Tractates 3–5

The first Sunday of Easter. God speaks through the prophet: "Behold, I make a new heaven and a new earth; and the moon will shine like the sun, and the sun seven times as much." Although he foretells the future renewal of the elements after the end of this age, when the creation itself, as the Apostle says, "will be set free from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God" (for, beloved, neither will the elements fail so as no longer to exist, nor shall we die so as not to rise improved), yet on this day too we see the Lord's promise fulfilled, as we look on the souls and bodies of the newly baptized, renewed after the likeness of heaven and earth. The moon also, that is, the church, which grows in peace and wanes in persecution (it wanes, however, in the fullness of its orb, not in the light of its brightness), we now see shining like the sun through the whole world. And that Christ, the Sun of righteousness, shines on the earth today seven times as much as he used to shine, his rays bear witness, which enlighten every man coming into this world. For now there flashes from him that fiery sevenfold Spirit which sat upon the apostles like fire and burns today in each of the believers. For before Christ suffered and rose again, God was known only in Judea; now the radiance of the Lord's brightness passes into all nations. "For his going out is from the height of heaven, and his circuit to its height, and there is none who can hide from his heat." Since, then, the world has been restored today, let us joyfully keep the birthday of the world's re-formation. "This is the day which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it." When I say the birthday of the world, I mean our own, who have been reborn in Christ: we who before were alive to sin but dead to righteousness, and who now, dead to the iniquities of our former crimes, have begun to live to God, made conformable first to the death and then to the resurrection of Christ. "For we were buried with him through baptism into death, so that as Christ rose from the dead, so we too might walk in newness of life," celebrating the feast and glorying in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, taken on the tenth day of the first month, was sacrificed by the Jews on the fourteenth day, at the evening of the world.

But what that tenth day signifies, and what the fourteenth, I shall explain, to keep yesterday's promise, as far as the Lord deigns to grant. God says to holy Moses: "Speak to the whole congregation of the children of Israel, saying: On the tenth of this month let each man take a sheep by the houses of their families, a sheep for each house. And if they are too few in the house to suffice for a sheep, he shall take with him his nearest neighbour, according to the number of souls; each shall reckon what suffices for himself in the lamb. Your lamb shall be perfect, male, a year old; you shall take it from the lambs and the kids; and it shall be kept for you until the fourteenth of this month, and the whole multitude of the congregation of the children of Israel shall kill it toward evening. And they shall take of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel, in the houses in which they are to eat it." The manifold wisdom of God speaks through the Law in such a way that by the very words in which he orders things to be done for present salvation he foretells things to come. The shadow of the truth that was to follow saved the Jews of that time in these observances, while signifying at the same time that their descendants, forgetful of the divine benefits, would slaughter at his coming the very one under whose shadow they had been saved. For by them Christ, coming into this world, was led like a sheep to the slaughter; and we, having the blood of this Lamb (that is, the sign of his passion) either on the two doorposts, whether faith and works or heart and mouth, or on the lintels of our foreheads, are protected from every assault of the raging plague.

That the lamb is taken on the tenth day and sacrificed on the fourteenth signifies, as I see it, that the people of the Jews would crucify at evening the Son of God, whom they had received in the Decalogue of the Law and who was born, as it is written, in the fourteenth generation after the deportation to Babylon. "At evening": either the evening of this world, because he suffered in the last times of the age; or else at the setting of the sun itself, since when the Lord was crucified the sun set. For at midday, "from the sixth hour, there was darkness over the whole earth until the ninth hour." What could be so much an evening? Nor should you think it idle that, whereas above it is said in the imperative mood, "let them take a sheep by houses," below it is pronounced in the indicative mood, "the whole multitude of the congregation of the children of Israel will kill it toward evening." "They will kill," he says, not "let them kill." For what the synagogue of the Jews was going to do cruelly was foretold; it was not commanded to be done. Nor did it happen because it had been foretold; rather it was foretold because it was going to happen, so that God might show his foreknowledge in things that were to come about through the freedom of men's choice. We have said "freedom of choice" because the Jews willed to do what they did, and certainly, had they not willed it, they would not have done it. Surely it is a huge sacrilege even to think that God, who is not only good and just but goodness itself and justice itself, either commands or compels something to be done which, once done, he condemns. Or do we perhaps think that if the Israelites had repented, the almighty Son of God could not have saved the world in another way? "For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor?" Consider in the Gospel how Christ waited for the repentance of the Jews, where he reproaches the cities in which most of his mighty works had been done, because they had not repented: "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you. And you, Capernaum, who are exalted to heaven, you will be brought down to hell," he says; "for if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained to this day. But I tell you that it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom on the day of judgment than for you." God's foreknowledge is not deceived; but neither is the freedom of will once granted to man taken away, lest God be unable to judge anything of one who was not free in acting. God condemns the obstinacy of the wicked and embraces the conversion of the penitent.

