Sermons 48–52

[On Christ being called the carpenter's son, and on envy.] The evangelist, about to expose today the envy of the Jews toward Christ, began thus: “Jesus came,” it says, “to his own country, and taught them in their synagogues, so that they were astonished and said: ‘Where did this man get this wisdom and power? Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary, and his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all this?’” (Matt 13:54–56). Clouds do not so blind the sky, night the day, darkness the sun, as envy blinds and darkens the mind. Jewish spite proves this: it marvels at Christ's wisdom, is amazed at his powers, extols his works, takes up his sayings, and yet, so that divinity may not be seen in him nor Godhead perceived, it calls to mind and publishes the names of fleshly parents. “Jesus came,” it says, “to his own country.” Let no one wonder that the Founder of things, the Lord of the heavens, the God of all, is allotted a country and a place, since he shuts himself in a womb, measures himself by a cradle, occupies himself at the breasts, confines himself in a lap, gives himself into arms; and to take away human straits he gave and fitted himself to human straits. O man, God lays himself down to you by these things, follows you by them, searches you out through these straits, so as to re-form by example the one he formed by his work, to lead out by affection the one he drove away by judgment, and to keep in himself the one he sees has perished apart from himself. “Jesus came,” it says, “to his own country and taught them in their synagogues.” Not in his temple but in their synagogues. The synagogues could not be his, in which crowds of unbelief, not of faith, gathered; in which a people of envy, not of love, assembled; in which sat the council of the malicious, not the council of good discipline. “He taught in their synagogues, so that they were astonished.” They were astonished in indignation, not in gratitude; amazed in spite, not in praise; they raged because the humility that stood brought forth what the proud benches could not understand. “So that they were astonished and said: Where did this man get this wisdom?” So speaks one who does not know God, from whom comes wisdom, from whom comes power; so speaks one who does not know that Christ is the wisdom of God, the power of God. Where wisdom comes from Solomon proves, who, when he took up the summit of the kingdom as a little one, so as to rule the people entrusted to him by virtue, not by arrogance; by wisdom, not by swelling; by hearts, not from the summit, wanted, asked, and received wisdom from God (1 Kgs 3:9–12). “Where did this man get this wisdom and power?” The power that gives eyes that nature did not give, that restores hearing shut up by weakness, that loosens in the mute the bonds of their speech, that brings the lame back to running, that compels souls already bound in the lower world to return to their own bodies: none but one envious of salvation would deny that it is from God. But the Jews knew that Christ's works were of divine power, not of human possibility; but the cloud of spite and the smoke of malice darkened the sight of the onlookers, so that they might not see through to the light of Christ, the time of the Gospel, saying: “Is not this the carpenter's son?” They said, “This is the carpenter's son”; but whose carpenter's son they did not say; they said “carpenter's son” so that by a mean craft the craft of the Author might be hidden, and the name of a craftsman might hide the name of the Godhead. Christ was a carpenter's son, but of that one who made the fabric of the world not with a hammer but by command; who fitted together the members of the elements not by skill but by order; who forged the mass of the world by authority, not by charcoal; who kindled the sun not with earthly fire but with heavenly heat; who formed the moon, darkness, night, and seasons; who distinguished the stars with varied light; who made all things from nothing, and made them, O man, for you, so that you might weigh the workman by your estimate of the work. But you, Jew, brand the son of this carpenter, to whom for such benefits you ought to repay the debt in his Son: this is why you do not receive future things, because you are ungrateful for present ones. “Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary?” Again, Jew, you cry out the mother's name, you hide the Father's; you speak of a father, you do not speak his name; you say carpenter, you do not say his work. Jew, these things deceive you; they do not deceive those who will believe. “Is not his mother called Mary, and his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us?” If the mother, if the brothers, if the sisters are with you, where is the father? He is not with you, because God hates the false, deserts the envious, turns from the ungrateful, does not allow the