In hac die tua: The Tears of the Lord and the Warning of the Fathers
II classis · Green Commemoratio: S. Annæ, Matris B. Mariæ Virginis (26 Julii)
Epistola: 1 Corinthians 10:6–13 Evangelium: Luke 19:41–47
I. Liturgical Context
The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost stands in the long green season in which the Church, having completed the mysteries of the Lord’s life in the temporal cycle, sets herself to the patient formation of those who live within them. The Sundays after Pentecost are not a liturgical interlude. They are the Church’s sustained instruction on how the redeemed man is to walk between the Ascension and the Judgment — that is, on the whole matter of perseverance.
The propers of this Sunday are unusually severe, and unusually consoling, and they are both at once.
The Introit takes up the fifty-third Psalm: Ecce Deus adiuvat me, et Dominus susceptor est animæ meæ — “Behold, God is my helper, and the Lord is the protector of my soul.” The Mass opens, therefore, not with the soul’s strength but with the confession that its protection lies outside itself. The Gradual, drawn from Psalm 8, raises the eyes higher still: Domine, Dominus noster, quam admirabile est nomen tuum in universa terra — the majesty of the divine Name across the whole earth. And the Communion antiphon, taken from the sixth chapter of St. John, gives the Sunday its resolution: Qui manducat meam carnem et bibit meum sanguinem, in me manet, et ego in eo — “He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me, and I in him.”
Hold that Communion antiphon beside the Epistle and the architecture of the day becomes visible. The Epistle warns that the fathers in the desert ate a spiritual food and drank a spiritual drink and were nonetheless struck down in the wilderness. The Communion promises indwelling to the one who eats the Flesh of Christ. The Church, in a single Mass, sets the warning and the promise side by side and does not soften either. She is teaching that the Sacrament is not a talisman, and that its efficacy in the one who receives it is not indifferent to the life he leads.
Upon this Sunday there falls also the feast of St. Anne, mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary, kept in the Roman rite on the twenty-sixth of July. The Sunday, as a Sunday of the second class, retains the Mass; the feast is observed by commemoration — its Collect, Secret, and Postcommunion added to those of the day. This is not a diminishment. It is the liturgy’s own instruction in proportion: the Lord’s Day yields to no saint, and the saints are content that it should not.
II. The Epistle — 1 Corinthians 10:6–13
The text
Hæc autem in figura facta sunt nostri, ut non simus concupiscentes malorum, sicut et illi concupierunt. “Now these things were done in a figure of us, that we should not covet evil things as they also coveted.” (v. 6)
Itaque qui se existimat stare, videat ne cadat. “Wherefore he that thinketh himself to stand, let him take heed lest he fall.” (v. 12)
Fidelis autem Deus est, qui non patietur vos tentari supra id quod potestis, sed faciet etiam cum tentatione proventum, ut possitis sustinere. “And God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able: but will make also with temptation issue, that you may be able to bear it.” (v. 13)
The argument
The passage is the conclusion of an argument the Apostle has been building since the opening of the chapter. He has reminded the Corinthians that their fathers were all under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized in Moses, all ate the same spiritual food and drank of the spiritual rock, and the rock was Christ — and that with the greater part of them God was not well pleased, for they were laid low in the desert.
The Corinthians, it appears, had drawn from their possession of Baptism and the Eucharist a conclusion of security. Paul demolishes it not by denying the power of the sacraments but by producing the precedent. Israel had the figures of these very sacraments, and Israel fell.
He then enumerates four sins, each with its historical instance:
Idolatry (v. 7), citing Exodus 32:6 — sedit populus manducare et bibere, et surrexerunt ludere, “the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.” The golden calf. Note that the sin is described by its banality: a meal and an amusement.
Fornication (v. 8), the apostasy at Baal-Peor in Numbers 25, where ceciderunt una die viginti tria millia — three and twenty thousand fell in one day. Numbers records twenty-four thousand; St. Thomas, treating the difference in his commentary on this chapter, resolves it by observing that the Apostle specifies a single day, the remainder having perished thereafter, or by the hand of the judges (Super I ad Corinthios, cap. 10, lect. 2). The discrepancy is worth noticing precisely because the Fathers did not conceal it.
Tempting Christ (v. 9), the fiery serpents of Numbers 21. The Apostle’s phrasing is doctrinally weighty: it was Christ whom they tempted in the desert. The Word who would take flesh was already the one leading Israel, already the Rock from which they drank.
