Sermons to the People 343.1–343.10

May the divine readings and the holy oracles of God that have sounded in our ears make a nest in our minds: may they not fly in and pass on, or settle and leave, but bring forth something. For if the sparrow has found itself a home, and the turtledove a nest where she may lay her young, how much more the sparrow, the word of God, and the turtledove, the mercy of God? We have heard the reading about Susanna: let conjugal chastity be built up, and rest on so firm a foundation and be fortified by such a wall that it may both drive off those who lie in wait and convict false witnesses. The chaste woman would have remained to die, had not he been present who saw what was hidden from the judges. Her words have been written down, which she spoke in the garden, that is, in her pleasure-garden: words which no man heard except only the two who were lying in wait for another man's wife's modesty and, when she resisted, were planning false testimony. They alone heard what was said: “I am hemmed in on every side. For if I do this, it is death for me; but if I do not, I shall not escape your hands. But it is better for me not to escape your hands than to sin in the sight of God.” She despised what she heard because she feared him whom she did not see; to whose divine eyes, however, she herself was in plain view. For though she did not see God, she was not unseen by God. God saw what he was building; he looked on his own work; he dwelt in his own temple; he himself was there, answering those who lay in wait. For if the giver of chastity had abandoned her, chastity would have perished. So she says, “I am hemmed in on every side.” But she was also waiting for him who would save her from faintheartedness and the storm of false witnesses, as of evil winds. Yet in those winds and waves chastity did not suffer shipwreck, because the Lord was at the helm. There was shouting, people came, they went out: the case came to judgment. Susanna's household had believed the lying elders against their mistress; and although her past life, unharmed and spotless, seemed fit to bear witness to her chastity, yet it seemed to them irreligious not to believe the elders. No such word had ever been heard about Susanna. Those, then, were false witnesses—but not to God. The household believed one thing; the Lord saw another; but what the Lord saw, men did not know; it seemed right to believe the elders. So she had to die; but if the flesh died, chastity would be crowned. The Lord was present to her prayer; he heard the woman he knew; he did not abandon to death the one whom he had helped not to commit adultery. The Lord stirred up the holy spirit of Daniel, still young in age but strong in piety. Since, then, there was the prophetic Spirit in him, he at once saw the deceit of the most wicked elders. But what he perceived had to be shown to the others. “They are false witnesses,” he says; “return to judgment.” But that they were false he knew, to whom the prophetic Spirit had revealed it; those who did not know had to be taught. So if the judges had to be taught, the witnesses beyond doubt had to be convicted. To convict them, then, pressing on the falsehood of the testimony which he himself already knew, he ordered them to be separated from each other. He questioned each one: for both could have one lust, but they could not devise one plan. One was asked under what tree he had caught the adulterers; he answered, “Under a mastic tree.” The other was asked; he answered, “Under an evergreen oak.” The discord of the testimonies revealed the truth and set chastity free.

And chastity indeed, brothers, as I have already said, would have been set free and crowned even if the flesh, which must die sometime, had died by that judgment. For we are all going to die; and no one who wishes to escape brings it about that he removes death, but only that he postpones the debt. This holds everyone; this we must all repay, what we have drawn from Adam; and because we do not want to die, no release is granted by the collector of this debt, only a delay requested. Susanna, then, a devout woman and a chaste wife, was certainly going to die sometime; and if that sometime had been then, what harm would it have done to her chastity, while her flesh was laid in the tomb and her chastity was given back to God and crowned by God? For do you think, brothers, that it belongs to great merit if false witnesses do not prevail against an innocent person? It is no great merit if false testimony does not prevail against an innocent person. It would be a great merit if it had not prevailed against the Lord. But our Lord Jesus Christ himself was crucified through the tongues of false witnesses. Yet those false witnesses prevailed for an hour: what harm did they do to one who would rise again? So by his own example our Lord God, in his flesh, in his weakness, and in the form of a servant which he took up to set the servant free, to seek the runaway, to redeem the captive, to loose the bound, to make the servant a brother—coming for this in the form of a servant, he showed the servant an example, so that he should not dread false witnesses, and should not fear when they are believed. For they can make a bad reputation; but they cannot kill a pure conscience. The three men were set free from the furnace of burning fire; their God was present; they walked among harmless flames, burning around them and not scorching them, and in that very walking they spoke praises to God, and came out unharmed as they had been thrown in. Their God, then, was present. Was the God of the Maccabees absent? These escaped; those were soon burned: both were tested, the latter consumed in the flesh, the former unharmed in the flesh; but both were crowned. That the three men should escape the flames was granted to Nebuchadnezzar, so that he might believe in their God. For he who could free them openly could also crown them secretly. But if he had crowned them secretly, he would not have freed the king who had raged. The safety of their bodies became the salvation of his soul. They by praising God escaped present fires; he by believing in God escaped eternal hell. More, then, was granted to him than to them. But Antiochus, by whom the Maccabees were tortured, was not worthy to be granted such things; so when they had been consumed by fire and torments he exulted; but he who exalts himself will be humbled.

