Sermons 160–163

[On the same.] Although in the very mystery of the Lord's incarnation clear insignia of the Godhead were always present, today's solemnity opens and reveals in many ways that God has come into a human body, so that mortality, always wrapped in darkness, might not lose through ignorance what it has deserved to hold and possess through grace. For he who willed to be born for us did not will to be unknown by us: and so he reveals himself, so that the great mystery of godliness might not become the occasion of great error. Today the magus finds wailing in a cradle him whom he sought shining in the stars. Today the magus marvels at him clear in swaddling clothes whom he long endured as obscure among the stars. Today the magus turns over in deep astonishment what he sees, and where: heaven on earth, earth in heaven, man in God, God in man, and him whom the whole universe cannot hold enclosed in a tiny body. Hence the magus, who cannot grasp it by searching, at once worships; for he sees that stars, moon and sun do not shine in heaven as he beholds flesh shining on earth; he sees that in one and the same body the commerce of Godhead and humanity has come together. While he believes him God, he perceives him king, understands that he will die for love of the human race, and with fearful thought turns over how God can die, how the restorer of life can be killed. And so the magus stops seeking by art what he cannot find by art; and since he sees that he has long wandered in the heavens with the wandering stars, he rejoices that on earth he has come to God under the guidance of a single star; and the magus discovers that all things seen in heaven, clear to human eyes, are darkened by deep mysteries. And now, seeing that he must believe and not examine, he confesses with mystical gifts: with frankincense that he is God, with gold that he is king, with myrrh that he will die. With frankincense God, with gold king, so as to appease with rich service him whom he had attacked and offended by a curious and troublesome practice; and he fulfils what many suppose to be said of the wise man from Ethiopia: “Ethiopia will stretch out her hands first to God” (Ps 68:31 [LXX 67:32]). The magus sees Christ, anticipating the Jew with his hands, because when the Jew was wickedly betraying Christ to Herod, then the magus was confessing Christ as God with gifts. Hence the gentile, who was last, has become first: because then by the faith of the magi the belief of the gentiles was dedicated, and the cruelty of the Jews was marked. Today Christ entered the bed of the Jordan to wash away the sin of the world: John himself testifies that he came for this: “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1). Today the servant holds the Lord, man holds God, John holds Christ; he holds him to receive pardon, not to give it. Today, as the prophet says: “The voice of the Lord is over the waters” (Ps 29:3 [LXX 28:3]). What voice? “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matt 3). Today the voice of God is over the waters, because God himself, to prove the truth of the generation, stands by as witness and defender of his own Son. “This is my beloved Son,” because he had no other to bear witness: the Father's secret has no arbiter; the divine generation knows no witness; the Godhead admits no outside knowledge, as the Son himself says: “No one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son” (Matt 11). Today the Holy Spirit floats over the waters in the form of a dove, so that as that dove announced to Noah that the flood had left the world (Gen 8), so by this sign it might be known that the world's perpetual shipwreck had ceased; nor does it carry, like that one, a sprig of the old olive, but pours the whole richness of the new chrism on the head of the Parent, to fulfil what the prophet foretold: “Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your companions” (Ps 45:7 [LXX 44:8]). Today the Lord is over the waters. Rightly over the waters and not under the waters, because Christ does not serve his baptism but commands the sacraments. Today the God of majesty thundered; and if the Father thunders from heaven, if the Son stands in the streams of the Jordan, if the Holy Spirit appears bodily from above, why is it that the Jordan, which fled at the presence of the ark of the law (Josh 3), does not flee at the presence of the whole Trinity? Why? Because whoever submits to kindness begins to be free of fear. Here the Trinity exercises all its grace, speaks with itself all its love; there it broke the elements so as to train its servant to fear. Yet amid such and so great things John stands unafraid, because he cannot fear who, born wholly for the love of God, is approved by the angel's testimony. Today Christ gives the beginning of heavenly signs, when he turns water into wine (John 2), so that he whom the Father had already proved to be his Son by his voice might prove himself God by his powers, since he who changes the elements is their Author; and he who made nature does not labor to act against nature: he changes water into wine so that the dullness of our nature may advance in the vigor of the Godhead. For he who stretched and enlarged five loaves, by a flowing and secret increase of the fragments, into food for five thousand men (Matt 14), could have increased and prolonged the measures of wine for the wedding feast by growing increases. But the water was to be changed into the mystery of blood, so that Christ might pour unmixed cups from the vessel of his body for those who drink, to fulfil the prophet's word: “And my cup that inebriates, how splendid it is!” (Ps 23:5 [LXX 22:5]). In three ways, then, Christ's Godhead was proved today: by the gift of the magi, the Father's testimony, and the change of water into wine; because the authority of Scripture has established that every word stands by three, saying: “In the mouth of two or three witnesses let every word stand” (Matt 18). But since the feast itself now bids us come to the Lord's table and the gladness of that cup, it is enough to have enclosed great matters in a short sermon, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns now and always and for all ages of ages. Amen.

