which no one fulfills by his own powers, unless he is helped by grace, unless God helps him by his Spirit. Now recall how the Holy Spirit is commended by the number seven. In Isaiah he says that man is to be filled with the Spirit of God, of wisdom and understanding, of counsel and fortitude, of knowledge and piety, with the spirit of the fear of the Lord (Isaiah 11:2). These seven operations commend the Holy Spirit by the number seven, who, as it were descending to us, begins from wisdom and ends at fear; but we, ascending, begin from fear and are perfected in wisdom. 'The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord' (Psalm 110:10). If then the Spirit is needful that the law may be fulfilled, let seven be added to ten, let there be the number which is ten and seven.
If you count from one up to seventeen, they make one hundred and fifty-three. There is no need now to count; count among yourselves, reckon thus: one and two, and three, and four, and so add the other numbers up to seventeen, and you find the sacred number of the faithful and of the saints who shall be in the kingdom with the Lord. SERMON XLII. On the closed doors. Safe is the door where the master of the house enters. For he himself is the door and the gate. So he enters upright, subtle, that he may instruct, not merely admonish; that he may gladden by inspiring, not make a noise by visiting.
God descended from heaven, the deaf hears, the mute speaks, the heart of the doubter believes, and there is no noise of the Savior entering, because he knows how to enter through closed doors. He enters the heart of a man who before did not believe and who blasphemed all that is good. When he has begun to believe, he begins to marvel. He stands amazed at the one who believes, and at Christ entering into the heart of the one who takes pity. Is the framework of the members opened? Is the wickerwork of the body, joined together from its own parts, separated from its joints or necessary ligaments? So through the closed doors where the apostles were shut in (John 20:19), he entered by the reality of a body, not merely by the presence of majesty. So he was wont to enter, so that he promised joy before he made a sound.
He entered the womb of the Virgin; the Holy Spirit came upon her, and the power of the Most High overshadowed her (Luke 1:35). He is begotten, and that gate is closed, which no one enters save the prince alone, 'and it shall be,' he says, 'shut forever' (Ezekiel 44:2). Behold, therefore, now he who rose from the guard of the tomb enters to the apostles by the closed gate, and from the sepulchre by his own power. Would Christ not have risen from the sepulchre if the angel had not descended? Or did the stone hinder the Lord, unless it were removed by the angel? Nay, the Lord rose so that the angel was not necessary. He was there for homage, not for help.
Rising from the sepulchre, and recognizing Mary in the garden, he asks Mary, 'Why do you weep?' And she, 'Rabboni,' which means, 'Lord' (John 20:15-16). He therefore now enters to the apostles with the doors barred. Say, O evangelist, how he entered. Whence did he come? He entered mightily, he opened hell, he took the spoils. He entered the doors, and greeted the apostles. He did not say that the little chinks of the doors were laid open, nor that the framework of the doors was loosened. 'How,' says the heretic, 'did a true body (as you say) enter through the closed boards of wood?' He would rightly say this if he pleaded the case before the Passion, when he still bore a mortal body to be subjected to suffering, to be held by enemies, to be fastened with nails, to be pierced by the lance, to be committed to burial.
For now all that grossness of the assumed body had been absorbed and transformed into divinity, yet not annihilated. O great mystery! He enters through closed doors, and shows his scars laid open. Nothing hindered him as he entered. Unbelief hindered Thomas as he doubted. What do you say, Thomas? 'Unless I see the marks of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe' (John 20:25). Faithful testimony of one seeking and of one demonstrating, of one feeling and of one offering! Did the Lord say, 'In vain do you seek my wounds'? Willingly he accepted what the doubter presumed. 'Put your hand into my side' (John 20:27), and let not your touch be deceived. And though the doubter did not feel, yet the Savior offered what the other sought.
A spirit can neither be felt nor handled; but because it was a true body, and a true body entered through the closed doors, he himself said, 'Thomas, put your hand into my side.' What is it, Thomas? Do you recognize the Lord from this, if you feel the wounds of the Passion? And he: 'This suffices me to believe him my Lord, if I shall have touched the healing of his scars.' There is all power; there is all mercy. 'Better, O Lord, do I know you from your Passion, better do I touch you on your cross, because you were lifted up for my salvation.' 'Be exalted, O Lord, in your strength; we will sing and chant your mighty deeds' (Psalm 21:14). How shall we sing? 'My Lord and my God' (John 20:28).
