A reflection for Tuesday within the Twenty-Third Week after the Octave of Pentecost — Feria Tertia infra Hebdomadam XXIII post Octavam Pentecostes, IV classis (3 November)
The Mass of the twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost could not be sung on its own Sunday, because the Church kept the Feast of All Saints. Yesterday she put on black for All Souls. Today, on the first free day of the week, the Sunday Mass comes back. It could hardly have come back at a better moment.
Listen to its chants. The Alleluia and the Offertory are both taken from the De profundis: De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine: Domine, exaudi orationem meam — “Out of the depths I have cried to Thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice” (Ps. 129:1-2). That is the psalm the Church prays at the graveside and in the Office of the Dead. The Introit is God’s own promise through Jeremias: Ego cogito cogitationes pacis, et non afflictionis… et reducam captivitatem vestram de cunctis locis — “I think thoughts of peace, and not of affliction… and I will bring back your captivity from all places” (Jer. 29:11, 14). In the first week of November, the month the Church gives to the holy souls, these words sound like what they are: a promise to the captives of Purgatory and a pledge of the resurrection.
There is a further reason this Mass weighs on the end of the year. From now until Advent, whatever Sunday the calendar reaches, the Church keeps singing this Mass’s Introit, Gradual, Offertory and Communion. These are the last chants of the liturgical year. The year ends, as life ends, with a cry from the depths and a promise of return.
Tuesday, by an old devotional custom, is the day of the holy angels. It is good to remember them this week. The poor man Lazarus “was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom” (Luke 16:22). The Church asks at every funeral, In paradisum deducant te Angeli, “May the angels lead thee into paradise.” In the Requiem Offertory she prays that St. Michael, the standard-bearer, may bring the faithful departed into the holy light.
The Roman Martyrology also gives us a companion today. On the third of November it commemorates St. Malachy, Archbishop of Armagh, who died at Clairvaux in 1148 in the arms of St. Bernard. His death, as we will see, is a commentary on today’s Gospel.
I. Nostra autem conversatio in cælis est: the Epistle
“Brethren, be ye followers of me, and observe them who walk so as you have our model. For many walk, of whom I have told you often (and now tell you weeping), that they are enemies of the cross of Christ; whose end is destruction; whose God is their belly; and whose glory is in their shame; who mind earthly things. But our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ, who will reform the body of our lowness, made like to the body of his glory, according to the operation whereby also he is able to subdue all things unto himself. Therefore, my dearly beloved brethren, and most desired, my joy and my crown; so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved. I beg of Euodia, and I beseech Syntyche, to be of one mind in the Lord. And I entreat thee also, my sincere companion, help those women who have laboured with me in the gospel, with Clement and the rest of my fellow labourers, whose names are in the book of life.” (Phil. 3:17-21; 4:1-3)
Followers of me. Imitatores mei estote: “be ye imitators of me.” Two days ago the Church set before us the whole company of heaven, and this is what she wants us to do with them. St. Paul does not say “admire me.” He says “copy me,” and “observe them who walk so as you have our model,” our forma. The saints are not decorations of the Church’s year. They are the shape the Christian life takes when it is actually lived.
Enemies of the cross. Paul weeps as he writes. St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage (Homiliæ in Epistolam ad Philippenses 13), notices whom the Apostle is weeping over. They are not pagans or persecutors. They are people who bear the name of Christ and live for comfort. They do not deny the Cross in words, Chrysostom says in substance. They deny it with their lives, because a man who lives for pleasure cannot love the Cross. Their god is their belly, and the service of that god never ends. Their glory is in what ought to shame them. They “mind earthly things”: all their attention, all their planning, all their worry is spent on what will be left behind at death.
Our citizenship is in heaven. Against them Paul sets one sentence: Nostra autem conversatio in cælis est. The Greek word he uses, politeuma, means citizenship, a commonwealth, the city to which one belongs. The Philippians understood this better than we might. Their city was a Roman colony (Acts 16:12). Its citizens lived in Macedonia, far from Italy, but they were enrolled as citizens of Rome, governed by Roman law and proud of it (Acts 16:21, 37). Paul tells them they hold a better citizenship than that one. Their true city is above, and they are its colony on earth.