Murmuring (v. 10), and they perished ab exterminatore, by the destroyer. Murmuring is set beside idolatry and fornication as a capital offense — a judgment that ought to arrest anyone who considers complaint a minor fault.
Then verse 11: these things happened to them in figura, and were written ad correptionem nostram, in quos fines sæculorum devenerunt — for our correction, upon whom the ends of the world are come. The Old Testament is not merely antecedent to the New; it is addressed to the New. And we, the Apostle says, are those upon whom the ages have converged. There is no further dispensation coming. This is the last hour, and it has no successor.
The Fathers on this passage
St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this chapter to a congregation not unlike the Corinthians, presses the point that the possession of sacred things multiplies rather than reduces one’s liability. Israel’s privileges were real; they became the measure of Israel’s condemnation. He is severe with those who reason from their reception of the mysteries to a presumption of safety, and he insists that the Apostle recites these catastrophes not to terrify the despairing but to unseat the complacent (Homiliæ in epistulam I ad Corinthios, hom. 23; PG 61).
St. Augustine supplies the doctrinal frame within which verse 12 must be read. To think oneself to stand is precisely to have forgotten whence standing comes. Perseverance is not the natural momentum of a soul once converted; it is a gift, continuously given, and the man who reckons it his own possession has already begun to lose it. Augustine’s treatment of presumption and of the gift of final perseverance (De correptione et gratia; De dono perseverantiæ) is the indispensable commentary here, and it is what stands behind the Church’s later definitions against the presumption of assured salvation.
St. Thomas Aquinas gathers the threads. No man can know with the certitude of faith that he is in a state of grace, apart from special revelation (Summa Theologiæ I-II, q. 112, a. 5). Grace is necessary not only to begin but to continue and to persevere (I-II, q. 109). And presumption — the expectation of glory without the means, or of pardon without repentance — is a sin against the Holy Ghost, and a sin against hope itself (II-II, q. 21). Verse 12 is thus not a counsel of anxiety. It is the ordinary condition of the wayfarer, who walks in hope and not in possession.
The consolation
The Epistle does not end in warning. Verse 13 is one of the great consolations of Scripture, and it makes three distinct affirmations.
First, that the temptations which assail us are humana — proportioned to man, not monstrous, not unique to us. The devil has no new weapons.
Second, that God is faithful. The Apostle grounds our security not in our resolution but in the divine fidelity — the same fidelity that governed the covenant with Israel.
Third, that God faciet cum tentatione proventum — will make with the temptation an issue, an outcome, a way through. Not, be it noticed, always a removal of the trial. The Latin proventum carries the sense of a yield, an emergence. The temptation is permitted, and within it a passage is provided.
The Christian therefore stands between two truths that must be held together and never traded against each other: he cannot presume, and he need not despair.
III. The Gospel — Luke 19:41–47
The text
Et ut appropinquavit, videns civitatem, flevit super illam, dicens: Quia si cognovisses et tu, et quidem in hac die tua, quæ ad pacem tibi: nunc autem abscondita sunt ab oculis tuis. “And when he drew near, seeing the city, he wept over it, saying: If thou also hadst known, and that in this thy day, the things that are to thy peace; but now they are hidden from thy eyes.” (v. 41–42)
…eo quod non cognoveris tempus visitationis tuæ. “…because thou hast not known the time of thy visitation.” (v. 44)
Domus mea domus orationis est. Vos autem fecistis illam speluncam latronum. “My house is the house of prayer. But you have made it a den of thieves.” (v. 46)
The tears
The scene is the descent from the Mount of Olives on the day the crowds acclaimed Him. At the summit of His public triumph, with the branches still in the road, the Lord looks upon the city and weeps.
This is one of only three occasions on which the Gospels record the tears of Christ, and it is the only one shed over a city rather than a person. St. Ambrose, in his exposition of this Gospel, dwells upon the reality of those tears as evidence of a true human nature — not a wept appearance, but the genuine sorrow of a man — and reads them further as the grief of the Church over souls that will not be gathered (Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, lib. X; CCSL 14). The Lord does not weep for Himself, who goes willingly to His Passion. He weeps for those who will not have it.
St. Cyril of Alexandria presses the same point against those who would make the Incarnation a matter of semblance: the tears are the tears of the Word made flesh, proper to the humanity He assumed and appropriated to the one Person who wept them (Commentarii in Lucam).