[On the parable of the servant returning from the field, and on man's gratitude toward God.] You have heard, brothers, how the Lord demands divine service by the example of human servitude, saying: “Which of you, having a servant plowing or pasturing, will say to him when he has returned from the field: Come at once and recline; and will not rather say to him: Prepare something for me to dine on, and gird yourself and serve me until I eat and drink, and afterward you shall eat and drink? Does he thank that servant because he did what he commanded him? I think not. So you too, when you have done all that you have been commanded, say: We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we ought to do” (Luke 17). “So you too.” What likeness is there? Rather a great unlikeness. Does man owe God as much as man owes man? Far from it. For the order is different, the cause different, the bond of faith unlike. God made man to be, commanded him to be born, gave him to live, granted him to know, gave him times, distributed his ages, granted him for glory, opened him to honor, set him over living creatures, and appointed him lord of the whole earth by a set law and age; and when these first benefits of God to man, so many and so great, had perished, he restored second ones, as much greater as they are divine, as much more excellent as they are heavenly. For he afterward gave him as a dweller in heaven whom he had first given as an inhabitant of earthly things, so that no adversity, no attack, no serpent lurking among earthly goods might any longer be able to creep up on man; and so that a now sure condition might keep him whom an uncertain freedom had lost; and so that man might be free of all things, by the servitude of the Lord alone, to whom he owes the condition in which he was made, owes his origin; and because he was redeemed, because he was bought, he certainly owes servitude, as the Apostle says: “You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men” (1 Cor 7). And the prophet, to confess his condition and origin: “Your servant,” he says, “and the son of your handmaid” (Ps 116:16 [LXX 115:7]). Man owes these things to God; what such thing does man owe to man? And yet God asks for at least that much, because man wants to render nothing to God, to whom he owes everything. But let us take up the reading again and set the likeness itself before our eyes, and what we have said will then be clear: that we pay no servitude to God and all of it to man. “Which of you, having a servant plowing or pasturing, will say to him when he has returned from the field: Come at once and recline; and will not say to him: Prepare something for me to dine on, and gird yourself and serve me until I eat and drink, and afterward you shall eat and drink?” How familiar, how homely, how drawn from daily use, how common this teaching is! If the hearer is a master, he recognizes that he demands such things of his servant; if a servant, he knows that he renders them to his master. For the servant, after watches before dawn, after the various hard labors of the whole day, after anxious and fearful running about, both prepares his master's dinner and, girded, serves what he has prepared: he is not proud because he has done it, but trembles as he does each thing with devotion, and sets before his master many dishes seasoned with every art of flavor, while he himself will taste a half-cooked and perhaps unsalted little supper; offering frequent cups, he varies the goblets, changes the wines; at the longer stories of a very long banquet he stands fixed, he stands not knowing how to move, he stands, whose servitude may not grow weary. And when the master is already spending part of the night in sleep, passing it in rest, the servant gathers up, takes care, sees to, puts down, puts in order, puts away, and so lingers over necessary things that he keeps little or nothing of the night for food and sleep. After all this, unless he keeps watch for the morrow and is up before his master wakes, tired yet untiring, he will be early to the whip; nothing of yesterday's labor helps him against present punishment, because whatever the master does to the servant, unduly, angrily, willingly, unwillingly, forgetfully, deliberately, knowingly, unknowingly, is judgment, justice, law; the anger of the one commanding is law to the subject, and the condition of servitude has no voice against the master's pleasure. If, then, the servant feels what he owes to man by serving like this, and the master by his mastery is taught and understands, himself teaching it, what servitude he owes to the Lord of lords. Paul fulfilled this, who so wrote the titles of his servitude: “To this very hour we hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are beaten with blows” (1 Cor 4). And elsewhere: “I bruise my body and bring it into servitude” (1 Cor 9, following the LXX). The good servant inflicted punishment, he who, so acting, beat himself continually to the point of bruising; nor did he loosen the reins of his body, lest the flesh, loosened by indulgence, should fall into another's servitude. But, man, what you demand of your servant, pay to him who made you a master. You who always sleep and demand tireless watches of your servant, keep watch at least sometimes for your Lord, who watches unceasingly for you; stand by your Lord at least for a single moment as he fasts, you whose servant always stands by you as you eat; forgive an innocent servant, you to whom, though you sin, your Lord is gentle; meanwhile give pardon, you whom your Lord always forgives. Certainly, if you have done any good, believe that you have paid a debt to the Lord, not done him a favor. “When you have done,” he says, “all that you have been commanded, say: