A reflection for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost — Dominica XV post Pentecosten, I. Septembris, II classis (6 September)
I. Liturgical Context
The Church prays this Sunday from the bottom of a pit. Her Introit is Psalm 85, a prayer made in affliction: Inclina, Domine, aurem tuam ad me, et exaudi me — “Incline Thy ear, O Lord, and hear me, for I am needy and poor” — and the verse continues, “Save Thy servant, O my God, that trusteth in Thee.” Nothing in the Introit is yet answered. It is the voice of one who has cried all day and is still crying, and that is the disposition in which the faithful are set down before they hear a word of the readings.
This is also, by the rubrics of 1962, the first Sunday of September, and the Church begins at Matins the Book of Job. For the whole of this month the Office is governed by the man who lost his children, his substance, and his health in a single day and answered, Dominus dedit, Dominus abstulit; sit nomen Domini benedictum. The Sunday Mass and the September Office are therefore reading the same lesson from two sides: the Introit asks to be heard in poverty, Job shows what it is to trust in it, and the Gospel shows what God does when He comes down the road to meet it.
The Gradual (Bonum est confidere in Domino, Ps. 117) makes the theme explicit: it is good to trust in the Lord rather than in man; the Offertory (Exspectans exspectavi Dominum, Ps. 39) tells of the waiting rewarded, the one drawn up out of the pit of misery and set upon a rock. The Communion (Panis quem ego dedero, Jn. 6:52) closes the Mass on the flesh of Christ given for the life of the world. Trust, waiting, the pit, and then life given through a Body: the propers are already preaching before the Epistle is read.
II. The Epistle: Si vivimus spiritu (Gal. 5:25-26; 6:1-10)
St. Paul opens with a conditional that is really a diagnosis: “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.” Life and walking are distinguished. The Galatians have received the Spirit — that is not in question — but a man may be alive and yet fail to move by the principle of his life, may possess the Spirit and still conduct himself by the flesh. Everything that follows is a description of walking, and it is strikingly concrete: no vainglory, no provoking, no envying; the fallen brother restored “in the spirit of meekness”; burdens carried; the self honestly weighed; the teacher supported; sowing and reaping; perseverance in doing good.
St. Jerome, commenting on this passage in the third book of his commentary on Galatians, observes that the Apostle’s considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted is the hinge on which fraternal correction turns. The one who corrects must first remember that he stands by grace and not by nature; otherwise the correction becomes a display of his own standing, and vainglory — the very thing verse 26 forbids — enters by the back door of zeal. St. Augustine, in his exposition of the Epistle, presses the same point: no one is fit to rebuke another’s sin who has not first examined whether he is acting from charity or from a desire to be seen as better, and the test he proposes is simple — whether one would be equally glad to be corrected in one’s turn.
St. John Chrysostom, in his commentary on the sixth chapter, draws out the meaning of bear ye one another’s burdens; and so you shall fulfil the law of Christ. Paul does not say “tolerate,” Chrysostom notes, but “bear,” as a man bears a load; and since no one is without some fault, the Apostle establishes a kind of mutual carrying in which each is supported by the other’s patience. This, and nothing more exotic, is the law of Christ: the Lord bore us, and we are made like Him by bearing.
Then comes the sentence which governs the second half of the passage and, as we shall see, the Gospel: Be not deceived, God is not mocked. For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap. St. Thomas, treating this chapter in his lectures on Galatians, reads the sowing “in the flesh” and “in the Spirit” as two orders of causality and two harvests. The seed determines the crop. What is sown in corruptible flesh cannot yield an incorruptible harvest; what is sown in the Spirit — that is, by the principle of the Spirit’s life, the walking of verse 25 — reaps life everlasting. The Apostle ends, therefore, not with a threat but with encouragement: “in doing good, let us not fail; for in due time we shall reap, not failing.” The harvest is certain; the only question is the seed and the patience.
III. The Gospel: Adolescens, tibi dico, surge (Luke 7:11-16)
Two processions meet at the gate of Naim. One is coming out: a dead man, the only son of his mother, and she a widow, and a great multitude of the city with her. The other is going in: the Lord, His disciples, and a great multitude. St. Cyril of Alexandria, in his homilies on St. Luke, does not let the meeting be a coincidence. Death comes out of the city carrying its spoil; Life goes in. The bearers of the corpse and the followers of Christ have met, and the outcome cannot be in doubt.