The early Church took this sentence to heart. The second-century Letter to Diognetus (chapter 5) describes Christians this way: they live in their own countries, but as sojourners. They share everything with their neighbours, yet every foreign land is home to them and every homeland is a foreign land. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. St. Augustine built his greatest work on the same idea. Two loves, he says, have made two cities: love of self, reaching even to contempt of God, made the earthly city. Love of God, reaching even to contempt of self, made the heavenly one (De civitate Dei XIV.28). Each of us is enrolled in one of them by what we love.
The body of our lowness. Then Paul tells the Philippians what their King will do when He comes from that city: He “will reform the body of our lowness, made like to the body of his glory.” The Vulgate reads reformabit corpus humilitatis nostræ, configuratum corpori claritatis suæ.
Tertullian pressed hard on the verb (De resurrectione carnis 47 and following). He argues, in substance, that one does not reform a thing one has thrown away. The body that rises is not a new body issued in place of the old. It is this body, the body of our lowness, the one that is buried, transformed. St. Thomas, treating the qualities of the risen body (Summa Theologiæ, Supplement, qq. 82-85), names four: impassibility, subtlety, agility and claritas, glory or brightness. Paul’s word claritas is the very one Thomas uses. The Apostles saw that brightness once on Thabor, when “his face did shine as the sun” (Matt. 17:2). That is the likeness to which our bodies will be conformed.
This is why the Church, in this week of All Souls, treats the bodies of her dead with such reverence. She blesses their graves and incenses their coffins. She buries them in consecrated ground. These are not sentimental customs. They are acts of faith in this verse. The body in the grave is waiting to be reformed.
Whose names are in the book of life. The passage ends on a quarrel and a list of names. Two women of Philippi, Euodia and Syntyche, had worked beside Paul in the Gospel and had then fallen out with each other. He does not take sides. He begs each of them by name to be “of one mind in the Lord,” and asks a trusted companion to help them make peace. Even people who labour together for the Gospel can quarrel, and the Apostle treats their quarrel as worth a line of Holy Scripture.
Among his fellow labourers he names Clement. Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History (III.4), records the ancient belief that this was the same Clement who later became the third successor of St. Peter as Bishop of Rome. Origen held the same view. The identification cannot be proved, but it is old and venerable. If it is right, the man Paul mentions in passing is the Pope whose letter to the Corinthians we still possess and whose name the priest says every day in the Canon of the Mass.
All of them, Paul says, have names written “in the book of life.” The Church thinks of that book especially this week. She has two great November commemorations, and both are about names written there. The saints of the first of November have entered into what is written. The holy souls of the second are also written in the book of life. Purgatory is not a place of uncertainty about salvation. Those who are there are saved. They are being made ready, and they cannot help themselves. The Council of Trent teaches (Session XXV, Decretum de Purgatorio) that the souls detained there are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, and most of all by the acceptable Sacrifice of the altar. When we pray for them, we are helping people whose names Christ has already written down.
II. Non est enim mortua puella, sed dormit: the Gospel
“At that time, as Jesus was speaking these things unto the multitudes, behold a certain ruler came up, and adored him, saying: Lord, my daughter is even now dead; but come, lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live. And Jesus rising up followed him, with his disciples. And behold a woman who was troubled with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment. For she said within herself: If I shall touch only his garment, I shall be healed. But Jesus turning and seeing her, said: Be of good heart, daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour. And when Jesus was come into the house of the ruler, and saw the minstrels and the multitude making a rout, he said: Give place, for the girl is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn. And when the multitude was put forth, he went in, and took her by the hand. And the maid arose. And the fame hereof went abroad into all that country.” (Matt. 9:18-26)
St. Matthew tells two miracles in one story. A father’s petition for his dead daughter is interrupted on the road by a woman who has been dying slowly for twelve years. The Lord heals the woman and then goes on to raise the child. St. Jerome, in the commentary the Church reads at Matins for this Sunday (Commentarii in Matthæum I, on 9:18-26), sees the whole history of salvation in that order. The ruler’s daughter stands for the Synagogue, to whom the Lord was first sent. The woman stands for the Church of the Gentiles, who reached Him while He was on His way to another and was healed first. St. Ambrose reads the scene the same way in his commentary on St. Luke (Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam VI). The twelve years are no accident: according to St. Mark and St. Luke the girl was twelve years old (Mark 5:42; Luke 8:42). The woman began to suffer in the year the child was born.