cruel and ungodly to dwell with him. “And are not all his brothers and sisters with us?” Craftily you thrust forward brothers, you parade sisters, so that by many births the virginity of the holy mother may be hidden, her integrity obscured, and everything human and nothing divine may be perceived of the Son. Jew, those whom you call Christ's brothers and sisters are the children of Cleopha, Mary's sister, not of Mary; and both the divine law and human kinship call the children of brothers and sisters brothers. So it was not the virginity of the mother, who remained a virgin after giving birth, that made them Christ's brothers, but the claim of kinship with his mother's sister. Blessed Mary, had the mother had other sons besides Christ, would not at the very time of the cross, at the very moment of death, have been handed over to a disciple, would not have been entrusted to a stranger. Envy cast the angel down from heaven (Isa 14), shut man out of paradise (Gen 3). It first defiled the earth with a brother's blood (Gen 4). It drove brothers to sell their brother (Gen 37). It put Moses to flight (Exod 2), stirred Aaron to wrong his brother, stained Miriam with spite against her brother (Num 12); and, not to say much, it reached and attacked (what the mind dreads, what the eye trembles at, what the ear cannot take in) the very blood of Christ. Envy is worse than all evils: those it has captured cannot be freed; those it has wounded do not come to healing, do not return to health. Envy is the poison of offences, the venom of crimes, the mother of sins, the origin of vices: whoever does not see it sees good things; whoever does not know it does not know evil; whoever flees it lives. Envy can be avoided by flight; it cannot be overcome by combat. But let us now hear what the Lord answered: “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country and in his own house.” Christ indeed came to his own country and his own house, for it is written: “He came to his own, and his own did not receive him” (John 1:11). But by saying, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country and his own house,” he teaches that among one's own, to be powerful is a bite, a burning; to stand out among neighboring citizens burns the glory of the neighbors: if kinsfolk owe honor to a kinsman, they count it servitude. “And he did not do many mighty works there,” it says, “because of their unbelief.” Power is not exercised where unbelief does not deserve it. And even if Christ demands no fee when he heals, yet he is indignant when insult is offered him instead of honor, he who is God over all, blessed and glorious for ages of ages. Amen.

[On the same, according to Mark.] Whenever the holy evangelist records that the Lord endured or did human things, he troubles the minds of carnal people as with a total commotion of the waves. For weak minds do not know how to hear, discern, and dispense the mysteries of the Lord's body, as today's reading shows, which says: “Jesus went out from there and went to his own country” (Mark 6:1). From where does he go out, and where does he go in, who is contained by no place, enclosed by no place? To what country does he go, who made and possesses the whole world? As the prophet says: “Yours are the heavens, and yours is the earth; you founded the world and its fullness” (Ps 89:11). But Christ goes out and goes in not for himself through himself, but for you through you, until he brings you in when expelled, recalls the exile, leads back and carries back the one cast out. So “Jesus went to his own country”: not to give his own back to himself, but to give back to you your country, which Adam had lost. “He went to his own country.” If he was born, how not a man? If a man, how not a citizen? If a citizen, who would wonder that he has a country? But this is the manner of his humanity, not the order of his divinity, that he confesses: because he who is and who was before the ages our God, our parent, willed to be among the last through the ages, so as to save by kindness those whom he had made by power, and by sharing their sufferings to receive back those whom he had made exiles by rebuking and commanding. For whatever we read that Christ did or endured through the man he assumed, let us not hear it as an injury to his divinity, but as having advanced the glory of man. “And his disciples,” it says, “followed him.” Rightly do the disciples follow Christ returning to his country, whom so great an election, the fullness of so great a grace, had already made citizens and burghers of the heavenly country, written in the roll of the order above, as the Lord says: “Rejoice, because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). “And when the sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished at his teaching, saying: ‘Where did this man get all these things? And what is the wisdom given to him, and such mighty