But you may say: "Could God, then, have lied, who foretold that they would do what they did?" We do not attain to the greatness of the power of his omnipotence, who calls the things that are not as though they were. We would think he could have lied if what he foretold had not been fulfilled. Did he then lie to the Ninevites too? For he said, "Yet three days, and Nineveh will be overthrown" (according to the Seventy); and it was not overthrown, because it repented at the preaching of Jonah. But understand: "The word of God is a sword sharp on both sides." Nineveh was to have been overthrown in one way, and it was overthrown in another. It was to have been overthrown by destruction if it had persisted in its wickedness; its iniquity was overthrown, because it repented. "As heaven is distant from the earth," God says to men, "so my thoughts are distant from your thoughts, and my counsels from your counsels." It is written: "Do not seek things too high for you, and do not search out things above you; for their suspicion has tripped up many." Believe, then, beloved, that the Lord is just, true, and loving in all his words and works, so that you may attain perfect wisdom.

"For your lamb shall be perfect, male, a year old," he says, so that you may think nothing middling of the perfect one, nothing weak of the male, nothing half-complete of the year-old. He is perfect, because in him dwelt all the fullness of the divinity bodily. He is male, because he deigned to be born a man from a virgin, so as to provide for both sexes. He is a year old, because after the baptism which he received for us in the Jordan, the space of one year is completed until the day of his passion; and only those things are written in the Gospels which he taught or did in that year, and not even all of them. For so the evangelist John says: "Jesus did many other signs in the sight of his disciples" (those, that is, whom he is written to have chosen after his baptism) "which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have eternal life in his name." And of what he did before that year the same John testifies thus in the last words of his book: "There are also many other things that Jesus did; if they were written one by one, I think the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." Only the evangelist Luke mentions in passing that the Lord Jesus, when twelve years old, was found by his parents in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, hearing them and asking them questions, and that he said to his parents: "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in the things of my Father?" This is the acceptable year of the Lord, of which, reading in the synagogue what was written of his own person in the book of Isaiah, the Lord Jesus says: "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your ears." This is the year whose crown (that is, the victorious circle to be blessed by the works of Christ's goodness) the prophet joyfully announced in the psalm: "You will bless the crown of the year of your kindness," he says, "and your fields will be filled with plenty": the hearts of the believing peoples, that is, having received the seed of the word of life, will overflow even with a hundredfold fruit. And if, when the legs of the robbers who hung on the cross with Christ were broken, the Saviour's legs were not broken, as the holy evangelist testifies, "so that the Scripture might be fulfilled which says, Not a bone of him shall be broken," it was necessary, by the reasoning given above, that this Lamb of God should be sacrificed at a year old, so that everything written of him might be fulfilled in him, to whom be all honour, power and glory, with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, before all ages, and now, and always, and for all ages. Amen.

We have now taught, in three discourses, the carnal observance of the Jewish Passover, filled with these spiritual types: once yesterday, and twice when we spoke to your charity at the vigils; and we have clearly proved that the sacrifice of flesh and blood, commanded in shadow, rightly ceased when Christ the Lamb of God came, who, according to the Apostle, "is the end of the Law for righteousness to everyone who believes." For the most blessed Paul himself too, while he was still in Egypt, celebrated the Passover with the Jews by the Jewish rite. "But when it pleased him who set me apart from my mother's womb," he says, "and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, I did not at once consult flesh and blood." Since, then, one to whom the Son of God has been revealed must not linger over carnal things, let us look for the remaining parts of the spiritual mysteries in the inward parts of the reading set before us.