He, then, who freed Susanna, a chaste woman and faithful wife, from the false testimony of the elders, also freed the virgin Mary from the false suspicion of her husband. That virgin was found pregnant, to whom no man had come. Her womb indeed had swelled with offspring, but her virginal integrity had remained. She had conceived by faith the sower of faith; she had received God into her body, who had not allowed her body to be violated. Yet to her husband, as a man, she came under suspicion. He believed it came from elsewhere, since he knew it was not from himself, and suspected that it came from adultery. He is corrected by an angel. Why was he worthy to be corrected by an angel? Because there was no malevolent suspicion in him, such as the apostle says malevolent suspicions arise among brothers. Malevolent suspicions belong to slanderers; benevolent suspicions belong to those who govern. One may suspect evil of a son, but one may not slander a son: you certainly suspect evil, but you hope to find good. He who suspects benevolently wants to be proved wrong: for he is truly glad when what he suspected as evil is found false. Such was Joseph towards his wife, with whom he had not been joined in body but had already been united in faith. So the virgin too came under false suspicion; but as the Spirit was present for Susanna in Daniel, so the angel was present for Mary. The angel said to Joseph: “Do not fear to take Mary as your wife: for what is born of her is of the Holy Spirit.” The suspicion was removed, because redemption was found. [4] A little while ago married women rejoiced at Susanna; let virgins rejoice at Mary: let both hold to chastity, the former conjugal, the latter virginal. For both chastities have merit with God; but virginal is greater, conjugal less; yet both are pleasing to God, because each is a gift of God. All come to eternal life; but in eternal life not all obtain the same honour, the same dignity, the same merit. Eternal life and the kingdom of God will be like—for the sake of a comparison—what we call the sky. In the sky are all the stars: so too in the kingdom of God will be all the good faithful. Eternal life will be equal for all: for there one does not live more and another less, when we shall all live without end. That is the denarius which the labourers will receive, whether those who worked in the vineyard from morning or those who came at the eleventh hour: that denarius is eternal life, which is equal for all. But look at the sky, remember the apostle: “There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory: so also is the resurrection of the dead.” So let each one, my brothers, strive in this world according to the gift he has received, that he may rejoice in the world to come. Are you married? Yours is a lower life; hope for a lower reward; yet do not despair of the eternal kingdom. The precepts of marriage must be kept by you. For what? Because you have a wife, ought you not to recognize that you are a pilgrim in this world, ought you not to think that you will die, that you will leave the bed of pleasure? And see where you are heading in any case: to the torment of calamity, or to the reward of eternity. Think, then; keep what you have received; carry your burden: for it is light if you love, heavy if you hate. For not in vain did the Lord say—nor was he, when he said this, speaking only to the continent: “Come to me, all you who labour and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls”—not for your flesh, but for your souls. “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”: light to one who loves, heavy to one who refuses. Have you taken the Lord's yoke on your neck? It is easy if you strive well; rough if you resist. Temptations surround married life. Was not this Susanna tempted in her very chastity just because she was joined to a husband? Are only those women not tempted in this respect who are united to husbands? Look, Susanna was another man's wife, she had a husband; yet she was tempted, she was tossed in the storm. “I am hemmed in,” she says, “on every side.” For she feared death from the false witnesses; but she feared utterly to die from God, the true judge. For by the false witnesses she would die for a time; by God the judge she would be punished for ever. She weighed and chose: first she feared and weighed; she weighed and chose; she chose and conquered. She taught devout married women, taught them to resist the tempter, taught them to fight, taught them to labour, taught them to implore help.

