INSTRUCTION ON THE EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Rev. Fr. Leonard Goffine's The Church's Year

Quote:Who live according to the flesh?

Those who follow the evil pleasures and the desires of corrupt nature, rather than the voice of faith and conscience. Such men are not guided by the Spirit of God, for He dwells not in the sensual man, (Gen. VI. 3.) they are no children of God, and will not inherit heaven, but eternal death. But he who is directed by the Spirit of God, and with Him and through Him crucifies his flesh and its concupiscence, is inspired with filial confidence in God. by the Holy Ghost, who dwells in him, and by whom he cries: Abba (Father.) Prove yourself well, Christian soul, that you may know whether you live according to the flesh, and strive by prayer and fasting to mortify all carnal and sensual desires that you may by such means become a child of God and heir of heaven.

ASPIRATION Strengthen me, O Lord, that I may not live according to the desires of the, flesh; but resist them firmly by the power of Thy Spirit, that I may not die the eternal death.

Taken from The Liturgical Year by Dom Prosper Guéranger  (1841-1875)

Quote:The Apostle and Doctor of the Gentiles here goes on, forming to the Christian life the new recruits, whom his own voice and that of his fellow-apostles, dispersed as they are throughout the world, are every day leading, by hundreds, to the fount of salvation. Although the Church is all attention to the events which are preparing for Judea, yet is she full of maternal solicitude for the great work of the training those children whom she has given to her divine Spouse. While Israel is obstinate in his fatal refusal to accept the Messiah, another family is growing up in his place; and by its docility, richly repays our Lord for all the rebellion and slights offered him by the children he had first made his chosen ones. They were the ancient people, and are jealous of others being now called to the same privilege. The contradictions of which Christ complains in the Psalm, are anything but over; and yet, thanks to the Church, the Man-God is already the Head of the Gentiles.

Admirable is the fruitfulness of the Bride; for, wonderful is the power of sanctification which she is using all through the world of various nations. Scarcely has she sprung into her beauteous existence, than she offers to her Lord and her King a new empire, consolidated in unity of love; she presents him with a generation that is all pure in the intelligence and practice of every virtue. It is quite true that the Holy Ghost acts directly on the souls of the newly baptized; but there is something else to be considered in the divine plan. It is this: the Word having been made flesh, and having taken to himself a Bride (which is the visible Church on earth), whom he has made his associate in the work of man’s salvation—he has willed that the invisible operation of the divine Spirit, who proceeds from him (the Word) shall not be in its normal state, unless there be added to it the extrinsic cooperation and intervention of this his Bride. Not only is the Church the depository of those all-potent formulas and mysterious rites which change man’s heart into a new soil, cleaning it from thorns and weeds, making it able to produce a hundred-fold—but she also sows the seed of the divine husbandman into that same soil, by her countless modes of teaching the Truth. To the Holy Ghost, indeed, a magnificent share is due of that fecundity and that social life of the Church; still her portion of work is exquisite; it deals with the elect taken as individuals, and consists especially in getting them to profit of the divine energies of the Sacraments which she administers, and in developing the germs of salvation which her teaching plants in their souls.

How important, then, and sublime will ever be that mission which is confided to those men who are set over particular churches, as teachers or directors of souls; they represent, to these isolated congregations, the common Mother of all the Faithful, for in her name, they really provide for the Holy Spirit those elements upon whom he is to make his all-powerful action felt. For that very same reason, woe to those times when the dispensers of the divine word, having themselves naught but halved or false principles, give but weak shriveled seed to the souls entrusted to them! The Holy Ghost is not bound to supply their insufficiency; ordinarily speaking, he will not supply it, for such is not the way established by Christ for the sanctification of the members of his Church.