works done by his hands?’” Unhappy and detestable wickedness of the Jewish mind, always readier to debate than to believe: it is anxiously moved by divine powers not to faith but to false accusation, even because it deserved to hear so great a wisdom. But since it is maliciously curious, or querulous, suspicious of good things, quite ready for harmful ones, it despises the teaching that it admires; it scorns the precepts it approves; slow toward God, very prone to idols; cunning in divine things, wholly relaxed toward wood and stones; rebellious against prophecy, contrary to truth, lost in auguries and lies. I ask: to whom is it a cause for caution that a blind man sees? To whom a cause for anxiety that a dead man rises? To whom a doubt that a mute man speaks? Surely, who would not know that he is God by whose command alone every weakness is healed? Moses had done many signs, Elijah had shown the greatest proofs of power, Elisha had done works not unlike them: why does no one examine their person? Why does no one raise a question about their status? Why has no one, ungrateful, inquired with such curiosity where they came from, who they were, where these things came from, and through whom they did them? But he alone is judged here who alone was unwilling to judge so as not to punish; he is examined with wicked severity who, so as to grant pardon, asked nothing; and though he alone was innocent and found all guilty, as a sign of his immense kindness he preferred to take up the sentence rather than repeal it, so as to give back to mortals the life long lost and restore the slain. Truly, as the Apostle said: “Great is the sacrament of godliness, which is manifested” in the flesh of our Christ (1 Tim 3:16). Yet this carnal rivalry, whose thinking is always hostile to truth, extends its curiosity still further: it does not allow Christ to be believed God by his powers and wisdom, but by the evidence of neighbors, parents, brothers, relatives it asserts, is eager, wishes, and understands him to be only a man, saying: “Is not this the carpenter's son and Mary's, the brother of James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not his sisters here with us?” Caiaphas prophesies with a profane mouth (John 11:49–52); and though he was high priest, he overcame the sense of his own falsehood by the office of truth; he proves his sentence not by his own command but by that of one condemned. Balaam blesses with a mouth meant to curse, and, hired for wickedness, speaks wholly the mysteries of truth (Num 23–24); and as a rose among thorns, that is, as little flowers of wonderful fragrance spring up on a bristling bush, so sometimes the minds of the worst are driven unwillingly to good things by the impulse of the Godhead, so that what they say is a matter not of merit but of mystery. We see that this happened then to Jewish malice, which, to insult the Lord's birth, while through Joseph's craft it exaggerates the truth of Christ's lineage, confesses and speaks of the quality of his true begetter, saying: “This is the carpenter's son.” Well did it keep silent about the name, so as to betray the begetter by his craft, saying not “Joseph's son” but “the carpenter's son.” And what carpenter is such as this one, who fashioned so great and such a world out of nothing? And what carpenter is such as he, who alone is the author and alone the giver of all good craft? Say, then, Jew, “the carpenter's son,” so that you may confess unwillingly “the Son of God”; say “Mary's son,” so that, driven to it, you may confess a true man, but the son of a virgin; say “brothers,” so that you may proclaim and set forth so great a condescension of your Creator. And although by this you strive to hide the virtues of the holy mother, yet the truth of the evangelist proves and asserts that those you call brothers were the sons not of Joseph and Mary but of Cleopha, her sister; for the usage even of the present time is known to call the sons of brothers and sisters brothers. For the Lord would never, against the order of devotion, have entrusted his mother from the cross to an outsider, that is, to John, if she had borne other sons besides him; but he hands over a virgin to a virgin, so that between such persons there might be only the care of the sacrament and only the fellowship of religion; nor would so great a disciple serve worldly concern, but, about to preach the virgin birth, he would have at home the means of proving it to the doubtful. And James could not have had the care of one woman and mother, he who in the beginnings, and in that Jewish fury of the time, ruled the church of Jerusalem by himself. Well did the Lord add: “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country.” See how carnal citizens think; see how worldly relatives feel and give honor. Blessed is he who, having deserved to have God as father, seeks nothing besides the heavenly country.

