stains are wiped away. Eat as the poor, and then you will be filled; so that you too may be among those of whom it is said, “The poor shall eat and be filled”; and, filled to your health, belch forth his bread and his glory. Run to him and be converted: for he it is who converts those who have turned away, pursues fugitives, finds the lost, humbles the proud, feeds the hungry, frees those in fetters, enlightens the blind, cleanses the unclean, refreshes the weary, raises the dead, and rescues those possessed and captured by spirits of wickedness. Since we have now found you free of these, we congratulate you and warn you that the health which has appeared in your body may be preserved in your hearts.

The Lord Christ, who hears us together with the Father, deigned to pray to the Father for us. What is more certain than our happiness, when he prays for us who gives what he prays for? For Christ is man and God: he prays as man; he gives what he prays for as God. But, as you ought to hold, he ascribes everything to the Father because the Father is not from him, but he is from the Father. To the source from which he was born he gives all. But he too is a source, one that was born. For he is the fountain of life. So the Father, a source, begot a source. A source indeed begot a source; but the begetting source and the begotten source, just as the begetting God and the begotten God, are one God. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Father, the Holy Spirit of both is neither the Father nor the Son; but the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one God. Be built up in unity, lest you fall in separation.

You have heard what he prayed for us, or rather what he willed. He said: “Father, those whom you have given me, I will that where I am they also may be.” I will, he says, that where I am they too may be with me. O blessed home! O secure homeland! It has no enemy; it has no plague. There we shall live securely, we shall not seek to move away, we shall find no safer place. Whatever you choose here on earth, you choose for fear, not for security. Choose yourself a place while you are in a bad place, that is, in this world, in this life full of temptations; choose in this mortality full of groans and fears: while you are in a bad place, choose yourself a place to move to from the bad place. You will not be able to move to the good place from the bad place unless you have done good in the bad place. What kind of place is that, where no one hungers? So if you want to dwell in the good place, where no one hungers, in the bad place break your bread for the hungry. In that blessed place no one is a stranger: all live in their own homeland. So if you want to be in the good place, where no one is a stranger, in the bad place take into your house one who has nowhere to go in. Give hospitality to the stranger in the bad place, so that you may come to the good place where you cannot be a guest. In the good place no one needs clothing: there is no cold there, there are no heats: what need of a roof, what need of clothing? There will be no roof there, but protection. And see, there too we find a roof: “In the shadow of your wings I will hope.” So in this bad place give a roof to one who has none, so that you may be in the good place, where you will have such a roof that you will not seek to keep it in repair, because no rain drips in there. There is an everlasting fountain of truth; but that rain gladdens, it does not soak: that rain is the fountain of life itself. For what does it mean, “With you is the fountain of life,” and, “The Word was with God”?

So, dearly beloved, do good in the bad place, so that you may come to the good place, of which he who prepares it for us says, “I will that where I am they too may be with me.” He ascended to prepare it, so that we may come securely to what has been prepared. He himself has prepared it: remain in him. Is Christ a small house for you? Do you now fear his passion? He has risen from the dead and does not die, and death will no longer have dominion over him. A bad place, bad days: this world. But let us do good in the bad place and live well in the bad days. The bad place and the bad days pass; and there will come the eternal good place and the eternal good days; and those good days will themselves be one day. For why are the days here bad? Because one passes so that another may come. Today passes so that tomorrow may come; yesterday passed so that today might come. Where nothing passes, there is one day. And Christ is day, and the Father is day: but the Father is day from no day, the Son day from day. So the Lord Jesus Christ commended to us in his passion the toils and afflictions of the present world; in his resurrection he commended the eternal and blessed life of the world to come. Let us endure present things; let us hope for future things. That is why in these days we keep days signifying the toil of the present world, wearing down our souls in the observance of fasting; but in the days to come we keep days signifying the world to come, where we are not yet. I said “we signify,” not “we possess.” For until the passion there is contrition; after the resurrection, praise.