"You shall take it from the lambs and the kids," he says. From this the Jews ought to have perceived that the Law of God is to be understood spiritually, since they read that the lamb to be sacrificed was to be taken from the lambs and the kids, whereas it is contrary to nature that if it is a lamb it should come both from lambs and from kids. But the whole meaning of the word, beyond all ambiguity, is that this spotless Lamb, the Lord Jesus, deigned to take from the Virgin the flesh both of the just and of sinners; for he took a body not only from the patriarchs and prophets but from the mass of the whole human race. That the just are compared to lambs and sinners to kids he himself declared in the Gospel, saying that the lambs are to be called on the right, "Come, you blessed," but the kids driven away on the left: "Depart, you cursed." This one, then, taken from the lambs and the kids, the whole multitude of the congregation of the children of Israel killed, when they all cried out to Pilate: "Crucify him!" Yet according to the history of the Passover of the Law, the whole congregation did not kill one lamb, but a few people killed one each in every house. But there the chief priests and elders persuaded the people to ask that the robber Barabbas be granted to them and that they should destroy Jesus. For they destroyed Christ the Saviour, and were judged out of their own mouth, so that the Word of God died in them, that is, the speech of the prophets through whom he himself spoke, and, as it is written in the prophets, the wise failed among them; while that robber Barabbas, the devil, whom they demanded so insistently, lived in them. That the seditious man and murderer lives in them is shown by the very seditions they stirred up against the apostles, and which they do not cease to stir up even now against all the saints whenever they find the occasion.

But for us Christ lives. For he rose for us, because he was no longer seen by the Jews; nor after the resurrection did he enter the synagogue of the Jews, but he went in to the disciples gathered together. He comes in to us too, who are gathered in the house of the church, and shows us the reality of his venerable body, if only we have been or are worthy to be his disciples. For the blessed apostles, to whom it was truly entrusted to prepare the Lord's Passover in the upper room, since they saw that there were few from the Jews in the house of the church, not enough to complete the sacrifice of the Passover, called in neighbours from the Gentiles, according to what had been commanded in the Law: "And if they are too few in the house," he says, "to suffice for a sheep, he shall take with him his nearest neighbour," and so on; for they truly were not enough for him who endured to die for the sins of the whole world. For few of the Jews believed in the Lord Jesus. Hence the Apostle says: "So, at this present time" (no doubt, as in the time of Elijah, to whom God says, "I have left myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee before Baal"), "so, then," he says, "at this present time" (at the coming of Christ, that is), "a remnant according to the election of grace has been saved," from the people of the Jews, that is; for out of so great a multitude scarcely a few are found to have been converted to the faith of Christ. For this reason the prophet Isaiah too testifies of this remnant of the Lord and of God's mercy, saying: "Unless the Lord of hosts had left us a seed, we would have become like Sodom and been made like Gomorrah."

You, then, the newly baptized, who are invited to the banquet of this blessed and spiritual Passover, see how you keep your souls from every pollution of the foods that Gentile superstition has defiled. Nor is it enough for a Christian to guard his life from the deadly food of demons; he must flee all the abominations of the Gentiles and all the paths of idolatry, as though they were poisons of the serpent, the devil. For the parts of idolatry are poisonings, incantations, amulets, vanities, auguries, lots, the observance of all such things, and, I say, the feasts for the dead, from which the evil of idolatry raised the head of its error. For men first began, for the sake of their gluttony, to prepare meals for the dead which they themselves would eat; after this they even dared to celebrate sacrilegious sacrifices to them, although those who keep the feasts for the dead do not in fact offer their gift to their dead, when, pouring wine on the tables of the tombs with hands trembling from drunkenness, they stammer that the spirit is thirsty. Beware, I beg you, of all these things, lest God in his indignation hand over those who despise him and his enemies, who did not want him to reign over them, to the torturers of hell: "there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Keep, you newly baptized, the adornment of saving grace. Be sober in all things, lest you lose it through drunkenness. Come to church with care; devote yourselves watchfully with us to prayers, hymns, psalms and spiritual songs. Let these be the works of your leisure, so that, rendering the service owed to Christ the Lord, you may obtain from him the reward of eternal life. Let your banquets be sober, your beds chaste; let your mind be modest, your speech calm, your bearing gentle. Pray that God may preserve the benefits of his grace in you, and that your faith may advance more and more, by the gift of Christ the Lord, the Saviour, whose power is one and whose divinity is the same with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, before all ages, and now, and always, and for all ages. Amen.