He who entered through closed doors opened the doors of divinity, and bestowed on all peace from the truth of his own body. SERMON XLIII. On the same subject as above. An earthly emperor does not visit his fosterlings when they are set in fear, in the way that the Lord Christ visited the apostles as they feared. For if, for the safety of an earthly king, his counts are shut up in the sieges of tyrants, the emperor himself does not deign to come to the confinement of his fearful servants: he can send an army to their aid, but he does not humble his own princely rank. But our Lord is the King of the heavens, the Lord of the angels, the raiser of the dead, the salvation of the despairing.
He did not send angels to the fearful apostles, who dreaded the Jews, the Lord's crucifiers, but he himself came, ascending from the dead; he entered through the closed doors, that he who had shed his blood for them might give them security from his own presence. But the heavenly Emperor, the destroyer of death, the liberator of the human race, enters not through purple veils, nor does he pass through gilded curtains; but the everlasting Emperor himself enters, with the angelic legions going before him in spirit. No one lifts the veil, no one opens the door.
So he entered through the closed door, who opened the hell of death, who loosed our chain, who opened the heavens, and descended, and with his body ascended again to the heavens, penetrating the inner parts of the veil which is set before our eyes. For he was able, true God and true man, to enter through the closed door, to unseal the book with seven seals, and to enter the hidden treasures of wisdom. Good is his entrance, whom a messenger of peace accompanies, and the effect of security. What does he say to those who fear him? 'Peace be to you' (John 20:19). Peace greets them in peace, because the disciples could already be afraid, and yet they dared to handle his wounds. He who came to their aid says to them: 'I said,'
peace be to you, and unbelief is fixed in you. I took up your wounds, and you make of my Passion contentions. Handle and see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see me to have' (Luke 24:39). Thomas was absent from the flock; he began to be endangered in faith, because he had not yet seen the Savior. The disciples say to him, 'We have seen the Lord' (John 20:25); and he says to them: 'You have seen the Lord crucified! A great miracle! Unless I see the fastening of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe' (John 20:25). Thomas doubts, and Christ was entering. Peace entered, and unbelief withdrew. Thomas, what do you desire? Handle if you handle. Handle my wounds, that you may not falter in your faith.
You wish to put your hand into my side—would that you were willing to enter wholly! My openings lie open, that my gate may lie open to you toward the heavens. He heard the sweetest voice, and received entire faith. From the wounds of the physician he received hearing, and the sick man drank the antidote. 'You are,' he says, 'my Lord and my God' (John 20:28). He entered into the openings of Christ, and the gate of the heavenly kingdom was opened. May our wounds ever heal us and refresh us—those wounds which granted medicine to the world—that we may ever sing Alleluia. SERMON XLIV. Where, after the resurrection, Christ appeared in the garden to Mary Magdalene.
The enclosed garden flourishes, watered by the gladdening rush of a river, which the firstborn of the dead deigned to visit after the ignominy of the cross and the injury of the Passion, crowned with honor and glory. The tall palm shows the greenness of its beauty: because the flesh of Christ, ignorant of corruption, rose from the dead unwithering. For of this it was foretold so long before by the oracle of David singing: 'You will not leave my soul in hell, nor will you give your holy one to see corruption' (Psalm 15:10). Behold, the flower of the field blooms sweetly again in the meadows.
Everywhere there is diffused the grace of the Catholic Mother, and the lily of the valleys grows white around the mount of the sacred altar, while for all the faithful, clad in white in the garment of justice, the angelic banquet of the Passion is prepared. After the resurrection, therefore, of the saints, raised together with him like shoots from the ditches of the sepulchres, walking with delicate footsteps, the Lord entered the paradise of delight; and whereas at the world's beginning that transgressing woman Eve, the head of her own body, had made herself an exile of Paradise together with him, Mary, keenly watching for the Redeemer of her own salvation—the conqueror returning with the spoil of death from the dead—to the tomb, in the garden of loveliness first merited to behold him (John
20:11), called by her Author, turned from unbelief, and unshakably confirmed by the calling of her own name. For when with most religious affection and a timorous heart she frequented with impatient zeal the sepulchre of the Lord's body, she saw first two angels in white sitting at a distance, at the head and at the feet where the body of Christ had been laid. Not for this had the heavenly angels descended, that the flesh of the resting Lord might be guarded by them, but that it might be shown to Mary Magdalene that he had risen from the dead.