But there is a reading of this Gospel for November too, and it begins with what the woman was losing.
A life draining away. The Law says that “the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Lev. 17:11). For twelve years this woman’s life had been flowing out of her and nothing could stop it. St. Mark adds that she had spent everything she had on physicians and had only grown worse (Mark 5:26). Under the Law her condition also made her unclean (Lev. 15:25). Whatever she touched became unclean, and she was cut off from the worship of the Temple. She was dying by inches, and dying alone.
The hem. So she comes from behind, where no one will see, and touches the hem of His garment. The word is fimbria, the fringe or tassel which God had commanded every Israelite to wear “that seeing them, they may remember all the commandments of the Lord” (Num. 15:38-39). By the Law her touch should have made Him unclean. Instead His holiness made her clean. Uncleanness did not pass from her to Him. Healing passed from Him to her.
The crowd was pressing on Him from every side. St. Peter points this out in St. Luke’s account: “Master, the multitudes throng and press thee, and dost thou say, Who touched me?” (Luke 8:45). Many bodies touched Him that day and nothing happened. One woman touched Him and was healed. St. Augustine returns to this scene again and again in his sermons, and his summary of it is brief: the crowd presses, faith touches. It is possible to be very near Christ, to stand in His crowd every Sunday, and never touch Him. It is also possible for a soul at the back, ashamed and unseen, to touch only the fringe of His garment and be made whole.
St. Peter Chrysologus, who preached on this Gospel in several sermons (Sermones 33-36), dwells on the faith of the woman and the humility that brought her to the hem and not the hand. We are given more than she was given. She touched the edge of His clothing. At the altar we receive His Body. The Communion verse of this Mass makes the promise plain: Amen dico vobis, quidquid orantes petitis, credite quia accipietis, et fiet vobis — “Amen I say to you, whatsoever you ask when you pray, believe that you shall receive, and it shall be done unto you” (Mark 11:24). The woman believed before she touched. We are asked to believe before we receive.
Be of good heart, daughter. Confide, filia. He is on His way to raise one man’s daughter, and on the road He calls this woman His own. She had wanted to steal away healed and unnoticed. He would not let her. He made her come forward, not to shame her, but so that she could hear from His lips that her faith had saved her. She came for a cure of the body. She went home restored to the people of God.
Give place. Then the house of the ruler, full of noise. The flute-players had already come, as they did for every death, and the professional mourners were wailing. The Lord says to them: Discedite: non est enim mortua puella, sed dormit. “Give place, for the girl is not dead, but sleepeth.” And they laughed at Him.
St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage (Homiliæ in Matthæum 31), says that the Lord was teaching a lesson about death itself. He puts out the mourners because their grief belonged to people without hope. By calling death sleep He shows that for Him it is no harder to raise the dead than to wake a sleeper. Chrysostom draws the conclusion for his own flock in another homily, preached in a cemetery (De cœmeterio et de cruce 1). The Greek word for that place, koimētērion, means a sleeping-place, a dormitory. That is what Christians called their burial grounds, he says, because those who lie there are not dead but asleep. St. Paul gives the same instruction: “we will not have you ignorant brethren, concerning them that are asleep, that you be not sorrowful, even as others who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:12).
That is not a command to stop grieving. The Lord Himself wept at the tomb of Lazarus. It is a command to grieve as Christians, with hope, and to turn grief into prayer. The world still laughs at the claim that the dead will rise. The Athenians laughed at Paul when he spoke of it (Acts 17:32). The Church keeps calling her cemeteries sleeping-places anyway.