We reversed the order of the reading from Exodus, where the law for celebrating the Passover is described, so as to keep the order of due reverence in unlocking the mysteries; for on that most splendid night of the vigil, in the second discourse, it was right to explain not the sequence of what was said but what was fitting for the newly baptized, so that the unformed newly baptized might learn, and the instructed faithful recognize, the discipline of eating the paschal sacrifice. In the same way, of the dress of those who eat, I discussed one item suited to that occasion and reserved two for them as well as for the catechumens. For he says: "And thus you shall eat it" (the lamb, that is): "your loins girded, and your shoes on your feet, and your staffs in your hands." Then we spoke of the girding of the loins; now let us explain the shoes and the staffs. They are set before you today because on the next day, and the third, it was necessary first to explain the things from the beginning of the reading that I had deliberately passed over.

The true Lamb of God, whom John the Baptist points out, is Christ: "Behold," he says, "the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world." His flesh, both the faithful in the mystery and all believers together in faith, we must so eat and commit to the inmost part of our heart that we not only have our loins girded with chastity but are also shod, as the Apostle says, "with the preparation of the gospel of peace." For as earthly shoes protect the feet of the body and resist the harshness of cold, the bite of serpents, or the points of thorns, so the precepts of the divine Law, with which we are commanded to protect the steps of our minds, resist both the serpent, the devil, and the bitterest north wind of the Gentiles, and the thorns and briars of the heretics who prick us on every side. We must, then, use shoes of this kind, all of us who celebrate the Lord's Passover. For "the Law," as the Apostle says, "is spiritual," and "Christ our Passover has been sacrificed." So our loins must be girded and our feet shod. For what does it profit a man if he has chastity of body alone, and, careless and without the protection of the shoes of the Law, is exposed to the evils just mentioned, or (as happens every day) offers the bare heel of his heart for serpents to devour? If he thinks evil, if he covets what belongs to others, if he plots deceit, if he nourishes anger, if he lies in wait for his neighbour, if he is given to lying, if he is eaten up by spite, if he wastes away with envy, if with poisoned mouth he slanders good men, and while he tries to tear the innocent with the dart of his lying tongue, he is rather torn himself by the bites of the demons who speak through him? What did it profit you to have your loins girded, if, not keeping the shoes of the divine commandments, you have handed over the steps of your heart (that is, the feet of your soul) to be cruelly cut to pieces?

It may perhaps seem contradictory to some that, while here God so insistently commands that we must be shod, elsewhere the same Lord God commands holy Moses and holy Joshua: "Loose the shoes from your feet." The explanation is indeed a large one and would need to be built up with the windings of many propositions; but since brevity suits both the labour of the preacher and the memory of the hearer, I do not wish to draw you out at greater length. The question is resolved where the shoes are loosed, since the reason is added at once: "Loose the shoes from your feet," he says, "for the place on which you stand is holy ground." It is shown, then, that the land of Egypt, where that earlier command is given, is not holy, and therefore shoes are ordered to be worn there; but in the holy land it is decreed that they are to be loosed. For what reasons, however, must be plainly explained. As long as we live in the Egypt of this world, we who celebrate the Lord's Passover must use the shoes of the holy Scriptures, because our step cannot be safe unless it is covered by the Lord's commandments, until we enter that holy land of promise which is prepared for the just. "For blessed are the meek," says the Lord Jesus, "for they shall possess the earth": not, of course, this earth which sinners possess, but that one in which there are no thorns and briars, in which there are no serpents and scorpions, since there the devil with the other unclean spirits does not come. For he will then be, together with his followers, in the eternal fire which God has prepared for the devil and his angels.