But that both angels sat at the head and feet, whence the Lord had already risen with his body raised to life, this without doubt they were figuring: that from the East even to the West the resurrection of Christ, preached, would fill the whole world, as from the head even to the feet. And they say to her: 'Woman, why do you weep?' (John 20:13). Do you behold, descending from heaven, angels robed in white, and are you still occupied with womanish tears? Set, O woman, set a limit to your empty weeping. Now the tears are wiped from the eyes of the wretched, because, the bonds of groanings being loosed, the Lord of the angels, the triumpher, has ascended on high. 'For he ascended on high, he led captivity captive, he gave gifts to men' (Ephesians 4:8). Tell me,
O blessed ones whom I behold, and whom you may be I know not. Tell me, I say, good comforters, how can I not weep, so great a master having been taken from me, whose face I long to see, and I do not even find the buried corpse? Who then is this adversary, who so envies me that he strove to carry off by theft the venerable body of the Lord as it lay? Is it not enough that Judas sold him, the Jew bought him, Pilate condemned him, the soldier pierced him on the wood with beams, gazed upon him dead, and transfixed him with the sharp point? Were these small things, the deadly deeds committed by the sacrilegious against my Lord, while he still lived on and afterward willingly gave up his spirit? He is fastened to the gibbet alive, and he is snatched from the tomb dead.
For our consolation that rich man Joseph, having asked Pilate that the body be handed over for burial, received it and laid it up with great care in this tomb's vault (Luke 23:55). We marked the place of the buried body; we prepared spices, that anointing even the lifeless body of our Teacher we might soothe the burning of our grieving soul. And behold, on a sudden, with all vigilance, watching and searching, hastening I come, and early in the morning I find the sepulchre. These are the complaints of my running tears, from the bitterness of my inmost heart. Attend to my grief, weigh well the sting of my wounded heart, and grant to me who weep the most sweet remedy of your discourse.
Consider the matter, I pray, consider it as faithful patrons, receiving with calm ears the business of your undertaken salvation now made known to you, and give most wise counsel concerning the finding of the pledge of so great a treasure. Well do you ask, Mary, well do you seek, well do you knock. No one has taken from you the one you seek; he has raised himself up by his own power. While you speak with us, he will quickly appear to your sight: for the Lord will be with you always, and you shall be satisfied according to what your soul has desired, and your bones shall grow fat, and your heart shall be like a watered garden, and like a fountain whose water fails not; for thus does the luminous pupil of your eyes keep watch like a glowing torch.
The messengers divinely sent draw near, and at once the Lord of the messengers appeared. He beholds her standing, and questions her weeping: Woman, why do you weep? Whom do you seek? She, supposing that he was the gardener, says to him: Sir, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away (John 20:15). Consider, I beseech you, the groaning of my mourning conscience, and do not despise the torment of my breast. I perceive you to be the cultivator of this garden. I am seeking my Lord, buried in this garden. You alone are both the cultivator and the keeper of this garden; it cannot be otherwise but that you should show me where I may find him whom my soul has loved. Either from you I find him, or perhaps you yourself are the one I seek. My eye gazes upon you;
and my gaze is enkindled. Are you not my Lord and my God, for whom, thirsting in the night, my spirit keeps watch like a hart? O Mary, you who have directed toward me the full intention of faith, swiftly you have found the one whom with a pure purpose you have desired. It is no longer deferred: she has received the answer to her own true petition, and by the calling of her name she has been counted worthy to obtain the recognition of her Saviour. Now let us briefly ask why, when the Lord called Mary, and being called by him she recognized her Lord and Master, she heard from him: Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father (John 20:17). This is indeed to say:
Do not, Mary, merely reckon me a man, whom you behold rising from the dead and walking in the garden; but touch me when I shall have ascended to the Father, that you may believe me equal to the Father: But go to my brethren, and say to them: I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God (ibid.). He is my Father by origin, not by adoption; by nature, not by grace. For he himself said: You are my Son, this day have I begotten you (Ps. 2:7). With God, 'today' is eternal. It has no beginning; it has no end, no rising, no setting. Nor is any 'tomorrow' ever regarded with God, where there never was a 'yesterday.' In such a manner, then, is he my Father.
But he is your Father, to whom, having received the gift of my teaching, you have been counted worthy to say in prayer: Our Father who art in heaven (Matt. 6:9). He is my God, who, for your sake, having assumed manhood that there might be a mediator between God and men, being set upon the cross I said: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matt. 27:46) — not because I was ever separated from the fellowship of the Father, or that the Father could in any way depart from the undivided love of the Only-begotten (for I am in the Father, and the Father in me, John 14:10); but that in the flesh of a true man, submitting to death by punishment for the expiation of sin, I might in this way be more openly shown to those who doubt or are weak, and especially to the unbelieving Manichaeans. Behold in what manner he is my God.