He took her by the hand. The Lord sent out the mockers and went in with only a few witnesses. Tenuit manum eius. Et surrexit puella. He took her by the hand, and the maid arose. St. Luke adds a phrase that is worth holding onto: Et reversus est spiritus eius, “and her spirit returned” (Luke 8:55). Her life had gone out from her, and at His word it came back.
St. Augustine draws a moral lesson from the three dead whom the Lord raised in the Gospels (Sermo 98). The ruler’s daughter was still lying in the house. The widow’s son at Naim had already been carried out to the gate of the city (Luke 7:12). Lazarus had lain four days in the tomb (John 11:39). Augustine sees in them three kinds of spiritual death. The girl in the house is the soul that has consented to sin in the heart, though the sin has not yet gone out into action. The young man carried through the gate is sin that has gone out into deeds. Lazarus, buried and stinking, is sin hardened into habit. The Lord raises all three, but the first He raises quietly, in the house, with few witnesses. A sin that has not yet left the heart can be healed in secret, quickly, if we let Him in.
St. Malachy: the death that was a sleep. St. Bernard wrote the life of his friend Malachy, Archbishop of Armagh, the reformer of the Irish Church (Vita Sancti Malachiæ). Bernard records that Malachy, travelling to Rome, had once said that if he were to die away from Ireland, he would wish to die at Clairvaux, and on the day the Church commemorates all the faithful departed. In 1148, on his way to the Pope, he fell ill at Clairvaux and died there among the monks on the second of November, as he had wished. Bernard tells us how the funeral was kept. The monks began the Mass for him as for any of the faithful departed. But Bernard was so certain of his friend’s holiness that, at the end, he ventured to change the prayer and to pray to Malachy rather than for him.
That is the Gospel of the ruler’s daughter lived out in a Cistercian church. Bernard grieved for Malachy, and grieved deeply. In the sermon he preached at his passing (Sermo in transitu sancti Malachiæ episcopi), he also told his monks not to weep for Malachy as if he were lost. The man they buried was asleep. Bernard was later buried beside him, and they lie together still, waiting to be woken.
III. The Mass as a whole: what went out is brought back
The Thomistic pattern of exitus and reditus, all things going out from God and returning to Him, is the plan on which St. Thomas built the whole Summa (Summa Theologiæ I, q. 2, prologue). In today’s Mass it takes the form of a promise kept to the body.
Everything in the Gospel is going out. The woman’s blood is flowing out of her. The girl’s spirit has gone out of her body. The mourners have already begun the rites by which the dead are carried out of the house. The Introit had promised the opposite: reducam captivitatem vestram, “I will bring back your captivity.” And the Lord brings it back. The woman’s life stops draining away. The girl’s spirit returns. The house of mourning becomes a house of joy.
The Epistle tells us that these were signs. The girl rose to die again. The woman was healed to grow old. But Christ “will reform the body of our lowness” so that it can never die again, “according to the operation whereby also he is able to subdue all things unto himself.” The hand that took the girl’s hand will take ours. “The hour cometh,” He said, “wherein all that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God. And they that have done good things, shall come forth unto the resurrection of life” (John 5:28-29). That is the last reditus, the return of the whole man, body and soul, to the God from whom he came.
There are two touches in the Gospel, and both belong to the Christian life. The woman touched Christ: that is faith reaching out to Him, in prayer and in the sacraments. Christ touched the girl: that is His power reaching out to us when we can do nothing at all. The holy souls are in the second state. They cannot reach the hem. They wait for the hand. Our prayers and our Masses are how the Church asks Him to give it.
IV. The Collect and the Secret
Absolve, quæsumus, Domine, tuorum delicta populorum: ut a peccatorum nexibus, quæ pro nostra fragilitate contraximus, tua benignitate liberemur.
