Homilies of Maximus of Turin (Bruni's collection) 39.2–42.1

We have often set out the reason for holy Lent, whose beginning we celebrate today, and have often taught why we fast for so many days. We said that the Lord Jesus Christ consecrated this same number of fasting, and, taking no food for continuous days and nights, made one body of fasting: that is, though the order of the day was interrupted by the coming of the night, the order of the fast was not interrupted. So with him there were many courses of time, but one day of abstinence, showing us that we must fast this number whole: so that, since we cannot embrace the whole of Lent in one solid fast, we may at least celebrate it with daily fasts without interruption; so that if anyone neglects to abstain on one day, he has violated the whole of Lent, and for the sake of a little time's food has lost the fruit of great labor. But someone will say: We have sometimes received the reason for Lent, and we have often heard that it was consecrated by the Lord; but we long to hear why this same Lent has forty-two days. We read in the Old Testament that when holy Moses delivered the sons of Israel from the yoke of Egyptian captivity to lead them into the land of promise, he came to that land by stations of forty-two days, and that he obtained the promises in as many periods of time as we rejoice to enjoy the promises made to us by the Saviour. By the same number, I say, by which Moses came through the stations to rest, we too hasten through fasts to heaven. For our fasts are a kind of stations, through which, making the journey spiritually, we walk by the virtues of the soul and by daily progress come nearer to the land promised us, so that he arrives sooner who has fasted more devoutly. The swift feet of the soul are faith and fasting, which quickly climb from low places to the heights, quickly step from earthly things to heavenly. Of these feet the Apostle says: “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good things!” These feet the Lord commanded to be washed, as the Apostle says of the widow: “If she has washed the feet of the saints.” For the feet of those who preach peace are worthy of honor, which, spiritual and shining with doctrine, walk upon the hearts of men. In the number of forty-two days also the people of Israel came to the streams of the Jordan; and in the same cycle of days the Christian people comes to the streams of baptism. And as the prophet says, “The Jordan was turned back”; there, as the Israelite entered the water of the river, the wave fled away; here, as the Christian goes down into the font, the sins of his crimes flee away. And wonderful: there the river, turned back, returns to its source; here man, called back for the future, is restored to the infancy of his origin. There the wave seeks out the spring from which it had come; here innocence recognizes its man from whom it had departed. There the bed is emptied of waves; here hearts are emptied of crimes; so that there the muddy water does not wet the servants of God, and here a foul conscience does not pollute the servants of God. For the Jordan is a kind of font of washing, through which whoever passes, leaving his filth behind, enters the paradise of promise. In this number of forty and two, then, the people of Israel, leaving Egypt, crossed the streams of the Red Sea; and we too, in this same number, leaving the Egypt of the world, pass over the pools of burning Gehenna. For them the water is made solid; for us the fire grows cool; and against the custom of nature the sea is dried up by heat, and Gehenna is softened by the font of baptism. In this mystical number, I say, the sons of Israel came to Marah, and when they could not draw the water for its bitterness (for the spring had water but had no sweetness; it was delightful to look at but not pure to taste), a wood was thrown into it by Moses, and they drank its sweetness pleasantly; the sacrament of the wood took away the harshness which the harmful water carried. This, I think, was done as a figure. For I think the bitter water at Marah is the law of the Old Testament, which law, before it was tempered by the Lord's cross, was harsh. For it commanded an eye to be given for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and, being severe, offered no refreshment of mercy. But when it was tempered by the wood of the Gospel's passion, at once changing its bitterness for sweetness, it made itself sweet for all to drink, as the prophet says: “How sweet are your words to my throat, sweeter than honey and the honeycomb to my mouth!” For sweet are the words that command: “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer him the other also; if anyone takes your tunic, let him have your cloak too.” This, then, is the bitterness that has been changed into sweetness, that is, the severity of the law tempered by the grace of the Gospel. For the letter of the law without the mystery of the cross is bitter, of which the Apostle says: “The letter kills.” But when the sacraments of the passion are joined to it, all its bitterness is spiritually seasoned; and of it the Apostle says: “But the Spirit gives life.”