St. Luke is careful with the detail. The Lord saw her, and was moved with mercy toward her — misericordia motus super eam. No one asks. The widow does not fall at His feet as Jairus did; she does not send word as Martha and Mary would. St. Ambrose, expounding this passage in the fifth book of his commentary on Luke, notes that the mercy is unprovoked: the Lord is moved by the sight of the grief before any prayer is offered, so that the miracle is a pure gift. And to the mother, before He does anything to the son, He says a thing that in any other mouth would be cruelty: Weep not.
Then He touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. St. Bede, in his commentary on Luke, notes the touch: the Law held a man unclean who touched the dead, but here the Author of the Law touches the bier, and instead of contracting death He communicates life. The bearers stop — St. Cyril takes them as an image of the powers of death arrested by the presence of the Lord of life — and the Word speaks to a corpse as though it could hear: Young man, I say to thee, arise. He does not pray, as Elias and Eliseus prayed over the dead sons of the widow of Sarephta and the Sunamitess; He commands. And “he that was dead, sat up, and began to speak.”
The Fathers take the young man to be the sinner, and the widow to be the Church. This is not an allegory imposed on the text from outside; it is the Church’s own reading, and it is the homily she gives her clergy at Matins on this very Sunday, from St. Augustine’s ninety-eighth sermon. Augustine sets the three raisings recorded in the Gospels side by side. The daughter of Jairus was raised within the house: this is the soul dead by consent to sin in the heart, not yet brought out into deed. The widow’s son was raised at the gate, being carried out: this is the sin that has passed into act and is being borne out into the open. Lazarus was raised from the tomb, four days dead and stinking: this is the sin that has become habit, the sinner pressed under the stone of custom. All three the Lord raised; but note, says Augustine, that for the one in the house a word sufficed, for the one at the gate a word and a touch, and for the one in the tomb He groaned in spirit and cried with a loud voice. The deeper the death, the greater the labour of grace — and none is beyond it.
St. Ambrose develops the mother. She is a widow: the Church, whose Bridegroom has ascended and is not seen. She has one son, and he is dead: for every soul that has fallen into mortal sin is dead, and to the Church each is an only son, uniquely loved. The multitude that walks with her is the company of the faithful, whose tears accompany hers. And what moves the Lord is the weeping of the mother. Ambrose draws the plain lesson: the Church weeping over her fallen sons obtains their resurrection, and there is no sinner over whom the Church has ceased to weep. St. Gregory the Great, in his homilies on the Gospels, adds the pastoral note that the tears of holy Mother Church are the prayers of the saints and the labours of her ministers, by which those dead in sin are brought back to speech — that is, to confession and praise.
Then the verse that gives this reflection its title: et dedit illum matri suae — “and he gave him to his mother.” The Lord does not keep the young man for Himself, nor send him away, nor make of him a disciple on the spot. He restores him to the one who was weeping for him. St. Bede reads this as the return of the penitent to the bosom of the Church, and the whole sacramental economy of penance is folded into it: the sinner raised by Christ is handed back to his Mother, and it is in her house, not on the road, that he will now live.
IV. Synthesis: the harvest at the gate
Read together, the Epistle and the Gospel form a single arc, and it is the arc of the Church’s whole theology of grace: the going-out of the creature from God and its return.
The Gospel is the return in its most dramatic form. A son has gone out from life — through the gate, on a bier — and Life meets him on the road and turns the procession around. What was being carried out is walked back in. The city that was emptying is filled, and the people cry, “God hath visited his people”: visitavit — the word the Church uses of the Incarnation itself in the Benedictus. The raising at Naim is an image of the whole reditus, the great homeward turn that the Son accomplished by coming down to meet death on its own road.
The Epistle is what that return looks like once the young man is home. He has been given to his mother; now he must live in her house. “If we live in the Spirit” — and he does, for he was dead and is alive — “let us also walk in the Spirit.” Bearing burdens, restoring the fallen with meekness, sowing in the Spirit and waiting for the harvest: this is the ordinary daily life of one who has been raised. St. Paul says nothing about miracles because he is writing to men on whom the miracle has already been worked; he is describing the walk of the resurrected.
