A reflection for Dominica XVI Post Pentecosten — II. Septembris, II classis (13 September)
Two men are on their knees in today’s Mass, and one of them is St. Paul.
The Epistle shows him bowing before the Father in a prayer of such scope that language gives out halfway through it. The Gospel shows the Lord at a Pharisee’s table, watching men manoeuvre for the good seats, and telling them to sit down at the bottom. Between the two lies the whole argument of the day: that the love which has no measurable dimensions is entered only by those willing to be measured downward.
The Collect states the principle before either lesson is read: Tua nos, quaesumus, Domine, gratia semper et praeveniat et sequatur — “May Thy grace, O Lord, we beseech Thee, ever go before us and follow after us, and make us continually intent upon good works.” Grace goes first. Whatever place we end up in, we did not seat ourselves there.
I. That you faint not at my tribulations
St. Paul opens from a prison: Propter quod peto ne deficiatis in tribulationibus meis pro vobis: quae est gloria vestra — “Wherefore I pray you not to faint at my tribulations for you, which is your glory” (Eph. 3:13).
The clause is startling, and St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on this Epistle, does not soften it. The Apostle’s chains are the Ephesians’ glory, he says, because they are the measure of what God was willing to spend on them: He gave His own Son for the Gentiles, and He gave up His Apostle to suffering for them as well. So far is Paul’s imprisonment from being an argument against the Gospel that it is evidence of how dearly the Gospel was bought for those who received it. The Christians of Ephesus were in danger of reading their teacher’s humiliation as a scandal. He tells them it is their patent of nobility.
Then he kneels. Huius rei gratia flecto genua mea ad Patrem Domini nostri Iesu Christi, ex quo omnis paternitas in cælis et in terra nominatur — “For this cause I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named” (3:14-15). Chrysostom notes the posture: this is not a formula but the attitude of a man straining in petition. And the phrase about fatherhood is doctrinally enormous. St. Jerome, commenting on this passage, observes that every fatherhood — of angelic orders, of patriarchs, of the man who begets a son in Ephesus — is a borrowed name. God is not called Father because human fathers gave us the analogy; human fathers are called fathers because they participate, faintly, in what He is eternally toward the Son. The family is not a metaphor for God. God is the original of which the family is the copy.
What does the Apostle ask? Four things, each opening into the next: that they be strengthened by the Spirit in interiorem hominem, unto the inward man; that Christ dwell by faith in their hearts; that they be in caritate radicati et fundati, rooted and founded in charity; and that they be able to comprehend the dimensions of that charity and be filled unto all the fullness of God.
Chrysostom draws attention to the doubled image in the third petition — a root and a foundation, one taken from the field and one from the building site. Neither is visible. The root is underground; the foundation is beneath the floor. What holds a Christian upright is precisely the part of him that no one admires, and the deeper it is sunk the less of it can be seen. That is the Epistle’s quiet preparation for the Gospel.
II. Breadth and length and height and depth
Then comes the sentence that the Fathers never tire of: ut possitis comprehendere cum omnibus sanctis, quæ sit latitudo, et longitudo, et sublimitas, et profundum (3:18). The Apostle names four dimensions and does not say of what.
St. Augustine takes up the omission more than once, and reads the four as the shape of the Cross and, in the same motion, as the shape of a Christian life. The breadth is charity in its extension — good works done gladly and toward all, the arms of the Cross stretched wide. The length is perseverance, the long beam that runs from the ground upward and holds the whole: not merely to love, but to keep loving to the end. The height is the hope of the reward above, the expectation that draws the soul up. And the depth is that which lies underground and cannot be inspected — the hidden ground of grace, the secret of God’s judgments, the reason one man is called and another passes by, which no theologian has ever traced to the bottom. St. Jerome, treating the same verse, likewise sees in it the figure of the Cross, as though St. Paul had refused to name the object because his readers had only to look at a crucifix to supply it.
This is worth holding tomorrow, when the Church keeps the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The dimensions the Apostle asks us to comprehend were staked out on Calvary in wood. And notice the depth is the one direction that cannot be scaled: three of the four can be attempted, but the fourth is simply there, beneath us, unmeasured, holding the rest up. The soul that wants to know how far down the love of God goes is told, in effect, that it will find out only by descending.
Hence the next verse, which is either nonsense or the whole of the spiritual life: scire etiam supereminentem scientiæ caritatem Christi — “to know also the charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge.” Chrysostom’s resolution is exact: to know this love is to know that it exceeds knowledge. The comprehension asked for is not the closing of the hand around an object but the opening of the hand at the discovery that no hand is large enough. And the Apostle adds cum omnibus sanctis — with all the saints. It is not known privately. It is known in the communion of the Church or not at all.
The doxology then bursts out: Ei autem qui potens est omnia facere superabundanter quam petimus aut intelligimus — to Him who can do all things more abundantly than we ask or understand. He has just asked for the fullness of God, and he confesses at once that he has undershot.
III. Friend, go up higher
The Gospel (Luke 14:1-11) begins with a meal under surveillance. The Lord enters the house of a chief of the Pharisees on the sabbath, et ipsi observabant eum — and they were watching Him. St. Ambrose notes that He does not refuse the invitation of men He knows to be hostile; He goes in, because the sick are there.