I believe you have understood, brothers, why I compared these fasts of ours to those stations in which the people of Israel, placed as if on campaign, overcame King Pharaoh by daily labor and defended themselves from their enemies by halting at their stations as in a kind of camp; so that whoever of that company did not complete the stages of the daily station was either seized by Pharaoh or overcome by the wilderness. So we too must complete with all labor the forty-day journey set before us and fortify ourselves by the devotion of fasts as in a kind of camp. For our fasts are a camp for us, which defend us from the devil's attack. Indeed, they are called stations because, standing and staying in them, we drive back the enemies who lie in wait. Fasts are plainly a camp for Christians; if anyone strays from them, he is invaded by the spiritual Pharaoh or devoured by the wilderness of sins. And he suffers the wilderness of sins who is deserted by the fellowship of the saints. Fasting is a kind of wall for the Christian, impregnable to the devil, impassable to the enemy. For what Christian ever fasted and was captured? Who remained sober and was conquered? The devil attacks the drunkard; the enemy assails the self-indulgent. But where he sees fasting, he is laid low by hunger, by weakness: laid low, I say, by weakness, because Christian weakness is strength. Hence the Apostle says: “When I am weak, then I am stronger.” But someone asks how weakness is strong. Weakness is strong when the flesh wastes away by fasts and the soul grows rich in purity. For as much as the juice of food is taken from the one, so much is the strength of righteousness increased in the other. Then a man is weak indeed for worldly things, but strong for divine works. For then he thinks more of God, then he fears the judgment, then he conquers the enemy. For the Saviour says of the devil: “This kind is not driven out except by fasting and prayer.” He says, surely, that one possessed by the devil can be cleansed only by fasts. See, then, what the power of fasting is, how great a grace it gives its own man, since it gives such healing to another; how it sanctifies its own man, since it so purifies a stranger. It is a wonderful thing: one fasts, and the benefit of the faster profits another. So, brothers, let us by no means lay down the weapons of abstinence, and let us keep the fasts of the forty days without interruption. For this is the perfect number for conquering; for the Lord overcame the devil after he had fasted forty days, not that he could not have conquered him even before the fasts, but to show us that we can be victors over the devil when we have been victors over fleshly desires by fasting for forty days; but that he who violated this consecrated number by intemperance of the belly could easily be overcome by the enemy, as one weak and wretched. For how can he conquer the devil's wickedness in another who does not conquer the intemperance of the belly in himself? Be first, O man, victor over yourself, so that you can be victor over another. For there are your own enemies within you, who attack you daily. See, avarice surrounds you with ambition for riches; self-indulgence captures you with the sweetness of banquets; heresy perverts you with the perversity of knowledge. Conquer, then, your own enemies, so that you can conquer those of others. For it is no light sin, brothers, for the faithful not to fast the Lent enjoined by the Lord and to dissolve the consecrated fasts by the greed of the belly. It is written: “He who says he abides in Christ ought himself to walk as he walked.” If, then, you wish to be a Christian, you must do what Christ did. He who had no sin fasted Lent; you who sin will not fast Lent. He, I say, had no sin, but fasted for our sins. What sort of Christian are you, then, in your own conscience, when you dine while Christ is hungry for you? When you refresh yourself while the Saviour fasts for you? It is no light sin, then, as I said, to violate an enjoined fast. To prove this briefly by examples, we read in the books of Kings that when Saul, king of Israel, was waging war against the Philistines, he enjoined a fast on his whole army, and, while all abstained, began to fight against the enemy. A good king indeed, who conquered his enemies not so much by arms as by devotion, and fought more with religion than with weapons. So when Saul had enjoined abstinence for the day on all his men, and his son Jonathan, unaware of the command, advancing as victor through the midst of the enemy's lines, dipped the tip of his staff in a honeycomb and tasted it, such indignation was suddenly roused that the victory was delayed and the Godhead offended. Indeed, neither was an end put to the war nor was a prophetic answer given to the king. From this we understand that Saul was overcoming his enemies not so much by the valor of his soldiers as by their abstinence. In