If Scripture is witness to so great a woman, has it abandoned men? Has it let them lack an example to imitate? We watched Susanna tempted by men lusting for her corruption; we watched her fighting. That reading was the theatre of our heart; we watched for God's athlete, the chaste spirit; we saw the adversary fighting; let us triumph over the vanquished with the victor. Devout wives have their example, they have something to imitate. Let them owe to God what they keep, not to a man: for then they keep it, if they owe it to God; then they keep it, if they owe it to him who sees what they keep, which even the husband does not see. For the husband is often absent; God is always present. And sometimes, because the husband is a man, he suspects falsely: then let the woman pray for her husband who suspects falsely; let her pray that he may be saved, not that he may be condemned. For a husband's false suspicion does not close the eyes of God. Her conscience is bare before him who created it. For he frees for eternity the one oppressed for a time. But let her pray for her husband, and take pains to have not only a good life but also an unharmed reputation. For a good life frees chastity itself from being condemned; but a good reputation frees others from slipping into false suspicion and perhaps falling into sin while they judge what they do not see: as those judges fell, and holy Daniel—or rather the Lord through Daniel—freed those judges more than Susanna from inner death. For he freed her from being condemned for a time; but he freed them from falling, by judging badly and condemning an innocent woman, into the eternal punishment of that judge whom no one can corrupt and from whom no one can hide. [6] I was saying, then, about men, that they too have not been left without an example. Chaste men, men who fear God, men for whom your own wives are enough; men who do not violate what you do not want violated in your own; men who have rendered the fidelity you have demanded: you too wait, while I recall it, for what your wives were waiting for as the reader read. Divine Scripture has not left you without an example either. They heard of Susanna and rejoiced in her victory: you, attend to Joseph; not that Joseph to whom the virgin Mary, who bore Christ, had been betrothed, for he was tested by suspicion and soon healed by an angel. Holy Scripture bears witness to another Joseph, whom an unchaste woman tempted: she loved the handsome man, not with a chaste but with a perverse mind, where she had no eyes, where spiritual and invisible beauty is seen; she loved him handsome, she did not want him chaste. She loved another's servant, she loved her husband's servant; but she did not love him keeping faith with his master. Do you think she loved him, or rather herself? I think neither him nor herself. For if she loved him, why did she want to destroy him? If she loved herself, why did she want to perish? Look, I have proved that she did not love. She burned with the poison of lust; she did not shine with the flame of love. But he knew how to see what she did not know. He was more beautiful within than without, more beautiful in the light of the heart than in the skin of the flesh: where that woman's eyes did not penetrate, there he enjoyed his own beauty. Gazing, then, on the inner beauty of chastity, how could he allow it to be stained, to be violated by that woman's temptation? She loved; but he loved too; and what he loved was greater than what she loved, because he saw what she did not see.

If you want to see in some way the spiritual beauty of chastity, if you have any eyes at all for it, I set something before you by way of example: you love it in your wife. Do not, then, hate in another man's wife what you love in yours. What do you love in yours? Chastity, certainly. You hate this in another's, which you love in yours: you hate it in another's when by lying with her you want to destroy her chastity. What you love in your own, do you want to kill in another's? What you love in yours, do you want to destroy in another's? How will you have the prayer of piety, you murderer of chastity? Keep, then, in another's wife what you want kept in yours: love chastity itself rather than flesh. But perhaps you think you are a lover of your wife's flesh, not of her chastity. A sordid thought indeed; but I do not leave you without an example. For I think you love chastity in your wife more than flesh. But to show you most absolutely that you are a lover of chastity more than of flesh: you love it in your daughter. What man is there who does not want his daughters to be chaste? What man is there who does not rejoice in his daughters' chastity? Is it flesh that you love there too? Do you desire a beautiful body where you shudder at incest? Look, I have proved that you are a lover of chastity. If, then, I have shown you to be a lover of chastity, how have you offended yourself, that you do not love it in yourself? Look, you have a short way: love in yourself what you love in your daughter; love this in another man's wife, because your daughter too will be another man's wife. Love chastity, then, in yourself as well. If you love another man's wife, you will not have her at once; if you love chastity, you will have it at once. Love chastity, then, that you may have eternal happiness.

