A reflection for Dominica XVIII post Pentecosten — IV Septembris, II classis (27 September)
Confide, fili, remittuntur tibi peccata tua. “Be of good heart, son, thy sins are forgiven thee.” — Matthew 9:2
I. The Sunday after the Ember Days
This Mass cannot be read rightly without remembering what happened the day before. The Ember Saturday of September was, in the ancient Roman order, the great night of ordinations: the vigil ran long into Sunday morning, the new priests were made in the dark hours, and the Sunday that followed had for centuries no Mass of its own — the old books mark it Dominica vacat. When a proper Mass was at last composed for this day, it was composed in the afterglow of the ordinations, and every part of it still breathes them.
The Introit is a prayer for new ministers: Da pacem, Domine, sustinentibus te, ut prophetae tui fideles inveniantur — “Give peace, O Lord, to them that patiently wait for Thee, that Thy prophets may be found faithful” (Ecclus. 36:18). The Gradual rejoices at going up to the house of the Lord (Ps. 121). The Offertory recalls Moses consecrating the altar and offering holocausts upon it (Exod. 24:4-5). The Communion summons the people to bring their offering into the courts of the Lord (Ps. 95:8-9). And the Gospel ends with the crowds glorifying God qui dedit potestatem talem hominibus — “who gave such power to men.” On the morning after men have been ordained to forgive sins, the Church reads the Gospel in which the Son of Man first forgives them.
In the 1962 calendar this Sunday falls this year on the feast of the holy martyrs Cosmas and Damian, who are commemorated at the Mass. It is a happy concurrence. The Greeks call them Anargyroi, “the silverless,” because they were physicians who took no fee; on the Sunday of the Gospel of the paralytic, the Church sets beside the Divine Physician two of His servants who healed bodies for nothing and gave their own for Him.
II. The Epistle: grace given, grace confirmed (1 Cor. 1:4-8)
“I give thanks to my God always for you, for the grace of God that is given you in Christ Jesus, that in all things you are made rich in him, in all utterance, and in all knowledge; as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you, so that nothing is wanting to you in any grace, waiting for the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Who also will confirm you unto the end without crime, in the day of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The first word is gratias. St. Paul is writing to the most disordered church in his care — a community split into factions, tolerating incest, suing one another before pagans, profaning the Lord’s Supper — and he begins by giving thanks for them. This is not flattery, and St. John Chrysostom will not let us take it as such. In his second homily on this Epistle he observes that Paul attaches every good thing he names to grace: not “for your wisdom” but “for the grace of God given you.” The Corinthians were puffed up over their gifts and over their favourite teachers, and the Apostle deflates them in the very act of praising them. Whatever you have, he is saying, you were given. Chrysostom draws the sharp conclusion: if it was given, it is not yours to boast of; and if it was given in Christ Jesus, it is not Apollo’s or Cephas’ or even Paul’s.
The gifts named are specific: in omni verbo, et in omni scientia — every utterance and every knowledge. St. Thomas, commenting on the passage (Super I ad Cor., cap. 1, lect. 1), reads these as the gifts of teaching and of understanding the faith, given for the building up of the Church; the “testimony of Christ confirmed in you” is the apostolic preaching made firm in them by faith and by the signs that accompanied it. The Corinthians lack no gift — nihil vobis desit in ulla gratia — and yet they are not finished. They are exspectantes revelationem, waiting.
Then comes the promise that governs the whole reading: qui et confirmabit vos usque in finem sine crimine. The One who began the gift will bring it to its end. The Church has defined what is here at stake. The Council of Trent teaches that the great gift of perseverance unto the end (magnum illud usque in finem perseverantiae donum) can come from no other source than from Him who is able to establish him who stands, that he may stand perseveringly (Sess. VI, cap. 13). Every other grace may be received and lost. The grace of standing at the last is His to give, and St. Augustine, who wrote a whole treatise on it (De dono perseverantiae), insisted that it is to be begged daily and never presumed upon.