[On the healing of the paralytic.] Today's reading has shown that Christ carried out divine mysteries in human acts and conducted invisible business in visible things. “He got into a boat,” it says, “and crossed over and came to his own city” (Matt 9:1). Is he not the one who, putting the waves of the sea to flight, laid bare the depths, so that the people of Israel passed through amid the astonished waves with dry foot, as through the hollows of mountains (Exod 14)? Is not this the one who bent the crests of the sea under Peter's feet, so that the watery road gave solid service to human steps (Matt 14)? And why does he so deny himself the service of the sea as to make the crossing of a very small lake for a sailor's fare? “He got into a boat,” it says, “and crossed over.” And what wonder, brothers? Christ came to take up our weaknesses and confer his powers on us, to seek human things and grant divine ones, to receive insults and give back dignities, to bear weariness and bring back health; because a physician who does not bear weaknesses does not know how to heal weaknesses; and one who has not been weak with the weak cannot give health to the weak. So Christ, had he remained in his powers, would have had nothing in common with men; and unless he had fulfilled the order of the flesh, his taking on of flesh would have been idle. So he endured these necessities, so as to be proved a true man by human necessities. “He got into a boat.” Christ boarded the ship of his Church, always about to calm the waves of the world, so as to lead those who believe in him to the heavenly country by a calm voyage, and to make citizens of his city those whom he made sharers of his humanity. So Christ does not need the ship, but the ship needs Christ, because without the heavenly helmsman the ship of the Church cannot reach the heavenly harbor through the sea of the world with such great danger. We have said these things, brothers, as far as concerns spiritual understanding; but now let us follow the order of the history itself. “He got into a boat and crossed over and came to his own city.” The Creator of things, the Lord of the world, after he narrowed himself for our sake in our flesh, began to have a human country, began to be a citizen of a Jewish city; he who is parent of all parents began to have parents, so that love might invite, charity attract, affection conquer, kindness persuade those whom lordship had put to flight, fear had scattered, the force of power had made exiles. “He came to his own city, and behold, they brought him a paralytic lying on a bed; and Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the paralytic: ‘Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.’” The paralytic hears pardon and is silent, and returns no thanks, because he was more eager for the healing of body than of soul; and he so lamented the temporal distresses of his loosened body as not to lament the eternal punishments of the loosening of the soul, judging the present life more welcome to himself than the future. Rightly does Christ look to the faith of those who brought him, and so look past the folly of the one lying there, that by the support of another's faith the paralytic's soul might be healed before his body. “Seeing,” it says, “their faith.” You see in this place, brothers, that God does not seek the wishes of the foolish, does not look at the faith of the ignorant, does not examine the foolish desires of the sick, but comes to help at another's faith, conferring by grace alone, since he would not deny whatever is of the divine will. And truly, brothers, when does a physician either seek or accept the wishes of the sick, since the sick man always desires and asks for contrary things? This is why he now applies the knife, now fire, now bitter cups, and administers them to the unwilling, so that when healthy they may feel the cure that they could not feel while sick. And if a man despises insults and scorns curses so as freely to confer life and health on those wounded by disease, how much more does Christ the physician, by divine goodness, draw to health even unwilling and reluctant those wounded with the diseases of sins and suffering from the frenzy of crimes? O if we were willing, brothers, O if we were willing to see through the whole paralysis of our mind, to see our soul, destitute of virtues, lying on the beds of vices, it would be clear to us how Christ both daily looks past our harmful wishes and draws us to saving remedies and presses us on unwilling. “Son,” he says, “your sins are forgiven.” In saying this he wished to be understood as God, who through the man was still hidden from human eyes; for in powers and signs he was compared with the prophets, who through him had themselves done mighty works; but by giving pardon to sins, because this is not in man's power and is the singular mark of divinity, he was setting himself as God in human breasts. Pharisaic spite proves it: for when he had said, “Your sins are forgiven,” the Pharisees answered: “This man blasphemes; for who can forgive sins but God alone?” Pharisee, who by knowing do not know, by confessing deny, by testifying attack: if God is the one who forgives sins, why is Christ not God to you, who by the one gift of his pardon is proved to have taken away the sins of the whole world? “Behold,” he says, “the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). And so that you may grasp greater marks of his divinity, hear that he has penetrated the secret of your breast; see that he has reached the hiding places of your thoughts; understand that he lays bare the silent counsels of your heart. “And when Jesus,” it says, “saw their thoughts, he said: ‘Why do you think evil in your hearts? For which is easier, to say, Your sins are forgiven, or to say, Rise and walk? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins’, he said to the paralytic: ‘Rise, take up your bed, and go to your house.’ And he rose and went to his house.” The searcher of souls forestalls the malicious counsels of minds, and showed the power of his divinity by the testimony of a work, while he puts together the limbs of a dissolved body, tightens the sinews, joins the bones, fills the inward parts, strengthens the joints, and rouses to running the steps already buried in a living corpse. “Take up your bed.” That is: carry what carried you; change all roles, so that what was the witness of weakness may be the proof of health, so that the bed of your pain may be the sign of my healing, so that the greatness of the weight may declare the greatness of the strength recovered. “Go,” he says, “to your house,” so that, healed by Christian faith, you may no longer linger in the ways of Jewish unbelief.