short, by the fault of one, cowardice is brought on all, and by the offense of one, weakness is produced in all. For strength fails in the army where fasting fails in its observance. When Saul recognized this as a sin from the very offense of the Godhead, he at once said that Jonathan must not be spared, but that the sin committed must be expiated by the shedding of his blood. See how great was King Saul's observance of religion, who wished to appease the offended God even by the killing of his son, and how great is the guilt of a broken fast, which is punished only by the shedding of blood. If Jonathan, because in ignorance he broke the fast enjoined by his father, is condemned to death, what does he deserve who knowingly breaks the fast enjoined by Christ? So, brothers, let us keep the established fast by observance, so that we may conquer our enemies both spiritual and fleshly. For we have, as you know, fleshly enemies. Let us fast, then, so that both our army and our Saul may overcome and prevail over them. For the pleasure of the world, or its vices, is a kind of honeycomb, which, as it is written, for a time indeed fattens the throat, but in the end is more bitter than gall. Let us pray, then, that, as we fast, the Lord may grant us that honeycomb of spiritual things which grows sweet on the palate of the soul in eternal blessedness, with the help of him who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

Your minds still retain, brothers, that last Sunday we preached that those forty-two stations, through which the people of Israel, going out of Egypt, entered the land of promise by daily progress and, as by certain steps of salvation, climbed after the yoke of slavery to a kingdom, held a figure of this Lent of ours. In those stations, I say, there was a figure of our fasts, not only in the size of the number but also in the practice of the virtues; for the sons of Israel did not so much walk with bodily steps on the desert road as advance in the way of the Lord by religious acts. They plainly walked in the way of the Lord, which gave them drink in the waves and fed them from heaven. For manna did not fail the hungry in the wilderness, and the land did not flee from those in danger at sea. There the sea is spread out into a path; here heaven is opened for food. For the sake of the servants of God the Jordan holds back its streams; Marah changes its water. There the wave that was following turns back and goes before; here the spring that dripped bitterness is tempered for the better and grows sweet; and in a wonderful way the river lost its course and the spring its taste. But since we said that the sons of Israel, coming to Marah, suffered from the bitterness of the water, and could drink it only when wood had been thrown in, and that in it there was also a figure of the Old Testament, let us see where the people, setting out from there, arrived. It arrived at the place called Elim, in which there were twelve very pure springs and a multitude of seventy flourishing palms. See the mystery of God: how, after the bitterness of the law, the streams of the Gospel's mercy overflow. There one spring is harsh to drink; here many, so that all are sweet to drink. There after weariness there is no refreshment; here after labor there is refreshment and victory. For springs are supplied to the thirsty, palms are offered to the victors. Palms, I say, are offered to the victors, because to have come after the hardness of the law to the grace of the Gospel is to have conquered. For it is a kind of reward of the victor to rinse his mouth in a living spring and to furnish his right hand with the palm of the triumphant. Through the spring the tongue of confession is purified; through the palm the right hand of the martyr is honored: the one, because it exalted the glory of Christ; the other, because it refused the altar of sacrilege. The palm of martyrdom is a kind of reward, which gives sweet fruit to the confessing tongue and provides a glorious ornament for the victorious right hand. The palm is plainly, for martyrs, sweet for food, shady for rest, honorable for triumph, always green, always clothed with leaves, always ready for victory; and so the palm does not wither, because the glory of the martyrs does not wither. Indeed, those very palms are offered by the peoples to the Lord as he sits on the ass and comes to the temple. For when the disciples spread their garments and paved the road for Christ with their cloaks, the people's devotion had no greater reward to offer him than palms, signifying by the garments spread on the road that his way in the world was unpolluted, and by the palms offered that he was the conqueror of the world. He himself, I say, is the conqueror, of whom Scripture says: “The lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered”; he is plainly the conqueror, who destroyed the devil's death and lit up eternal