And the two readings meet exactly in the doctrine of sowing. He that soweth in the spirit, of the spirit shall reap life everlasting. The young man of Naim reaped, without having sown, a life he could not have earned; that is grace at its origin, unprovoked mercy at the sight of tears. But the Apostle warns that the life so given must now be cultivated by the one who has it, and that God is not mocked. The Fathers hold both together without strain, because they see in the widow’s son what St. Thomas calls the two moments of justification: the raising, which is God’s alone, and the walking, which is God’s work in us and ours in Him. The deified man is not one who was once raised; he is one who was raised and now walks. St. Augustine’s three raisings are a warning in the other direction: the young man who is given back to his mother and returns to the road of the flesh will be carried out again, and next time farther, toward the tomb.
V. Devotional Application
The Gospel is addressed, first, to those who are being carried out. Some who read this are, in Augustine’s sense, at the gate: a sin that began in the heart has passed into act and is now a matter of habit forming. To such the Lord says, before anything else, that He has seen; and the Church says that her tears have not stopped. The way back is the one the Gospel shows: the touch of Christ in the sacrament of Penance, and the being given back to one’s mother.
It is addressed, second, to the widow. Every parent of a child who has left the faith, every spouse, every friend who has watched someone walk out of the city on that bier, is the widow of Naim. The Fathers are unanimous that her weeping was not useless; it was the thing that moved the Lord. The practical counsel is therefore to weep well — that is, to pray and to offer, patiently and without theatricality, and not to stop.
It is addressed, third, to those who walk in the Spirit and must now bear burdens. The Epistle is very sober about how the raised are to treat the fallen: in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself. The examination this Sunday proposes is not “have I sinned” but “how do I speak of those who have,” and whether, in correcting, I am glad of my own standing.
Three practical steps:
First, make a serious examination, this Sunday, of any habit that is passing from the heart into act. Do not wait for the tomb. If the matter is grave, go to confession this week.
Second, choose one person for whom you are the widow — someone who has gone out through the gate — and undertake to pray for them daily through this month of Job, without telling them and without expecting to see the result.
Third, bear one burden you have been declining to bear: a person’s fault that you have been tolerating rather than carrying, a correction you have been making from superiority rather than meekness.
VI. The Collect
Ecclesiam tuam, Domine, miseratio continuata mundet et muniat: et quia sine te non potest salva consistere, tuo semper munere gubernetur.
“Let Thy continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend Thy Church: and, because without Thee she cannot stand safe, may she ever be governed by Thy bounty.”
The Collect is the widow’s prayer. It asks for the Church, in the plainest terms, that she be cleansed and guarded — cleansed, because her sons are sinners; guarded, because they are carried out through the gate daily. And it gives the reason in the very words of the Introit’s poverty: sine te non potest salva consistere. She cannot stand safe without Him. The word continuata deserves attention. The mercy of Naim was a single event on a single road; the mercy the Church asks for is continual, because the procession out of the gate never stops, and she must be met on the road every day.
VII. Aspiration
Domine, visita populum tuum. “Lord, visit Thy people.”
Or, when praying for one who has gone out through the gate: Adolescens, tibi dico, surge — said quietly, in the Lord’s own words, for the one you are carrying.
VIII. Further Study
This Sunday opens onto three of our paths. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the Thomistic account of justification — the raising that is God’s alone and the walking that is God’s work in us — and the sense in which the Fathers’ reading of Naim is a doctrine of grace rather than a pious allegory. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the September Office and the reading of Job, and the way the Sunday Masses of this season are set in conversation with the Scriptura occurrens of Matins. The Spiritual Practices path continues with fraternal correction and the spirit of meekness: how the Church has understood the Epistle’s counsel in the tradition of the Desert Fathers and of St. Francis de Sales.
Mater Ecclesia, ora pro filiis tuis.
IX. Source Transparency
The scriptural texts are given in the Douay-Rheims translation. The patristic readings are drawn from St. Augustine, Sermo 98, which is the homily appointed at Matins for this Sunday; St. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, book V; St. Cyril of Alexandria, Homilies on the Gospel of Luke, on chapter 7; St. Bede, In Lucae Evangelium Expositio, on chapter 7; St. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia; St. Jerome, Commentarius in Epistolam ad Galatas, book III; St. Augustine, Expositio Epistolae ad Galatas; St. John Chrysostom, In Epistolam ad Galatas commentarius, on chapter 6; and St. Thomas Aquinas, Super Epistolam ad Galatas lectura, on chapter 6. All patristic material is given as paraphrase with locus rather than direct quotation, pending collation against the critical editions. The Collect and propers follow the 1962 Missale Romanum and await verification against the printed text.