But perhaps you will be tempted: an unchaste woman will love you, she will find you alone, she will try to wring an embrace from you; if you refuse, she will threaten punishment by defaming you. This is what the lying elders did to Susanna; this is what his master's wife did to holy Joseph. But attend to him to whom both Susanna and Joseph attended. Because there is no witness, is God not there? Joseph would not offend his eyes, the eyes of his Lord who was present. He would not consent to the unchaste woman for an unlawful union. He repelled another's lust and embraced his own chastity. Yet she did what she had threatened: she lied to her husband; she was believed by her husband. God is still patient. Joseph is handed over to prison; he is guarded as a criminal by whom God was not offended. But God was not absent even there, because he was not guilty. The Lord was present to Joseph in his suffering: that he did not help him quickly, he postponed for greater rewards. He rightly gladdened the one he had trained by punishment. For holy Joseph had to suffer something hard, that is, bitter, for the sake of chastity itself. If perhaps he had loved that unchaste woman, he would have been ready to suffer hard things for her; and she would not count his love for her proven unless he endured such troubles or hardships for her sake, and repaid love—or rather not love but evil desire—in kind. She would burn for him in turn, seeing him burning with such love for her that he would not refuse to endure any punishments for it. If this for an unchaste woman, how much more for chastity itself? So God sometimes rightly delays his help, to test a man, to train a man, so that the man may become known to himself. For nothing is hidden from God.

This, then, I would urge on your Charity, brothers: that above all, before carnal desires and worldly joys and the vain and flighty pomp and vapour of this present life, you set the grace and beauty of wisdom, you set the sweetness and pleasantness of wisdom, you set the grace of modesty, the beauty of chastity. All these are hidden in the heavenly treasury; these precious gems lie bare before the eyes of God; they shine greatly; if you have eyes, you see them. Set these, then, above various and unlawful pleasures; and if temptation goes so far that you even suffer trouble, my brothers, who does not suffer for his purse? who does not suffer for his field, for one boundary stone of his field? If you suffer for these things, which you do not have in your power to keep as long as you want, or to leave to whom you want—but they are often lost while we live, and often after our death are possessed by those we hate—if for these goods (if indeed they are to be called goods, which do not make people good) men endure such evils with calm, why are they lazy for the faith? Why are they timid for the heavenly treasure, for those riches which not even shipwrecks can take from us? For the just man escapes from shipwreck rich and naked.

Holy Job was full of these riches; all those things perished at one blow; nothing remained in his house of the things by which he had seemed wealthy a little before; suddenly a beggar, on the dunghill, swarming with worms from head to foot. What is more wretched than this wretchedness? What is happier than his inner happiness? He had lost all those things that God had given; but he had God himself, who had given everything. “Naked,” he says, “I came out of my mother's womb, naked I shall return to the earth. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; as it pleased the Lord, so it has been done: blessed be the name of the Lord.” Surely he is poor? Surely he has nothing? If nothing remains, from what treasury were these gems of God's praise brought out? Afterwards the tempter came even to his flesh: when everything had been taken away, he left the tempting woman. He left Eve; but he was not that Adam. And how was he found there? How did he answer his wife when she suggested blasphemy? “You have spoken,” he says, “like one of the foolish women. If we have received good things from the hand of the Lord, why do we not bear evil things?” O man rotting and whole! O foul and beautiful! O wounded and sound! O sitting on the dunghill and reigning in heaven! If we love him, let us imitate him; to imitate him, let us labour; and if we falter in the labour, let us implore help. He who appointed the contest helps the contestant. For God does not watch you fighting as the people watch a charioteer: they know how to shout, they do not know how to help. God does not watch you fighting as the president of the games watches an athlete: he prepares a crown of hay; he does not know how to supply strength to the one labouring; nor can he, for he is a man, not God. And perhaps while he watches he labours more sitting than the other wrestling. But God, when he watches his contestants, helps them when called upon: for the voice of his athlete is in the psalm: “If I said, My foot has slipped, your mercy, Lord, helped me.” Let us not be lazy, then, my brothers: let us ask, seek, knock. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks will find, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.