Easter Song 4.1–4.297

Now, having crossed again the calm sands of the Jordan, following the road through Judea: a crowd mixed without name, and, relieving countless throngs from disaster, he receives the sick and lets them go away healthy. Nothing, then, is ever hard for the most high God to grant to those who hope in him, he whose ready power levels the steep and brings back the crooked to straight, and, as judge, grants whatever nature denies. For as a camel cannot pass through the eye of a needle because of the bulk of its limbs, so a rich man, swelling with abundant produce, could not approach the narrow path that leads to the threshold of the heavenly kingdom, had not the Begetter of things (who holds the world in check by law and remains under no law, for whom to will is to create, whom no face sees, but who himself sees all) said: “This is impossible for man, but for God on high all things are possible,” and made troublesome wealth grow gentle at last for many rich men. For he handles his riches well and wants his treasures stored in heaven, where whatever is kept no biting rust devours, no moth furrows, nor does badly buried gold serve thieves, who gives food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, shelter to strangers, clothing to the naked, comforts those bound in prison, cares for the sick, and, generous to others, is needy only toward himself.

Nor is there any doubt that the wealth reaches heaven which, given to Christ, is given in the person of a poor man, which grows by being lost, which is scattered so that it may be, which perishes so that it may remain, which, dead, gives life. Moreover, while the Lord was passing along a certain road with a crowd accompanying him, he sees two blind men sitting, asking the gift of their extinguished sight and filling the wandering air with tearful cries. Nor did kindness delay, accustomed to bring health where it feels faith burning; at once, touching their eyes, he bids them wake, eyes that a great sleep had pressed down, and, unlocking the windows long closed beneath their brows, he made the night depart as the day came in. Then, walking again within the walls of the sacred temple, he gave sight to the blind and footsteps to the lame. After such deeds he had left the city of David making for nearby Bethany, and, returning, he was hastening, as the day grew bright, to visit its roofs again. But look, standing tall in the middle of the fields was a leafy fig tree, on whose wood, hungry, he found no fruit when he searched the trunk; and to the tree's foliage he said: “From your shoots, from now on, let no fruit be produced for the rest of time.” At once the fig tree, widowed of its sap, dried up and remained dead with withered branches.

For everyone who nourishes nothing fruitful for God will be counted, like a barren trunk, with the burnt wood. But the just will flourish like the lovely palm, always in leaf, and like the cedar of Lebanon he will be multiplied and touch the stars with his top. Afterwards a madman without speech, brought to him, felt the master's power; the shut-in force of evil was choking him in his narrow throat, and he had shown his affliction by his silence. But the Creator, accustomed to lift all infirmities, drove the robber from the besieged throat and opened a path for the voice, and, the bond loosed, the tongue, long mute, poured out speech that had been silent. Then the Lord, going to a Pharisee's dinner, shared the meal of a friend who had invited him. Then a woman, whom an evil reputation and the many offenses of her life were biting, a suppliant for mercy, threw herself down embracing his feet, and, bending over them, waters them with streaming tears, and with her loosened hair does not cease to wipe and kiss the holy feet, soothing them with fragrant ointment, until the sentence of God was given, who never regrets lending his hand if we regret having sought our old ruin: “Go, woman, your faith has saved you from all the evil,” he said, “that you are seen to have done:

enjoy my peace.” It is a great medicine to confess that it is harmful to stay hidden, since he feeds his own wounds who covers them and is afraid to bare the blow to the healer. See, she who had long been defiled went away cleansed in a little while by her groaning, and, washing herself in the flood of her own weeping, she goes back clean by her tears and wiped dry by her hair. And now he had entered the synagogue of the city of Capernaum, duly teaching the people. When the wicked spirit, hiding in a human heart, had seen him, it roared with an insolent shout, saying: “What have we to do with you? Alas, Christ, have you come to destroy us? I know at last who you are, and I recognize the Holy One of God”; and, saying no more, it falls silent at his terrifying command and left the man, driven out, and, fleeing into the empty air, vanished. So too he put an end to various sicknesses, and always forced the demons he cast out to be silent, and forbids such a witness to reveal him. For once that harmful serpent, fierce and lover of black death, cast down from the summit of heaven with his pomps and his allies and the whole column of his unspeakable army, sees Christ, whom he had known there, on earth, covered with the veil of flesh, and groans that the Lord of power is a friend to man.