life. Palms, then, are raised for Christ as he comes. It is written: “The righteous will flourish like a palm.” Rightly, then, the banners of righteousness are raised for the righteous one as he comes, and the trophies of triumph attend their author. But before the palms are raised, the Lord's road all the way to the temple is covered with the disciples' garments, and the Saviour's path is paved with the apostles' cloaks so that it may be unpolluted. This, I think, was done as a mystery. For the way of Christ that leads to the temple is his faith and teaching. This way, then, the disciples, putting off the clothing of their own bodies, paved with their martyrdom, so that we might walk without stumbling: so that among the crowds of various nations they might spread the garments of their limbs beneath the path of righteousness, cover over the muddy mire of the world, and show the Saviour's way unpolluted. After Marah, then, the people of Israel came to twelve springs. We read in the prophet: “Bless the Lord from the springs of Israel.” The Lord is Christ, who is learned only through the mouths of the apostles and the teaching of the disciples. The apostles must be called springs, because like very pure springs they overflow with the grace of preaching, and after the bitterness of the law, with the abundant wisdom of their veins, they drip the sweetness of the cups of the sacrament. Nor is it any wonder if the drink of the springs is sweet, in whose bosom the food of the palms is sweeter. The apostles, then, are the springs, which watered the face of the whole earth with the river of their teaching and gave the weary peoples of the nations the drink of the divine mystery to drink. And the seventy palms that grew beside the apostolic springs I would call those seventy disciples whom the Lord sent, in the second rank after the apostles, for the salvation of men; whom the evangelist Luke, describing them, says were sent two by two. Truly, like palms, returning with exultation after their cares for men, they boast before the Lord that even the demons were subject to them. Rightly, then, are they compared to palms who, with the reward of palms, stood forth as victors over the devil.

That wonderful conflict between the King of heaven and the tyrant of the heavenly kingdom, to which the reading of the holy Gospel just completed has testified in the ears of your charity, sounds out for us the triumphant mystery of the Lord's incarnation. For the almighty Lord, pitying human captivity with the affection of ineffable love, and wishing at the same time to remove the devil's power from his world, sent his only-begotten Son, not degenerate in divinity, not unlike in power, not discordant in will, who, taking our flesh and spurning the old condition of birth, was born as a new Son of a woman of incorrupt body by a new law, so that the devil, though he might presume to tempt this saving man taken into the fellowship of the Godhead, could not overcome him. So when that savage lion saw the Lamb of God hungry after a very long and continuous fast of forty days and nights, and did not believe that one who hungered was God, he attacked him with the art of a most cunning temptation, saying: “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves.” The craftsman of such great guile was thinking, I suppose, and saying to himself: If this is the one at whose command manna flowed from heaven for the hungry peoples in the desert; if this is the one whom I know to have brought rivers out of the rock, he will be able now to transform stones into bread, if not at my request, at least for his own need, since he is hungry. If he does it, I shall prove him God; if he cannot, I shall catch him as a man. So the devil was waiting for bread, which he was trying not so much to gain for himself as to take away from the world. But the Lord of all things, who could both make bread from stone and did not wish the sacrament of human salvation to become clear to the one probing it, so tempered his answer in his holy mouth that neither did he, who was the truth, speak a lie, nor could the other, who was a liar from the beginning, recognize the truth which he was not going to believe. So the Lord said: “It is written: Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.” The tempter received an answer from the law which he could not contradict; he did not receive the bread, which he asked for not from a habit of eating but in a fraud of deceiving. For in what would the Son of God need human bread, to whom all substance belonged in his divinity? Or for what reason should Christ make earthly bread from any stone, since he himself, as we read, was both the spiritual bread and the stone? Mocked and derided, then, the tempter attacked with another engine of temptation. For when, by his own secret and hidden counsel, the Lord stood on the pinnacle of the temple, the devil said to