[On the healing of the deaf and mute demoniac.] Since the summer heat had poured itself on the earth more than usual, I kept silent for a long time, so that the crowding that is born of the desire to listen might not itself produce for us the burning of the dog-days: now, when the mildness of autumn has tempered the air, we are called back, with the Lord's help, to the Lord's word. When a certain man brought to the Lord for healing his son, possessed by the fury of a deaf and mute spirit, the evangelist so reported the Lord as moved, beyond his custom of patience, that he inveighed against the father's wound before he set himself to the son's healing. “One of the crowd,” it says, “answered and said: ‘Teacher, I brought my son to you, who has a mute spirit; and wherever it seizes him, it dashes him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I told your disciples to cast it out, and they could not.’ And he answered them and said: ‘O unbelieving generation!’” (Mark 9:17–19). “One of the crowd answered.” Why is it that when one asks, many are struck? Why is it that when one complains, all are branded with unbelief? Why is it that at the voice of one the whole generation is called proud with unbelief? Why? Because this man had come not to God but to a teacher, demanding healing not from power but from skill; attributing the slowness of the healing not to the case but to the healer; assigning the disciples' inability to the master's lack of skill; by such clamor satisfying Jewish spite and the envy of the scribes. “And I told your disciples to cast it out, and they could not.” That is to say: that there was a devil who would not believe Christ, a demon that could hold the power of Christ's name cheap. The disciples were driving demons out of possessed bodies not in their own name but in Christ's. So that the demon did not yield at the disciples' command this man was drawing to the weakness of Christ's name, not to the fault of the disciples. Seeing, then, that the crowds of the Jews standing around thought this way, the Lord so brands the unbelief of the fathers in the sons, and so strikes the poisonous offspring in their parents: “O unbelieving generation!” “Coming,” it says, “to his disciples, the Lord saw a great crowd around them and scribes disputing with them; and at once all the people, seeing Jesus, were amazed and greatly afraid”: fearing, surely, that with the master's coming they would lose what they had insulted the disciples with, and that, when so great a demon was driven out, the very thing that had been an occasion of shame would become a cause of glory for the disciples. This is why the Lord, when one asked, answered all: “O unbelieving generation, how long shall I be with you?” By whose unbelief not even one demon is put to flight from a captive body. “How long shall I be with you?” And shall I not send to the nations, where at the voice of one disciple of mine temples collapse, images flee, altars are consumed, idols fall, groves are cut down, the whole power of the demons is put to flight from its ancient and decrepit seats groaning, trembling, and howling; shrines are changed into churches, pagan altars are turned into Christian altars, the victims of dead cattle are changed into the living sacrifice of the heart, and auguries, divinations, and dreams are placed in God's nod alone, in God's decision only? “How long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you?” He bears with them by patience, not fear; not by necessity but by mercy; he bears with them, carries them, waits for them in expectation, not in dread, who wants the ungodly to return, not to perish. “Bring him to me”: as if he could not heal one placed far away; but bring yourselves the cause of your unbelief, the title of your faithlessness, the proof of your unbelief. “Bring him”: so that you who would not believe God teaching may believe at least the demon confessing, and may feel yourselves more wicked than the devil himself when you see him confess and tremble at once at the presence of his examiner. “And they brought him; and when the spirit saw him, at once it convulsed him, and he fell on the ground and rolled about foaming.” The man was rolling, but the devil was being tortured; the cure harassed the one invaded, but the majesty of the judge was rebuking the invader; the captive was being set before him, but the enemy was being punished; the devil's punishment appeared in the torment of the human body. There is need, brothers, there is need of God's light, so that human eyes may not be deceived in God's work. “And he asked his father: ‘How long is it since this happened to him?’ And he said: ‘From childhood.’” The author of time asks the time of the suffering; the physician asks the time of the suffering not as one ignorant but as one knowing, to reveal it to those who do not know. So by such a question he discloses the time, makes known the age, goes back over the infancy, so that the cause of so great an evil may touch not the offspring but the parent, because he had devoted the child given him by God to the favor of the devil, to the honor of demons, as Scripture says: “And they offered their sons and their daughters to demons” (Ps 106:37). What crime had infancy committed, what guilt, to make room for the devil in itself? But little ones are filled with a demon when they are offered to the devil by their parents, led to the demons' care. So he is freed by the father's faith whom the father's unbelief had bound. The father's voice is: “If you can do anything, help us, having compassion on us.” That is: help us, have mercy on us, whose guilt weighs down the innocent, to whose punishment the danger of the child so overflows. And rightly the Lord asks faith of the parent, saying: “If you can believe, all things are possible to one who believes.” And the father: “I believe, Lord; help my unbelief.” The father believes; and, as we said, he is freed by the father's faith who had been condemned by the father's unbelief. For he whom the begetter's faith profited, how could the begetter's unbelief fail to harm him? But how he was healed, or why the disciples, who had cast out many demons, could not drive this one out, we will lay open, with the Lord's help, in the following sermon.