But he is your God, because he created you in the first man with my majesty working together with him; and now, by the price of my shed blood, he has re-created you with his profound mercy for the possessing of the heavenly kingdoms. SERMON 45. On the one baptism. The psalm has sung to us, and the water has resounded, for the Lord has thundered over the waters; and if by the thunder from the clouds' voice the earth is shaken, so too is the voice of the Lord over the waters (Ps. 29:3). What creature is not moved except the heretics, who violate the sacrament of the waters, when they repeat the mystery after the Holy Spirit? What then is so great, that the voice of the Lord is over the waters, such as is he himself who gathered together those waters, when he gave them their name and law, when he uttered such a voice:
He who has once been washed has no further need of washing: for he is wholly clean (John 13:10). If at the voice of the Lord over the waters the whole world was shaken, at the sacrament of the Holy Spirit over the waters, is not the whole man clean, whom the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit wash? For the voice of the Lord which cannot be repeated can be heard with trembling. For he who is himself wholly [pure] said this over the basin, when he was washing the disciples' feet, and handed down to us the singular sign of the mystery. The basin is the whole world, and the round vessel of that basin is the circuit of the globe, where we are as vessels made by the potter's hands, the hands of Christ, for it is Jesus who baptizes in the Holy Spirit and in fire (Luke 3:16).
If vessels once fired are returned to the furnace, they are straightway broken beyond repair; and it is a light matter to the heretics that the fired vessels of souls in the baptism of graces should be recalled to a second washing of their rashness, esteeming themselves more highly than the Holy Spirit. Tell me, heretic, who said in Genesis: Let the waters bring forth reptiles of living souls (Gen. 1:20); and all the living birds were brought forth from the womb of the waters — was it not he who said: Go, baptize the nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19)? It is one voice: Let the waters bring forth reptiles of living souls; and: Go, baptize the nations.
Certainly because that same voice is in the waters, when men, reborn to heaven like flying birds, are brought forth from the spiritual waters. And so the Spirit deigned to descend upon the waters in the form of a dove (Matt. 3:16), and to remain, with united devotion, over the author of baptism as one dwelling there, that you may understand the kingdom of heaven to belong to those who are reborn through water and the Holy Spirit. Show me the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove in any other place, except once when Christ was baptized, and once when the world suffered the flood. Show me a second flood or a second dove. One flood, one dove, one branch; one baptism, one Spirit, and one sacrament of chrism.
That dove accuses you, content with a single burden of a leafy branch. It was sent forth again from the ark (Gen. 8:8), and it did not bring back another, because it sufficed for it that there be one thing once under one sacrament. The moving lips of the dove holding the branch are as it were the two Testaments, so that the leafy [branch] holds the mystery of the chrism of Christ. And is it a light matter to you, heretic, to repeat many floods? The Lord preserved eight souls unharmed in the flood: do you in the second flood of an unlawful baptism destroy all the souls, wickedly drowned, whom Christ saved once washed clean? Then the Lord said, lest it should be expected by men that a flood be repeated: I will no more make a flood upon the earth; I will set my bow in the clouds (Gen. 9:11, 13).
You have seen the bow in the clouds. Understand that there will be no flood. You have heard the voice of Christ as a bow in the clouds, that is, of one deciding and saying with the highest judgment: He who has once been washed has no need of washing. Do not repeat the flood, for you cannot find another Holy Spirit. As I see, above the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit you strive to vaunt yourself as a fourth, or as a first, so to speak, so that where you are not, no one is to be baptized. The Father is present, the Son is present, the Holy Spirit is present, for what has been commanded cannot be celebrated except in the Trinity. And you say it is not right, because you were not present. Therefore our God is present, where you are not absent. Of the Lord it is said:
The Lord shall wash away the filth of the sons and daughters of Israel (Isa. 4:4). To the Lord it is said: You shall wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow (Ps. 51:7). It did not say: This one and that one wash me; but: You shall wash me, because both the priest and the peoples are washed by one, and the priest presents in the sacrament what he receives. The Father is present, and does he not suffice for you? The Son is present, and has he not profited you? The Holy Spirit is present, and does he still not suffice for you? They suffice for those whom Peter and Paul baptized. But Paul used to say, when he handed down the sacrament: Were you baptized in the name of Paul? (1 Cor. 1:13) You perhaps, taking occasion from the name of Paul, are about to say that he baptized more through blessed John.