The Epistle therefore moves in a single arc: from God, through Christ, into the Church — and forward to the Day, when what was given returns to Him confirmed.
III. The Gospel: the soul first (Matt. 9:1-8)
“And behold they brought to him one sick of the palsy lying in a bed. And Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the man sick of the palsy: Be of good heart, son, thy sins are forgiven thee.”
His own city, St. Jerome notes in his commentary on St. Matthew, is not Nazareth but Capharnaum, where the Lord had made His dwelling. It is home ground, and on home ground He meets both the helpless and the hostile.
The first thing the Fathers mark is that the Lord saw their faith — videns fidem illorum — the faith of the bearers. St. Ambrose, treating the parallel account in St. Luke (Expositio in Lucam V, 11-13), draws out the consequence with evident delight: great is the Lord, who forgives some because of the merits of others. Let the sick man, he says, seek others to pray for him; if he cannot lift himself, let him be carried. The paralytic contributes nothing but his need. His friends contribute their faith, their labour, and — St. Mark adds — a roof broken open. The Church has never ceased to read in this the power of intercession: the prayers of the saints, of the Church, of a mother for a wayward son, laid down before the Lord for one who cannot yet come on his own.
The second thing is the order of the healing. The man was brought to have his legs restored, and the Lord speaks first of his sins. St. John Chrysostom (Hom. in Matt. 29) explains that Christ goes to the root: the disease of the soul is the graver disease, and often, though not always, the cause of the other. A physician who treated only the symptom would be no physician. And the word He uses is tender — Confide, fili: “Take heart, son.” Before He has done anything visible, He has called the man His child.
Then the scribes think blasphemat — He blasphemeth — and they are, on their own premises, reasoning correctly. Only God forgives sins. The Lord does not contradict the premise; He fulfils it. First He shows that He sees their thoughts, which St. Jerome notes is itself a work proper to God, who alone searches hearts. Then He asks: Quid est facilius? Which is easier to say? St. Jerome’s answer is precise. To say “thy sins are forgiven” is easier to say, because no one can check it; to say “arise and walk” is harder, because everyone will see whether it happens. So the Lord proves the invisible by the visible: Ut autem sciatis — “that you may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins” — Surge, tolle lectum tuum. The man stands, lifts the bed that had carried him, and goes home.
St. Bede, commenting on St. Mark’s account, gives the bed a moral sense the tradition has loved ever since: the sinner lies upon his flesh as upon a bed, carried by his passions; the man healed carries the bed, ruling the body that once ruled him — and he goes in domum suam, returning to the house from which sin had exiled him. St. Hilary (In Matt. 8) reads the scene more widely still: the paralytic is the whole Gentile world, carried to Christ by the ministry of the Apostles, and forgiven before it had any merit of its own.
And the crowds glorificaverunt Deum, qui dedit potestatem talem hominibus. They did not yet understand that the Man before them was God. But their words were truer than they knew, and the Church has read them ever since as a prophecy of what the risen Lord would do in the Upper Room: “Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them” (John 20:23). St. Ambrose defended this against the Novatians, who denied that the Church could remit grave sins after Baptism: the power is God’s alone, he answers, and it is precisely God’s power that He has chosen to exercise through His priests (De paenitentia I). The Council of Trent teaches the same, grounding the Sacrament of Penance in that Paschal breathing of the Spirit (Sess. XIV, cap. 1). On the morning after the Ember ordinations, the Church could hardly have chosen a clearer Gospel.
IV. Synthesis: from thanksgiving to glory
The Epistle opens with gratias ago; the Gospel closes with glorificaverunt Deum. Between these two words the whole Mass is held, and the whole Christian life with it.
St. Thomas teaches that all things come forth from God and all rational creatures are ordered to return to Him — the exitus and the reditus that give the Summa its shape. Today’s readings show that movement at the scale of a single soul. In the Epistle the exitus is spoken of in the language of gift: grace given, riches given, testimony confirmed, all descending from the Father in Christo Iesu. In the Gospel the gift takes flesh: the power to forgive, which belongs to God alone, comes down in the Son of Man, and through His Sacred Humanity reaches a man who cannot move. And then the movement turns. The forgiven man goes home; the crowds give glory; the Corinthians wait, confirmed, for the Day. What came down as grace goes back up as praise.