The common Mother, however, has a supplementary aid for such of her children, as may be thus treated—it is her Liturgy. There they will find not only the holy Sacrifice which will support them, and the graces of the Sacrament of love which will nourish spiritual life within them,—but moreover, the surest rule of conduct, and the sublimest teachings of every virtue. Such souls as these have perhaps got the idea that the poor subjective system they have made for themselves is the royal road to perfection; but if they be of an earnest good will, desirous to find the best way, God will, some happy day, lead them to find, and finding, to appreciate the inexhaustible and divinely given treasures of the Church’s Liturgy; possessing and enriching themselves with these, they will soon put aside what the Prophet Isaias terms bread without strength, and water without power. The same Prophet would thus urge them in the Church’s name, to what is best: All ye that thirst, come to the waters! And ye that have no money, make haste, buy and eat. Come ye! buy wine and milk, without money, and without any price. Why spend ye money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which doth not satisfy you? Hearken diligently to me, and eat that which is good, and your soul shall be delighted in fatness! And truly, there is a fact which should rouse, both to attention and gratitude, any Christian who longs to be enlightened as to the best way of getting to heaven: this fact is that the Church herself has made a selection, for our reading, from the treasury of the Scriptures and, in her Missal, which she puts into our hands, she has inserted practical teachings from the same divine Books, which she knew were best suited to the wants of her children. A Christian who is humbly and devoutly assiduous in the study of this admirable book of the Liturgy will abound in spiritual knowledge. His guide will say to him, and with a well-grounded assurance: This is the way! walk in it! And go not aside, neither to the right, nor to the left! We have no need to wonder at all this; for in the guidance of souls, the Church is far superior to the most learned Doctors and to the greatest Saints—all of whom were humble disciples in her school.

Let us put together a few lines which have been read to us as the Epistles of the last three Sundays, and were taken from that written by St. Paul to the Romans: and, to say nothing of their infallible truth as being inspired by the Holy Ghost, could we have had any exposition of the principles of revealed morality which could have been compared to it? Clearness, simplicity of diction, earnest vehemence of exhortation,—all are perfect in these few words, and yet they are but the outward expression of the sublimest truths of Christian dogma. Let us make the barest possible summary of what these three Epistles have taught us, and we shall see how grand they are. Christ Jesus, foundation of man’s salvation;—his death and burial made, in Baptism, the regeneration of man; his Life in God, the model of our own; the disgrace of our enslaved bodies, removed;—the sanctifying fruitfulness of every virtue substituted in our members for the poisonous roots of all vices;—and on this very Sunday, the preeminence of the spirit over the flesh; the duties incumbent on our spirit, if she is to maintain her superiority, what must man do if he would preserve the liberty bestowed on him by the Spirit of love, and prove himself to be what he really is, a son of God and joint-heir of Christ. Yes, these are the splendid realities which are henceforth to light up in us the law of the spirit of life (that is, the law of the life we are to live by the Spirit) in Christ Jesus; these are the axioms of the science of salvation now taught to the whole world, which are to be substituted for both the weakness of the Jewish law and the empty ethics of philosophers.

For, the leading idea which pervades the whole of this sublime Epistle to the Romans, is this: man, unaided by grace, is incapable of producing perfect justice and absolute good. Experience has proved it, St. Paul teaches it, and Father will later on unanimously assert it, and the Church, in her Councils, will define it. True, by the mere powers of his fallen nature, man may come to the knowledge of some truths, and to the practice of some virtues, but without grace, he can never know, and still less observe, the precepts of even the natural law, if you take them as a whole.

From Jesus, then, from Jesus alone comes all justice; not only supernatural justice, which supposes the infusion of sanctifying grace in the sinner’s soul, is wholly from Him; but even that natural justice, of which men are so proud, and which they say is quite enough without anything else,—even that soon leaves one who does not cling to Christ by faith and love. Our modern world has a pompous phrase about “the independence of the human mind;” let them who pretend to acknowledge no other goodness but that, go on with their boasting of being moral and honest men; but as to us Christians, we believe what our mother the Church teaches us; and agreeably to such teaching, we believe that “a moral and honest man,” that is to say, a man who lives up to all the duties which nature puts upon him, can only be that, here below, by a special aid of our Redeemer and Savior, Christ Jesus. With St. Paul, therefore, let us be proud of the Gospel, for, as he calls it, it is the the power of God, not only to justify the ungodly, but also to enrich souls that thirst after what is right, with an active and perfect justice. The just man, says the same Apostle, liveth by faith; and according to the growth of his faith, so is his growth in justice. Without faith in Christ, the pretension to reach perfection in good by one’s own self and works, produces nothing but the stagnation of pride and the wrath of God.