We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we ought to do.” When is man of himself profitable for divine things, who is so unprofitable to himself for human things? Let man consider the evils of the heart, the vices of the flesh, the waves of pleasures, the storms of desires, the rocks of anger, the shipwrecks of crimes; and then he will give to God whatever in him is profitable, and assign to himself whatever is unprofitable. But let us return to our subject, so that it may now be clear why the Lord admonished his disciples. Christ, in order to send his apostles to peoples sick with various pains, gave them the power of the Spirit, gave them power from above, gave them the grace of healings; so that, going about, they gave back sight to the blind, running to the lame, hearing to the deaf, and, not to keep you on each one, gave health to all who were ill; so that, returning, they boasted, saying: “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name.” The Lord restrains them, saying: “Do not rejoice that the demons are subject to you; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10). So that they might not lose through pride what they had gained through labor, and claim for themselves what they had obtained divinely, he calls them back to humility, the mother of doctrine, by this example: “Which of you, having a servant plowing or pasturing, will say to him when he has returned from the field, Come at once and recline; and will not say to him: Prepare something for me to dine on, and gird yourself and serve me until I eat and drink, and afterward you shall eat and drink?” After the labors they had completed and the many great proofs of their powers, the apostles seemed to themselves profitable enough; but living in the mud of the flesh and the clay of this body, they did not know that they were unprofitable; but they are found out when Judas betrays, Peter denies (Matt 26), John flees, all abandon (Mark 14), so that he alone might appear in whom and from whom was all profit. And his saying, “And afterward you shall eat,” warns the disciples to be eager, after his ascension, to be joined at once to the Lord in that blessedness above. For in short he approves them as those who will leave everything here, girds them for the endurance of suffering, and perfects them for the labor of his ministry. For the apostles served him as he reclined for as long a time as, amid the kitchens of sinners and the hearths of the gentiles, they prepared the Lord's supper on the tables of the Church as a perpetual memorial. What this supper is, the faithful man knows; let him who does not know and wants to know become one of the faithful. [Sermon 162. On the man who wanted to divide an inheritance.] You have heard today, brothers, what an heir of worldly goods asked of the Lord. “Teacher,” he says, “tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me” (Luke 12). Headlong and heedless greed thought the very Judge of the world an arbiter of a worldly suit, and wanted him to become the author of a division who had come to restore the unity of the human race. “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” Here it was not the teacher he sought but gain. “Tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” When he says “tell my brother,” he put first what would urge love, appeal to nature, knock at affection. “Tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” He cannot say to a brother “Divide,” who taught through the prophet: “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell in unity” (Ps 133:1 [LXX 132:1]). “Tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” What greater inheritance, what better inheritance is there than the bond of divine love? For an inheritance sometimes perishes, love never, as the Apostle says: “Love never fails” (1 Cor 13). But someone says: “Does love then never perish, never suffer violation?” Plainly never, because love, if it exists, remains; if it does not remain, it does not exist. As a barren tree, when in springtime it is all white with blossom, does not give fruit but deceives, so is the love that is thought to exist and does not: shaken by the waves of circumstances it vanishes, and so it hurts the careful and deceives the unwary. But let us return to what we began. “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” A worldly inheritance brings quarrels to descendants before it brings wealth; before it divides the property it splits the heirs; before it hands each his due portion it cuts up the successors themselves and sends them into factions. Therefore this is not an inheritance but a battle; and it is a stepmother of sons, not a resource. He enriches his sons who leaves his sons the fullest love. But you, whoever you are who press the Lord with such a petition, you provoke the Lord, you bring the Lord into a lawsuit, the Lord with whom the Apostle teaches and shows that you have a common inheritance: “We are heirs of God,” he says, “and fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom 8). He is so your heir, he is so your brother, who willed to be found like you in everything, by the lot of birth, the condition of growth, the order of life, the end of death. For though he was the sole heir of God and the only Son by nature, he willed and made you, who were wretched and subject to the lowest servitude, to be his partner and fellow heir by grace. So you will have, and will be able happily to possess, what has been conferred, if you remain in the Father's house, if you share in the divine inheritance. Divine portions can be given; they cannot be divided, because heavenly things neither does the giver lose nor does the receiver store away for himself alone. So, man, why do you call him to a division? Why, pitiable