This is why the Epistle’s promise and the Gospel’s miracle belong together. The paralytic could not rise until he was forgiven, and could not have been brought unless he was carried. The Corinthians cannot persevere unless they are confirmed. In neither case does the man supply the power. But in both the gift, once received, is meant to be carried home — the bed taken up, the grace kept sine crimine until the Lord appears.
V. For practice
The paralytic’s example asks three things of us, and none of them is complicated.
First, go to the Sacrament. The same Gospel that the new priests heard the morning after their ordination is the Gospel of every confessional. The words are not remittuntur as a hope or a feeling but as an act, spoken by a man to whom God has given such power. If it has been long, go this week. If it has not been long, go with more attention: the Lord calls the penitent fili before He calls him to rise.
Second, carry someone. There is a person in your life who cannot or will not come to Christ by himself. You may not be able to argue him there. You can carry him — by name, daily, at the Offertory of the Mass or in a decade of the Rosary. St. Ambrose’s principle is the Church’s: the Lord forgives some for the faith of others.
Third, begin with thanks. St. Paul thanked God for the Corinthians before he corrected them. Before you name the faults of your parish, your household, or yourself, name the graces that have been given there. It will not dull the correction; it will put it in its true light, which is that nothing any of us has is our own.
Examination for the day: Where do I treat a gift of God as an achievement of mine? Whom have I stopped carrying?
VI. The Collect
Dirigat corda nostra, quaesumus, Domine, tuae miserationis operatio: quia tibi sine te placere non possumus. Per Dominum.
“May the working of Thy mercy, we beseech Thee, O Lord, direct our hearts: for without Thee we are not able to please Thee. Through our Lord.”
It is one of the shortest Collects in the Missal and one of the most doctrinally dense. Tibi sine te placere non possumus is the whole anti-Pelagian teaching of St. Augustine in seven words, the same teaching the Second Council of Orange made its own against those who thought man could begin the work of salvation by his own strength. It is the Epistle’s gratia data turned into prayer: we ask for the grace to please God, because pleasing God is itself His gift.
VII. Aspiration
Confide, fili. — “Take heart, son.”
Or, from the Collect: Tibi sine te placere non possum. — “Without Thee I cannot please Thee.”
VIII. For further study
This Sunday opens naturally onto three of our paths. The Sacred Liturgy path takes up the Ember Days — their Roman origin, their connection with the ordinations, and why the Sunday after them was long vacat — and the structure of this Mass as a thanksgiving for the new priesthood. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the power of the keys and the Sacrament of Penance in Trent’s fourteenth session, and, alongside it, the gift of final perseverance in St. Augustine and in the sixth session. The Lives of the Saints path turns to Cosmas and Damian, the silverless physicians, whose cult the Church of Rome and the Churches of the East have kept in common since before the Schism.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day, prayed slowly before and after Confession.
Suggested devotion: the Sorrowful Mysteries, offered for one person you have undertaken to carry.
IX. A note on sources
Scripture is given in the Douay-Rheims, with the Latin of the Vulgate. The patristic witnesses are rendered in faithful paraphrase with their loci: St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians (Hom. 2) and Homilies on Matthew (Hom. 29); St. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, book I; St. Hilary of Poitiers, Commentary on Matthew, 8; St. Ambrose, Exposition of the Gospel according to Luke, V, and On Penance, I; St. Bede, Commentary on Mark, I; St. Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance. Many of these are gathered in St. Thomas’s Catena Aurea on Matthew 9 and Mark 2. Magisterial texts: the Second Council of Orange (529) and the Council of Trent, Sessions VI and XIV. St. Thomas is cited from his commentary on First Corinthians.
Sancti Cosma et Damiane, orate pro nobis.