The Jews are a proof of it. Proud of their Law, which gave them light greater than that enjoyed by the Gentiles, and wishing to make their whole virtue consist in their having possession of that Law,—they have rejected Him who was the end of the Law, and the source of all holiness; they have refused to accept the Christ who not only delivered them from their previous misery, but also brought them the knowledge of what would save them them, and the strength to fulfill it; they have continued in their iniquity, adding sin upon sin to that contracted from their First Parents, and thus treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath. Now is being fulfilled the prediction of Isaias, whose words might very appropriately have been used by the faithful few of Israel, whom we have been today looking at when they were fleeing from Jerusalem: Except the Lord of hosts had left us seed, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have like to Gomorrha.

What, then, shall we say? asks the Apostle; and he answers his own question thus: That the Gentiles, who followed not after justice, have attained to justice, (that is) the justice that comes from faith. But Israel, by following after the law of justice, is not come unto the law of justice. Why so? Because they sought it, not by faith, but as it were of works: for they stumbled at the stumbling-stone, as it is written: “Behold! I lay in Sion a stumbling-stone and a rock of scandal; and whosoever believeth in Him, shall not be confounded.”

Quote:The several parts of the parable here proposed to us, are easy to understand and convey a deep teaching. God alone is rich by nature, for to Him alone belongs the direct and absolute dominion over all things: they are his because he made them. But by sending his Son into the world under a created form, he, by this temporal mission, appointed him Heir to all the works of his hands, just as truly as he already was owner of the riches of the divine nature because of his eternal generation. The rich man, then, of our Gospel is Jesus, who in his sacred Humanity, united to the Word, is heir of all things, and as such, all things of the Most High God, created or uncreated, finite or infinite, belong to him. To him belong the heavens which proclaim his glory, and which, as long as they last, clothe him with their garment of light; to him the ocean, whose surges are but a voice that speaks his praise, and hushes the fury of its tempests when he bids it be still; to him the earth, which gladly offers him the homage of all its fullness. The grass and flowers of the meadows, the varied fruits, the fertile loveliness of the fields, the birds of the air and the fishes which inhabit the rivers, or that sport in the paths of the sea, the huge oxen as well as the tiniest insect that lives—the wild beasts of forest or mountain are all his, all are subject to his rule. Silver, too, is his, and gold is his; and man too is his, and would have been eternally his servant, had not this Jesus mercifully vouchsafed to divinize him, and make him a partaker of his own eternal happiness and riches.

Instead of our being his slaves or servants, he would have us be his Brothers; and when he returned from this world to his Father, whom he had also made to be ours by the grace he had infused into us, he sent us the Holy Ghost, who should bear testimony to us that we are the Sons of God, and be to us the pledge of our sacred inheritance,—heaven. O ineffable riches of the world to come! O inheritance the fullest that ever was! Our Jesus himself is all joy at the sight of it, and in the Psalm of his Resurrection, he gives expression to that joy. We, his members and joint-heirs, have a right to repeat those words after him, and say: The lines are fallen unto me in goodly places; for my inheritance is goodly to me! for the Lord himself is my portion! I will bless him for his have given me to understand my happiness!

But in order that we may attain to those eternal riches, there is a condition imposed on us:—we must turn to profit the visible domain of Christ; we must see that it is used in his service. The future rewards we are to have in heaven depend upon the more or less fidelity wherewith we have employed our share of these inferior good things, for they are entrusted to us, to each of us in the measure which seemed good in God’s eyes. What a divine agreement has been drawn up for us! What perfect adjustment between justice and love! Our Lord Jesus Christ has divided his property into two portions; he gives the eternal portion unreservedly to us; it is the only one that is truly great, the only one that is capable of contenting our infinite longings. As to the other portion which, in itself, would not be worthy of the attention of beings that are made for the contemplation of the divine essence, he could not think of allowing us to set our hearts on it, neither will he permit us to have absolute dominion over it. The real possession of temporal good belongs, therefore, to Him alone; the ownership of earthly riches, which he permits to the future joint-heirs of his own blissful eternity, is subject to numberless restrictions during their lifetime and, at their death, exhibits its essentially precarious tenure, by its not being able to follow its owner beyond the grave.