We also have John the Baptist, who said of the Saviour of the human race, the Lord Jesus: "The strap of whose shoes I am not worthy to loose." But in Christ the reason is different. He was shod not for his own sake but for ours, since the earth could not bear the bare footprints of his majesty. When he speaks of shoes, he points to the steps of the holy Scriptures, by which the knowledge of him walks and goes round to all who dwell on the earth. And therefore John the Baptist in the Gospel denies that he is either fit or worthy to loose the strap of his shoes, that is, his word: whether to expound one of his commandments, or to be able to lay bare and plainly show the venerable footprints of the Word of God, who is still shod in this world. "For now we see through a mirror in an enigma," he says, "but then face to face," where there will be nothing covered that will not be revealed, nor hidden that will not be known; when the Lord Jesus goes up to that future feast day not, as among unbelievers, as it were in secret, but, as it is written: "God will come openly, our God, and will not keep silence."

For this reason too the apostles are elsewhere in the Gospels forbidden to carry shoes on the way, when it is said to them by the Lord in the Gospel of Matthew: "Do not possess gold or silver or money in your belts, no bag for the way, nor two tunics, nor shoes, nor staff; for the labourer is worthy of his wages." But elsewhere they are commanded to have them, as the evangelist Mark describes: "And Jesus went round the villages teaching. And calling the twelve, he sent them two by two, giving them power to drive out unclean spirits, and commanding them to take nothing with them on the way except a staff only; no bag, no bread, no money in their belts, but to be shod with sandals," and, he says, "not to put on two tunics." Because of unbelievers and men of little faith, the apostles are commanded to have shoes on the way of preaching, so that they may preach the Word of God shod and covered in mystery, because of the thorns and briars of blasphemers. But to those who listen with a faithful mind, as though already in the holy land, being of perfect heart in faith, where they could safely bring forth bare testimonies about God, they are commanded not to carry shoes, so that they may plant there the open footprints of his divinity. And therefore blessed Peter put on his shoes in prison, and so went out again to the hostile Jews and the adverse powers, so that, his feet shod with the preparation of the gospel, he might tread on serpents and scorpions and on all the power of the enemy. And Moses says in the blessings, either to each of the faithful or rather to the person of Christ: "Iron and bronze shall be your shoe," so that he may break the heads of the dragons upon the waters, that is, crush the principalities of the demon dragons who are upon the waters of the Gentile peoples. That waters are likened to peoples and nations is revealed in the Apocalypse of John: "The waters which you saw," he says, "on which the harlot Babylon sits, are peoples and nations."

I need a staff too, while I still celebrate the Passover in Egypt, so that, if I am an imitator of holy Moses, I may free my Hebrew (that is, my understanding, an Israelite, who has been counted worthy to see God) from destruction by striking the Egyptian. Each one does this for himself as long as he serves the Law. But if anyone is apostolic, and, the Egyptian having been laid low through Jesus, has become great and powerful, he no longer carries a staff for his own sake but for the sake of those to whom it must be said: "What do you wish? Shall I come to you with a rod, or in love and a spirit of gentleness?" He carries it also for the sake of those who come to us in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravening wolves. But if the wolf ceases to be a wolf and feeds with the lamb, as the prophet says, and if the lion, ceasing to be a lion, eats straw with the ox, there is no need of a staff. For if the wickedness of savage ways is turned to such gentleness that, with the innocent little sheep and the clean labourers of Christ, they seek and take the sweet food of life, and are such that they ought to be instructed to perfection in love and a spirit of gentleness, then Christ tells all apostolic priests not to carry staffs of correction on the way, when in obedient and modest disciples they have already begun to possess the holy land. May the Saviour of the human race, God the Lord Jesus, grant this concerning you to my littleness, whose Deity is one and whose omnipotence is the same with the Father and the Holy Spirit, before all ages, and now, and always, and for all ages. Amen.