“Absolve, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the offences of Thy people: that by Thy bountiful goodness we may be set free from the bonds of the sins which we have contracted through our frailty.”
The Collect speaks of nexus, bonds or knots. Sin, even forgiven sin, ties us to debts we have not yet paid. That is exactly the condition of the holy souls. They are free of guilt and bound by what remains to be paid. In a week like this one the Church’s prayer for herself becomes a prayer for them as well. We ask to be loosed now, by penance and by God’s kindness, so that we may not need to be loosed later in the fire.
The Secret then asks God to finish what He has started:
Pro nostræ servitutis augmento, tibi, Domine, sacrificium laudis offerimus: ut, quod immeritis contulisti, propitius exsequaris.
“We offer Thee, O Lord, the sacrifice of praise for the increase of our service: that what Thou hast bestowed on us undeserving, Thou mayest graciously bring to completion.”
Last Sunday’s Epistle, read on the ferias of last week, said that “he who hath begun a good work in you, will perfect it” (Phil. 1:6). This Secret turns that confidence into a prayer. The resurrection of the body is the completion of what God began in us at Baptism. And the Postcommunion asks that those who have been given a share in divine things may not be left exposed to merely human dangers: ut, quos divina tribuis participatione gaudere, humanis non sinas subiacere periculis. We have touched more than the hem. We ask not to be lost in the crowd.
V. A word for practice
Examine. Where is my citizenship, really? What do I plan for, worry over and spend my attention on? Do I “mind earthly things”? Is there any area of my life in which the belly, comfort or appetite in any form, has become a god? Is there someone with whom, like Euodia and Syntyche, I have stopped being “of one mind in the Lord”? Is there a sin still lying in the house of my heart, not yet acted on, that I could bring to Christ now, quietly, before it is carried out of the gate?
Do. Visit a cemetery this week and pray there for the dead. The Church has long enriched such visits with indulgences during these first days of November, applicable to the holy souls. Pray the De profundis at a grave, or for the dead of your own family by name. Have a Mass offered for someone who has died, or add their names to your parish’s November list. Their names are written in the book of life, and it is a work of mercy to keep them in ours. If there is a quarrel you can mend, mend it before the month is out.
Pray. The Collect of the day, slowly, for yourself and for the holy souls. Then Psalm 129, the De profundis, with the versicle Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Aspiration. Nostra autem conversatio in cælis est. “Our conversation is in heaven.”
Devote. On this Tuesday ask your Guardian Angel to bring you, when your time comes, into the holy light, and ask St. Michael to do the same for the souls of the faithful departed. Ask St. Malachy, who died on All Souls’ Day and was buried as one who sleeps, to obtain for you a holy death and for the dead a swift release.
If you wish to go deeper: the Theology and Doctrine path takes up the resurrection of the body and the qualities of the glorified body as St. Thomas sets them out, and the Church’s doctrine of Purgatory and the suffrages for the dead as defined at Trent. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the last Sundays of the liturgical year, the repeated chants of this Mass, and the Office and Mass of the Dead. The Lives of the Saints path tells the story of St. Malachy and his friendship with St. Bernard, and of St. Clement of Rome. The Spiritual Practices path offers the November devotions for the holy souls and the practice of preparing for a good death.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims, with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. John Chrysostom, Homiliæ in Epistolam ad Philippenses 13, Homiliæ in Matthæum 31, and De cœmeterio et de cruce 1; the Epistula ad Diognetum 5; St. Augustine, De civitate Dei XIV.28 and Sermo 98; Tertullian, De resurrectione carnis 47; St. Jerome, Commentarii in Matthæum I (on Matt. 9:18-26); St. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam VI; St. Peter Chrysologus, Sermones 33-36; Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica III.4. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ I, q. 2, prologue, and Supplement, qq. 82-85. Hagiography: St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Vita Sancti Malachiæ and Sermo in transitu sancti Malachiæ episcopi; the Roman Martyrology for 3 November. Magisterial text: Council of Trent, Session XXV, Decretum de Purgatorio.
Non est mortua puella, sed dormit.