[On the same.] It is the teacher's duty to discuss what has been read, and to set out and show in clear speech what is obscured in mystical meanings, so that lesser understanding may not breed ruin for the hearer from the very source that should and could have conferred saving knowledge. This, then, is the harmony of today's reading: “And one of the crowd answered and said: ‘Teacher, I have brought my son, who has a deaf and mute spirit’” (Mark 9:17). He did not say, “I have brought my son, deaf and mute,” but, “I have brought my son, who has a deaf and mute spirit.” Is spiritual wickedness distinguished by human members and confined by human senses, so as to bear our weaknesses and our sufferings, unable to see except through the windows of the eyes, to take in hearing through the openings of the ears, to bring forth speech by the service of the tongue, and so to endure the pitiable state of the deaf and mute, when its thin and airy nature does not know flesh, rejects bones, passes through the whole world in a moment of time like a breathing breeze, assumes different appearances, is changed into various forms, penetrates hearts, mocks souls, breathes in ungodly and most shameful thoughts, and is not perceived whence it comes or whither it returns, and so, like a flying javelin, pierces innocent minds with a deadly wound and with every ease? It would be little if the father alone had said this in his supplication, “I have brought my son, who has a deaf and mute spirit,” had not the Lord himself driven out the unclean spirit with such a rebuke: “You deaf and mute spirit, I command you, come out of him.” But let us now follow what concerns the solution of the question. God, who will burn the demons in everlasting fire, who already now binds them with chains, distresses them with torments, presses them with punishments, can also, when he commands, maim them with every weakness, and in the very way they see, hear, and speak, make them blind, deaf, and mute so that they cannot speak. But in this place let it be declared what the devil did to the man. The ancient runaway, when he found that God had come to earth, stopped up the ears of men, bound the tongue, and, the doors of human sense locked, made and prepared the human breast as the hiding place of his cave, thinking that the hearing of the word and the power of the divine name would not come there; at the same time, as he is crafty and cunning, he believed that by such a fiction he could catch the father and deceive the parents, so that they would despair that one who could neither hear nor speak could be healed, and would believe that what was the devil's work belonged to human weakness, would put down to the child and ascribe to nature what the enemy shut inside had brought in. In fact, as Matthew reports of the same case, he had deceived the father of this wretch with another pretense too; for he begs thus: “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is moonstruck and suffers terribly” (Matt 17:15). The demon wished what had been his own craft to seem then to belong either to human nature or to a heavenly element, fitting the man's sufferings to the courses of the moon; he harassed the body as the moon waxed, so that people would believe that what was the crime and fury of the devil belonged to the moon. So he mocked men, got around the ignorant, defamed among the idle a creature which, made only for light, does not know how to harm men, whom it is rather bound by continual service to help. But after the knower of hidden things came, the most powerful inspector of secrets, whom the hidden fictions of the devil could not withstand, the boy is brought to be healed by divine command, so that whatever the devil had bound might be loosed by Christ. The enemy worked, worked to make what was seen seem to belong to nature. But why could the disciples not cast him out? Because this man is presented as a figure of the Gentile people: for the Gentile people, according to the Apostle, had the spirit of this air. “The spirit of the air,” he says, “who now works in the sons of disobedience” (Eph 2:2). So this man was deaf and mute, who could neither hear the law nor confess God, but was tossed in the fire of Gehenna and in the waters of the ever-bitter flood; nor could he be healed by the disciples or by any man, because Christ was long since called the hearing of faith, the confession of salvation, the redemption and life of the nations. Then, when the devil was put to flight by Christ's command, what was shut is opened, the bonds are loosed, speech is restored, hearing returns, the man is repaired, and only the devil weeps that he has been thrust out of his long possession. This is why one coming from the Gentiles is first cleansed from the demon by the laying on of hands and exorcisms, and receives the opening of the ears, so that he may take in the hearing of faith and may come to salvation, with the Lord leading.