one, do you invite him to an inquiry? Why do you ask a part from him who sought and conferred the whole on you? Stop, at least now that you have experienced it, and repent now of having asked such things. For you received a part of the principal estate, and once you had received it you lost it as a stranger, a wanderer, a profligate, a glutton with the profligate (Luke 15). Hence you are an exile from paradise, hence without a share in the inheritance, hence banished from life. Man, Christ says to you: “What you have obtained from me and through me you will not be able to possess without me, for you have already seen what you were without me; knowing this, I so asked the Father for you, ungrateful as you are: ‘Father, those whom you have given me, I will that where I am they may also be with me’ (John 17). And since not even this could suffice for your protection, for when you were with me in paradise you perished outside me, I added, saying: ‘Father, as you are in me and I in you, so may they also be one in us.’ I, in order to have the Father's goods, came forth from the Father, and did not depart from the Father at all; and so I want you to have yourself in us as much as we ourselves are and remain in ourselves. Stop, then, either dividing heavenly things or quarreling over earthly things in my hearing, lest the kind giver whom you hold and have today you should afterward feel as a most severe examiner.” But let us now hear what the Lord answered: “Man,” he says, “who made me a judge or divider over you?” “Who made me a judge?” And where is what you said, Lord: “The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son” (John 5)? “Or a divider over you?” And who will divide the just from the unjust, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats (Matt 25)? If the judgment of man is owed to you, and the division of the whole world is to be carried out by you, how do you say, “Who made me a judge or divider over you?” All judgment is indeed with Christ, it was, and it will be; but then he had not come to judge but to be judged, not to condemn the guilty but, innocent, to be condemned by the guilty. In the man he was acting as God, in the servant as Lord, so as to be a slave of time, he who was both maker and judge of the ages. Rightly, then, he answered: “Who made me a judge or divider over you?” And who would make him a judge, who made and restored all things? Christ could not be an arbiter at the will of a litigant, he who is the sum and power of all judgment. But why did he not object to that quarreler: “How, uninvited by your brother, have you made such a request? Do you not know that he is not a just mediator who is chosen by one party only?” Indeed he did not say this; but the man stood there as one hateful, so that it would be lawful for him, though not for his brother, to draw back from the judge's sentence. And since Christ had come to correct the guilty, not to condemn him, he removes by a precept the tinder of quarrels, saying: “See, beware of avarice.” That is to say: let avarice be cast off, and there will be no contention over an inheritance. Avarice, brothers, denies parents, divides brothers, separates companions, dissolves friendship, shuts out affection: whoever has it within him will belong to no one, and will not belong to himself. Avarice, brothers, as the Apostle said, “is the root of all evils” (1 Tim 6): when it begins to take root in the heart, it so scatters the ornaments of character as a harmful tree, entwined with deadly roots, loosens and scatters the monuments of ancestors.

[On despising care for earthly things.] Blessed are those whose hearts the hearing of the Lord's word today has pierced. Blessed are those whose minds so great and such a promise of the Savior has advanced to faith. Blessed are those who by the severity of the heavenly commands have been released from the hard cares of the present. For with such a word the Lord today addresses his disciples, or rather all his hearers: “Do not be anxious for your life, what you will eat, nor for your body, what you will put on. Life is more than food, and the body more than clothing” (Luke 12). Who is so envious of his own goods, who so hostile to his own delights, as to despise what is freely given and prepared from heaven, and to covet what is gained by worldly labors and pains? It is a very degenerate soul, a wholly servile mind, that seeks out dainties reeking of the cooks' breath, the grime of the kitchen, and yesterday's horror, when a royal provision continually waits on it and lies at hand. Do not, then, O man, groan in providing empty things; do not labor in preparing perishable things, because God always and everywhere stands by as the provider of your meal. What king does not provide the due rations for devoted soldiers? What master does not supply these foods to faithful servants? What father does not give bread to his sons? If, then, God is to us King and Lord and Father, what will he deny? A soldier who serves at his own expense disparages his king; a servant living at his own cost accuses his master; a son anxious for himself blames his living father. Do not, then, O man, expose God by thinking so on your own behalf, who by the justice of a ruler, the zeal of a master, and the affection of a parent has taken into himself all your anxiety and poured out his care, saying: “Do not be anxious for your life, what you will eat.” But perhaps the honeyed rain and the single food deter you by the example of Jewish disgust, and you do not believe that flesh, compounded of various humors, can be satisfied by manna alone at its own will; you say: “God, as he willed the body to consist of different members, so he willed and commanded it to be nourished with various dishes.” That