For the fool, as well as for the wise man, the day will come when his soul will be required of him; and when the rich man, as well as the poor, will be brought before his Maker, exactly as he was on the day of his first entrance into the world, and it will be said to him: Give an account of thy stewardship! At that dread hour, the rule observed for the judgment will be that which our Lord revealed to us during his mortal life: Unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required; and to whom they have committed much, of him they will demand the more. Woe, at that hour, to the servant who has comported himself as though he were the absolute master! woe to the steward who, disregarding the trust assigned to him, has done just what his own whim suggested with the good of which he was only the dispenser. When that the light of eternity shall be upon him, he will understand the error of his foolish pride. He will see the shameful injustice of a life which the world, perhaps, thought of a very decent one, but which was spent without the slightest regard to the intentions for which God gave him the riches, which were his boast. He will then be entirely deprived of them all; neither will be it be then in his power to make a better use of them for the future, that is, a use more in accordance with the designs of God. If he might at least make some restitution for the good he has abused! if he might sue for aid from those with whom he lived upon earth! But no! when time is over, labor is over too. He has nothing to show for all his riches; he is powerless; and when he goes before that dread tribunal, where every man is afraid that he cannot put his own accounts right,—whom can he get to help him?

Happy, therefore, if now that time is still granted him, he would allow the thousand calls of God to awaken him from his false conscience! Happy if, like the steward mentioned in our Gospel, he would say to himself those words of Job: What shall I do, when God shall rise to judge? And, when he shall examine, what shall I answer him?

This very Judge, whom he so rightly fears, now most mercifully points out to him how he may escape the punishment due to his past maladministration. Let him imitate the prudence of the unjust steward, and he will have praise for it from his Lord: not only, like him, because of his prudence, but because, by his thus spending over God’s servants the riches that were entrusted to his care, far from thereby robbing his divine Master, he acts in strict accordance with his wishes. Who thinkest thou, asks our Lord, is the faithful and wise steward, whom his Lord setteth over his family, to give them, in due time, their measure of wheat, and oil? Alms, whether corporal or spiritual, secure us powerful friends for that awful day of our death and judgment. It is to the poor, that the kingdom of heaven belongs; so that, if we spend the riches of this present life in solacing the sufferings of those poor ones, now that they are living here below—afterwards, they will not fail to make us a return, by receiving us into their future homes,—the everlasting dwellings of heaven.

Such is the immediate and obvious meaning of the parable given us today. But if we would go further,—if we would understand the whole intention of the Church in her choice of the present Gospel, we must then listen to St. Jerome, whose homily for last night’s Office, is put before us as the official interpretation of the sacred text. Let us first listen to the words of Scripture which the Saint quotes,—they immediately follow those of our Gospel: He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in that which is greater; and he that is unjust in that which is little, is unjust also in that which is greater. If, then, ye have not been faithful in the unjust mammon, who will trust you with that which is the true? These words, says St. Jerome, were said in the presence of the scribes and pharisees; they felt that the parable was intended for them; and they derided the divine preacher. The one that was unjust in that which is little, is the jealous Jew who, in the limited possession of the present life, refused to his fellow men the use of those goods which were created for all. If, then, you avaricious Scribes are convicted of maladministration in the management of temporal riches, how can you expect to have confided to you the true, the eternal, riches of the divine word, and the teaching of the Gentiles? Terrible question, which our Lord leaves thus unanswered; let these unjust Stewards, the depositories of the figurative Law, deride Jesus as much as they please, and pretend that his question does not refer to them; but they will soon be giving the true answer: the answer will be the ruin of Jerusalem.

SERMON XXXVII. EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST. – ON THE PARTICULAR JUDGMENT
by St. Alphonsus Liguori



“Give an account of thy stewardship.” LUKE xvi. 2.