And while the Lord, having gone the way of Tyre and passing again through the fields of Sidon, trod the calm sands, he healed a wretched man shut off in two passages, who uttered no voice from his mouth and took none in by his ear, and at the touch of the starry hand, the inner chambers broken open, all the doors opened, and, glad, suddenly he deserved both to be heard as he spoke and to hear those who spoke. You too felt the gift of the master's power, bent down over your blind eyes, on whose eyes Christ spat and took away the look of a feigned death. Then, teaching the peoples greater heavenly things, he reveals himself by his words to be true God, and, wishing for a while to avoid the dense crowds that pressed too hard on him, he goes to the lake and, sitting in Simon's little boat, was strengthening from the water the people standing on the shore. And now his words had ended; then he bids the boat be taken farther out to sea and the fishing nets let down into the vast deep, nets which had been able to catch nothing through the whole night in empty labor. Simon obeys, rejoicing, and, pressing on the watery tribes, throws out the linen enclosure, and so huge a catch filled the open folds that the overflowing prey strained two hulls with the heaped fish: for there was a partner boat. So often we cannot bear the greatest joys, and fear wishes too readily granted;

and what is easy for God, men do not even dare to wish for. Distinguished by such mighty works, he was going into the city called Nain, surrounded by a great crowd and a band of disciples, when, look, close by he sees a wretched young man being carried out, a cold corpse, the sad service having already suffered many funerals and an empty burial; an envious fate had widowed his mother, long since a widow, by a second urn. Nor did kindness, the enemy of grief, delay long; it brought life-giving help, and, touching the bier, “Rise,” he said, “young man”; and, obeying the word at once, the dead man rises, and, sitting up and speaking, came back to life and goes off as his mother's companion: for, though numb in death and though he had suffered the loss of his life, the servant could not stay silent when the Lord called, nor be dead when Life was present. Soon, the procession turned about, laying down its trembling grief on the road back, a white procession brought back the happy mother. Nor was it a small healing for you, Mary, when the Lord treated you; it cured your mind, hurt by many wounds, which a fierce rage had invaded with sevenfold arms, wedged in a demonic mass; but the scaly serpent, fleeing the commanding miracles of the holy word, driven from your heart, goes off and, through the flying air slipping into the chaos, the inner chamber of hellish Gehenna, dragged its seven huge coils, its sevenfold folds.

And lest the Lord let the harvest, overflowing with heaped growth, languish with too few laborers, he commands other disciples, whose mind, aware of right, and pure simplicity, shining in number and merit, were a golden balance, to hasten like lambs among bloodthirsty wolves, saying: “Take the rights of power, so that you fear no enemy; tread underfoot with faithful mind the threats of vipers and the scorpion and all things of the hostile power: no hostile savagery will harm my servants. Do not rejoice so much, men, that the black spirit is subject to you, as that the heavenly letter writes your names in the eternal book.” For it is God's rule to put life before deeds. For when good merit is lacking, miracles are nothing, which wicked men often perform, to whom the judge of the world will say: “I do not know you; depart, all you craftsmen of crimes, who in deeds always wicked have counterfeited the work of God.” So in the time of Moses certain men, on the shores of vain Memphis, by their spells produced signs, not by God's will, but by a false image gave magic shapes to human eyes. Afterwards he enters the house of a certain ruler of the Pharisees, to honor the house, not only to take food, to which he had come then at an easy request.

Here a man was swelling, distended with a transparent belly, full of water, and his belly had stretched the pregnant skin, about to give birth to an enclosed death; already his limbs were melting as his belly grew, and a swollen wasting, poured through his wretched limbs, had thinned the bloated sick man, and the whole dropsy had gathered into the space of his belly. The Father of the world could not bear this sight, and he passes over his Sabbath not caring for it, ready to care for the man whom he wished rather to be his own: for the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Then, kindly, drying up the body's flood, he bade the watery plague depart: soon the flowing disease leaves the inner parts, and the emptied fibers settle in the chest, and the watery plague left the lake of the flesh. Meanwhile the Lord, passing through the fields of Galilee, had begun to touch with his holy foot a certain village. When ten lepers saw him from afar, men bearing spotted portents, whom a discolored punishment disfigured with obscene shapes on their foul bodies, crying together they said: “Master, have mercy, for you can do all things, Jesus”: then the moved power, which is never empty of kindness, begins more mercifully: “Go, show your faces to the priests.”