fear which troubles you is superfluous, O man: for the whole creation runs and flies together to the Creator's meal. So if the singleness and sparseness of the food of the law frightens you, let the abundance of the heavenly banquet of the Gospel invite and challenge you, which in one dish sets before Peter, about to eat, all the kinds of the whole creation (Acts 10). For whatever Noah, the conveyor of a new world, preserved for the seed of the world, whatever flies and is carried in the air, whatever is born and lives on earth, whatever is and moves in the waters, all this is slaughtered from heaven for Peter alone and set out for his supper. If then, O man, you want to receive and eat all things, scorn to provide cheap storerooms for yourself. We indeed strive to prove to you by great examples that, if you think on things above, the things of the flesh will not be lacking: but God, in keeping with the marks of his majesty, sends one who doubts his promises back to low and lowly examples, so as to convict by such a test one whom so great an example did not draw to imitation. “Consider,” he says, “the ravens, that they neither sow nor reap, they have no storeroom nor barn, and God feeds them; how much more are you of more value than they?” He rightly sends the doubting unbeliever to a bird that is the friend of war, the companion of fury, insatiable for blood, and raging even against the dead more grievously than the sword. For when the sword stops, that most shameless executioner falls on the lifeless body, tears it, scatters it, strews it about, so that no merciful burial may find anything of the corpse to commit to rest. So the Lord by such an example exaggerates the madness of the doubter, who thinks that God will deny to devout sons what he supplies to impious birds; and they suppose that he who allowed them to grow at birth, and fixed the growth of the body, will not give the means of livelihood to those who leave homeland, home, parents, children and wives for his sake. O wretched man, most worthy of all unhappiness, who, when a kingdom is given him, sighs for bread; when perpetuity is granted him, weeps for drink; when he is clothed with the glory of immortality, laments the body's clothing! Conscious of an inborn unhappiness, he does not believe that he will be made happy; and nourished in the dust of the earth, he doubts that he will be an inhabitant of heaven. Fittingly, then, the Lord added what follows: “Which of you by thinking can add one cubit to his stature?” The inward searcher sets out the thoughts of human minds; for every man, while he longs for the beauty of his body, wishes to be tall: but this man can think, this man cannot obtain by himself; he reaches it by believing, he cannot reach it by thinking. Hence the Lord, aware of human desire, stretched man to the form of Christ, so that he who in his shortness was ill-formed, to his own shame, might be adorned with the whole beauty of the measure of Christ; so he well added: “If then you cannot do even the least thing, why are you anxious about the rest?” That is: why, O man, do you presume greater things by thought, who despair of lesser things through faith? What is less than clothing, what greater than the growth of the body? Believe, then, that clothing for the body can be given you by God, from whom faith promises you the growth of the body. But since God so loves the human race that those whom he rebukes by right of a master he soon consoles and soothes with a father's tenderness, he leads those whom he seemed to have provoked by comparison with a most foul bird back to the example of a fragrant and exceedingly beautiful flower. “Consider,” he says, “the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin. But I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like one of these.” O how much the kindness from above lowers itself for love of man! For he who could have established his precepts by his authority alone hints and builds his case with all the labor of a teacher; and he who could have set the end of his promise in faith alone leads his hearers to faith in the promise by persuasive example; he confirms the doubtful by comparison with the lily, he exalts the lily by the example of Solomon: because, on the Lord's own testimony, among all the kings of the world Solomon shone splendid with singular glory and unique adornment, and the lily surpasses and excels all the flowers of the earth in grace; and it is as far above every flower as a king is known to excel all in beauty and glory. Nor need we describe at greater length the beauty of the lily, whose preeminence the Lord's testimony renders unique: but we must certainly repeat what the Lord commended by a double example for the strengthening of our faith: that the Christian, certain of life, of the kingdom, of immortality, ought not to be troubled by the need for food and clothing, when he sees that God has conferred such glory of clothing on a plant born today and to perish tomorrow. But as that plant is assigned to dryness and to the oven's fire, so those are destined for the fires of death and Gehenna who doubt that present things will be supplied them by God, when they already feel that future things have been granted them. “And do not seek what you will eat or what you will drink, and do not be lifted up on high; for all the nations of the world seek these things. But your Father knows that you need them. Rather, seek the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added to you.” When he calls himself our Father, he proves that his kind care for us is not lacking; when he commands us to seek the heavenly kingdom, he shows that all things will be subjected; he indicates that whatever heavenly provision demands will be at hand for us.