And a sick man is there: ecce homo quidam hydropicus erat ante illum. A man with dropsy, swollen with the water his body cannot expel, and thirsty in proportion to his swelling. The Fathers do not leave this at the level of medicine. The tradition gathered in the Catena Aurea — and St. Augustine among those cited — reads the dropsical man as the figure of the covetous: the more he takes in, the more he wants; his appetite grows by what feeds it, and the very abundance he has accumulated is the disease. It is an apt guest to place at a dinner where the guests are grasping at the better seats. The man’s body displays, in flesh, what the other diners are doing with their ambition.
The Lord asks the lawyers and Pharisees, Si licet sabbato curare? — is it lawful to heal on the sabbath? At illi tacuerunt. They held their peace. St. Cyril of Alexandria remarks on that silence: they could not say yes without surrendering their accusation, and could not say no without convicting themselves before the man’s obvious need. So He heals him, lets him go, and answers the silence with a question they cannot dodge: which of you, if his ass or his ox fall into a pit, will not pull it out at once on the sabbath day? Self-interest had already taught them the exception. They knew perfectly well that the sabbath yields to necessity; they simply had not thought a man worth as much as an ox.
Then, having watched the guests choosing the first places, He gives the parable. Do not take the highest seat, lest a more honourable man arrive and you be told to give it up, and go with shame to the lowest. Rather take the last place, so that the host may say, Amice, ascende superius — “Friend, go up higher.” And He gives the law behind it: omnis qui se exaltat, humiliabitur: et qui se humiliat, exaltabitur.
Two things must be said here, or the parable becomes a lesson in etiquette.
The first is that St. Gregory the Great, and the whole ascetical tradition after him, insists this is a teaching about the true state of things, not about seating. Humility is not a low opinion of oneself; it is an accurate one. St. Bernard defines it as the virtue by which a man, in the truest knowledge of himself, becomes small in his own eyes — the operative word being truest. Pride is a failure of arithmetic before it is a failure of manners. The man in the first place has not merely been rude; he has miscounted.
The second is that the Fathers are alive to the obvious abuse. If the lowest place is the road to ascende superius, then the shrewd will take the lowest place in order to be summoned up from it — and this, St. Augustine warns, is pride wearing the clothes of humility, and the more dangerous because it has learned to be inconspicuous. The counterfeit is detected by a simple test: the false humble man is disappointed when no one calls him higher. The true one had not been waiting.
And note who does the raising. The guest does not promote himself, and the parable gives him no means of doing so. He sits down and waits for the host. This is the Collect again — gratia praeveniat et sequatur — and it is why humility is not the anxious business it is sometimes made out to be. The one who has genuinely taken the last place has nothing further to arrange.
IV. Where the two lessons meet
The Epistle asks for the fullness of God; the Gospel points to the end of the table. These are the same instruction.
Charity has depth, St. Paul says, and the depth is the dimension in which nothing can be displayed. The root is buried; the foundation is under the floor. A man who insists on the visible places is asking to be a building without footings, and St. Gregory’s warning applies to him: virtues gathered without humility are dust carried in the wind. Conversely, the man who consents to the low place is not diminishing himself; he is acquiring the one dimension in which the love of Christ can actually be entered, because it is the dimension in which Christ Himself descended — humiliavit semetipsum (Phil. 2:8).
Our Lord kept the parable’s own rule. He came to the table of the human race and took the last seat at it, and was called higher by the Father on the third day.
A word for practice
Examine one thing today, and make it concrete rather than general: not “am I proud,” which costs nothing to admit, but where do I seat myself? In which room, which conversation, which family argument, do I still arrange to be reckoned first? Name the room.
Do one act of charity in the buried dimension: something genuinely useful that no one will know you did, and that you will not afterward mention. If it is difficult to think of one, that difficulty is itself the examination.
Fast. This week brings the September Ember Days — Wednesday, Friday and Saturday after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (16, 18 and 19 September). The Ember fasts are the Church’s quarterly instrument for exactly the disorder the dropsical man wears on his body: an appetite that grows by being fed. Keep them, in the traditional manner or in whatever measure your state of health permits, and offer them for good priests, which is their ancient intention.
Pray the Collect of the day, or St. Paul’s own petition made personal: Det vobis… Christum habitare per fidem in cordibus vestris — that Christ may dwell by faith in my heart, and that I may be rooted and founded in charity.
Devote. Tomorrow is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Make the Stations, or simply kneel before a crucifix and take the four dimensions in order — the breadth of its arms, the length of its beam, the height above the head, the depth in the ground — and ask for the last of them.
If you wish to go deeper, this Sunday opens onto two paths. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up humility in the Thomistic ordering of the virtues, and the question the Epistle raises directly: how grace precedes, accompanies and follows every good act, and why the seat at the table is always given and never seized. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the Ember Days and the structure of the liturgical year — why the Church fasts four times annually at the turn of the seasons, and what the September Embertide asks of the faithful.
Domine Iesu, mitis et humilis corde, fac cor meum secundum cor tuum.