And as they went on their way, the men suddenly marvel at each other's cleansed limbs, and, looking, see that there is nothing mottled on one another, and all examine their own forms in each other's eyes. Of them, to give thanks for so great a gift, scarcely one, turning back his steps on the return path, falls to the ground adoring the Lord of power, and showed his face to the true Priest. For who but Christ is the chief of pontiffs and the high priest? The author of the twofold offering after the order of Melchizedek, to whom are always given gifts that are his own, the fruit of the grain and the joy of the vine. When the blind son of Timaeus, sitting beside the road by which he had learned that the Lord was passing, had begged for light, shouting with repeated cries, and, not keeping silent when the people forbade him, was told to come to the Lord, groping with his hand, he received his sight and goes back with no one to lead him. How strongly importunate faith presses! Whatever a hard situation denies, prayer alone, repeated with honest desires, obtains. So that man was asking bread of his friend, who, the doors shut, through the dark silence of the night, with persistent cries and panting prayers wrung it from one who long and confidently refused.

And the Lord, passing through places on the Samaritan road, had taken on human thirst in the blazing heat, and the spring of everlasting water desires a little water to drink, inasmuch as he was in a body. Then a woman of that nation, standing there, who had drawn a small draught from the well, when she hesitates to give the gift of perishable water, recognizing her own life with its many husbands, begs that the gift of the inexhaustible stream be given her, to lay aside her thirst forever; which no one will be worthy to be rid of unless, plunged into the flood of the Lord Christ, he receives the calm waters of the soul, not of the body. And while, sitting in the middle of the vault of his temple, thundering with his Father's voice, he turns the wandering people to the open roads of the straight path with friendly warnings, look, a woman was being dragged, a great crowd thronging, to be stoned for the guilt of foul adultery; the band of Pharisees, setting her before a gentle judge, while preparing to condemn her, rather sets her free; for of all those in the crowds there was no accuser properly without sin to take up first a stone to throw and strike the defilement of the unchaste adulteress. Nor could anyone pluck a little speck from another's eye who knew there was a great beam in his own. So that onrush retreated in flight, and the merciful sentence pardons the guilt, now loosed on condition that she sin no more.

For whoever, like a dog, licks up his own vomit neither cares to keep the old pardon nor to have a future one, holding to the losses of the one, losing the gains of the other. Then, going on, he sees a man sitting who was born blind, who, slipping from the womb of a mother ill with child, rushed into the light without light. Then he, the founder of human blood and the origin of the rising world, not suffering the limbs of his own work to remain long unfinished, smearing his native clay over the enclosures of the eyelids, makes the man complete from the old seed. Yet he does not receive his sight until, having received the command of the Lord, he had come to the water of Siloam and, safe in the healing of the clay that was his kin, had bathed his eyes in the pure water. Soon, then, twin lights shine out in his face, and at last they deserve to behold the day they had not known. Know, all of you, what the mystic miracles teach our minds. We are the blind offspring born of wretched Eve, carrying the darkness born of long error. But when God deigned to take the mortal form of a human covering, there was made for us from the virgin a saving clay, which, washed in the sacred springs, unlocks the bright openings of the light of rebirth.

And, returning to the soil of Bethany, he had entered it; and there Lazarus lay buried by the lot of death, already on the fourth day without light, and, shut in the marble of the tomb, he gave off the smell of corruption. His sisters wept, the people present wept, the Almighty wept too, but in his body, not in his Godhead, and he grieved over the lifeless limbs in that part of himself in which he would die; by his tears he fulfilled the friend, by his majesty the God. Why, Martha, do you delay to believe? Or why, Mary, do you groan? Do you doubt whether Christ can call back one man from the caverns of the underworld, he who will grant countless crowds to rise after death? So when the trumpet of the Lord sounded, crying “Lazarus, come out”: shaken with great fear, Tartarus bursts apart, the recesses of Erebus lay open, deadly chaos trembled, and the law of deep death perishes, and the soul suddenly seeks its own marrow, and the corpse is seen standing alive before their eyes. And after a burial's honors, as though created anew, having died for himself he stands as both his own posthumous son and heir. And so that, despising the fleeting heights of the wandering world, he might show himself truly God, not in a lofty chariot, the honor of mortal pomp, nor with swift four-horse teams did he furrow the dusty road, nor press the tall back of a snorting horse, which, decked with trappings and purple, shakes its head, champing bloody gold:

but rather the honor of riding slowly on a humble donkey sufficed the ruler, whose gentle hoof, carrying the wonderful glory of so great a rider, would be the nobler for its burden, not unequal to that beast which, though Christ lay in the open manger, nevertheless knew him to be God. All the people, adoring, spread soft garments on the hard road. Tell me, pagan peoples, what king has had such glory in the world? To whom has a crowd coming to meet him, decked with palms or with branches of trees, ever given praise in heavenly hymns? To none but the Lord Christ, with the Father, who rules the heavenly kingdom as Prince in the Prince, with whom the Holy Spirit ever reigns equally.