him: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down.” O how foolish and how perverse this persuasion, that he should say to the Son of God, “Throw yourself down!” Would he not have said more rightly, “If you are the Son of God, ascend into heaven”? If the Lord did that, it would truly prove him the Son of God. But the enemy of heaven will not urge a heavenly ascent even in tempting; he calls downward and to the depths, because he wishes all to fall who knows himself to have fallen before all; nor does the blind one understand that he is trying to urge a fall on one who not only cannot fall but has come to repair the ruins of the fallen. For the Lord, as we have read, “lifts up those who are cast down; the Lord frees the fettered.” So he who had come not to be deceived but to save the deceived empties the probing art with such measure of a most cautious answer that the dark enemy not only cannot see the mystery set forth for us, but, driven round more and more by the Lord's answers, is confounded in a darker uncertainty. For the unconquered warrior of the spiritual battle said to him: “It is written: You shall not tempt the Lord your God.” How simple the prudence in this answer, and how circumspect the simplicity, by which the truth is not kept silent, and the reprobate cannot prove what is true! Truly, as it is written: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not comprehended it.” The devil hears that God is not to be tempted; yet he does not recognize that the one he tempts is God and man; for he sees Christ both answering what belongs to a man and able to do what belongs to God. But even this is not enough for his wickedness; he weaves the snares of a third temptation: “He took him,” it says, “to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their honors, saying: All these I will give you, if you fall down and worship me.” Notice carefully, brothers, that everything the enemy urges is falling; for truly everyone who worships the devil falls down, and he truly falls who pursues the powers and honors of the world through sacrilegious arts at the enemy's promise. But our Lord and Saviour confounded him with his usual answer, saying: “Get behind me, Satan; for it is written: You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.” The testimonies of the holy Scriptures are pressed on him, not that the unconvertible might be taught, but that the shameless might be refuted. He who would give the kingdoms of the world is commanded to go behind, so that he might lie subject against his will to the command of the Son of God, to whom he would not yield willingly, and might prove that he by whom he wickedly demanded to be worshipped is rightly to be worshipped by all. In short, dearest ones: while the tempter speaks abominations and presumes what is not permitted, he fell silent as one conquered by a man and went away as one commanded by God. And he had to depart from tempting him, in whom, though he moved with all his weight and strained with all his strength, he could not find even a trace of his own will, stupefied and amazed that after so many ages he had found a man without human lusts, and one born in the flesh with nothing at all of fleshly corruption. So when the devil had gone back, angels, as we have read, came and ministered to him. The service of the angels teaches us how great the glory of this triumph is. Nor is it any wonder that the angels hastened to serve him whose victory they marveled at. And so, brothers, if we do not wish to be overcome by the devil, let us cling to him who triumphed over the devil; and to cling to Christ is to believe that he has both the nature of his Father's Godhead and the reality of his mother's body. Anyone, with the Lord's help, will be able to conquer the devil who, longing for God's saving precepts, strives to bend the pride of a swollen mind, hateful to all; to restrain avarice, the root of all evils; to curb self-indulgence, the enemy of good virtues; to calm envy, the foe of holy love; to avoid the useless and often dangerous conversations of slanderers; not to love the ruinous profits of usury; not to burden justice, the guardian of peace, with bribes; to abhor the harmful schemes of factions; to turn away from the inglorious and sometimes bloody canvassing for undue office; to restrain the curses of an insulting tongue, which kindle discord; also to drive from the Christian mouth the lies that stain life, wound the soul, and break up friendships; and out of love for the true God to flee from all the superstitions of demons and the sacrileges of idols, by which above all the kindness of the Almighty is offended. If, then, we fast from these and from all crimes and vices of this kind, the days of this holy Lent will be duly celebrated, and we shall keep the feasts of all our solemnities with exultation, with the confidence of a gladder conscience and in peaceful times, with the help of our Lord Jesus Christ.