That argument is useless; it does not defend you. Tell me, which was the holier, John or Paul? I confess both. Yet I can say that Paul was stronger than John. Do not try to help yourself by burdening [John], so that you may seem to act rightly in saying this very thing, lest you seem to bring a slander upon blessed Paul. Saint Paul found twelve men, and asked them whether they had received the Holy Spirit. They said: We do not know, nor have we ever heard the name of the Holy Spirit. And Paul said: In what then were you baptized? They answered: In the baptism of John (Acts 19:1-3). And he baptized them with the baptism of Christ. He did not rebaptize, because that former was servile, whereas this is the Lord's baptism.
John has his own baptism; Paul has the baptism of Christ, not his own, not John's, but the baptism of Christ. That forerunning baptism of penance passes away, for he himself cried out: I baptize you in penance, but he who comes after me, he baptizes you in the Holy Spirit (Matt. 3:11). For after Judas the traitor no one rebaptized, because he had a baptism not his own but the Saviour's. John had his own baptism. Therefore Paul, that they might receive the Holy Spirit, washed in the baptism of Christ. And do you strive to wash again one who confesses to you and says, 'I have been baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit'? Because you were not there, is the sacrament of the Trinity not complete?
Where were you when the Son of God said: Go, baptize the nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19)? Up until your most recent and most sordid time, was the name of the Trinity in vain, so that your separation should avail more than the united conjunction of the Trinity? But I am righteous, you say, and you are sinners. The evil son indeed justifies himself; but he shall not wash away his own end (Prov. 24, according to the Septuagint); just as you, who justify yourself, and without yourself empty out the Trinity. How many false witnesses, prophets and unjust priests under the old law circumcised the sons of Israel, and yet not a second circumcision of the law;
and do you want to gather in a second abyss, so that you may assert yourself to be the righteous worker, and not the very [Trinity] which perfects the whole Trinity? Once was the sea gathered into one gathering (Gen. 1:9); once did the waters bring forth the living soul; once did our fathers cross the sea in baptism. SERMON 46. On the true vine. Since by the sickles of cruel vintagers the tendrils of our vine are cut off, and, the courts of the churches being defiled, the chambers of the spiritual ones grow faint from the fewness of those left behind, having no shade, let us run to Christ, who is the true vine (John 15:1), by whose blood-stained vine-shoot the burning Church is overshadowed.
For he himself is the true vine, planted for us from the Father's substance, whose power has covered the heavens, and the earth is full of his praise (Hab. 3:3). Thence ascending to the right hand of the Father by ways ever pleasant, giving green grace to those who burn, he stretched out his tendrils, either clad in the white flower of his nativity, or stained with the blood of his passion, with his hands stretched out upon the cross, and spread them abroad like vine-shoots upon the earth: that there might be refreshment for well-believing Christians. Let us run beneath that shade, which is woven from the heavenly true vine, and let us say under the temporal heat: Behold Christ our Lord, who was delivered up for our sins (Rom. 4:25); in his shade we shall live among the alien nations:
and touching also the harp of David, singing beneath the vine, let us say, In the shade of your wings I will hope, until iniquity pass away (Ps. 57:1). For behold, iniquity does not pass away, but grows; it does not rest, but rages. While the boar out of the forest lays waste, and the solitary wild beast feeds upon it (Ps. 80:13), because the true vine is quiet upon its throne, the Father the husbandman is angered: for the bitter vine has become an alien vine. Let us run to the purple prop of this vine's bloody passion, and let us hold, as it were, the reed of the statue of the cross, until the Father the husbandman, the sickle removed, restores his mercy; and let us say to him, protected by the consoling shoot of one prayer: Father, Father who art in heaven, why do we labour too much on earth?
Are you not the true vine, the husbandman, and does the boar out of the forest lay us waste, a barbarian knowing no human mercy? Did you not bring over the vine out of Egypt, plant it anew, and it filled the earth (Ps. 80:9)? Golgotha is witness, where beneath the cross you made a trench; there you planted the true vine with blood and water together, until the vine, propagated from the gibbet, from the sepulchre, to heaven, covered the mountains with its shade, and now the troublesome barbarian has occupied the mountains to cut off its tendrils. Its shoots have covered the cedars of God (ibid. 10), and now the lofty enemies cut us down: while they have no mercy on the infant, nor on the aged, for they were not ashamed at the face of the old, and had no mercy upon the sucklings at the breasts.