The syntax of verse 42 is itself a wound. Si cognosses et tu — “if thou also hadst known” — the sentence breaks off unfinished, an aposiopesis. The Lord does not complete the thought. What would have followed had Jerusalem known is left unsaid, and the silence is more terrible than any completion.
The unrecognized visitation
Non cognoveris tempus visitationis tuæ. This is the sentence upon which the whole Gospel turns, and it is the hinge that binds the Gospel to the Epistle.
Jerusalem is not condemned for want of a visitation. The visitation came. She is condemned for not knowing it — for the incapacity, self-incurred, to recognize God when He arrived in her streets. The Greek episkopē and the Latin visitatio both carry the double sense of a gracious coming and an inspection. God’s approach is never neutral; it either saves or judges, according to how it is met.
St. Gregory the Great, whose homily on this passage is read in the Church’s own Office for this Sunday, expounds it on two levels. Historically, he traces the prophecy to its fulfillment in the Roman siege of the year 70, when the ramparts encircled the city exactly as the Lord foretold, and not one stone was left upon another. Morally, he turns the whole prophecy inward upon the hearer: every soul is a Jerusalem, granted its own day of visitation, and the tragedy of the sinner is not that grace was withheld but that it arrived and was not recognized. Gregory’s pastoral concern is the delay of conversion — the soul that intends to repent later, and finds that the day of its visitation has passed while it was intending (Homiliæ in Evangelia, hom. 39; CCSL 141).
In hac die tua. In this thy day. The day of visitation is not perpetual. It is a day, and days close.
The cleansing of the Temple
St. Luke joins the lament to the cleansing without a break, and the juxtaposition is the evangelist’s argument. Having wept over the city, the Lord enters the Temple and drives out those who bought and sold.
St. Bede, following the Fathers before him, reads the episode in three registers. Historically, it is the purging of a real traffic from a real sanctuary. Allegorically, it is the cleansing of the Church from those who make the sacred an instrument of gain. Morally — and this is where the Fathers uniformly land — it is the purgation of the individual soul, which is the temple of God, and from which avarice, vanity, and the whole commerce of self-interest must be expelled if prayer is to have its house again (In Lucæ Evangelium expositio; CCSL 120).
The Lord’s charge is precise. He does not say that the Temple has been abandoned. He says it has been converted to another use: domus orationis made spelunca latronum. The sin is not the absence of religion but its subversion into a means of profit. And the thieves in the cave are thieves precisely because they have taken what belongs to God and turned it to their own account.
The Gospel closes with a line of great quietness after the violence: et erat docens quotidie in templo — “and he was teaching daily in the temple.” Having cleansed the house, He occupies it and instructs within it. That is the pattern of grace: the expulsion is never an end in itself, but the clearing of a room in which the Master intends to teach.
IV. Synthesis
Read together under the Thomistic figure of exitus et reditus, the two lessons describe a single movement and its single peril.
The going out. Israel is brought out of Egypt through the sea and fed with bread from heaven. This is the archetype of every Christian’s departure from the world through the waters of Baptism and his sustenance by the Eucharist. The means of the journey are given, freely and abundantly, and they are the very means Christ instituted — for the Rock was Christ, and the manna prefigured the Bread that came down from heaven.
The peril. The Epistle establishes that possession of the means does not guarantee arrival. The generation that ate the manna died in the wilderness. Sacramental participation joined to moral dissolution does not sanctify; it aggravates. Qui se existimat stare, videat ne cadat.
The return, and its condition. The Gospel names the precise mechanism of failure. It is not that God withholds the grace of return. It is that the soul does not know the time of its visitation. Jerusalem had the prophets, the Temple, the covenant, and finally the visible presence of the Messias walking her streets — every possible means — and lacked the one thing that cannot be supplied from outside: recognition. The reditus fails not for want of a road but for want of eyes.
The hinge is recognition. And recognition, in this life, is always tied to a particular day. In hac die tua. Not in the abstract, not in the future, but in the day now given — this Sunday, this Mass, this examination of conscience, this refusal or acceptance of a particular grace.
The consolation is fidelity. Set against this severity stands fidelis autem Deus est. God does not permit a trial beyond our strength, and He furnishes the way through. The soul is therefore never in the position of Jerusalem by necessity, but only by choice — and only by a choice that must be repeated, day upon day, and can at any point be reversed while the day lasts.
The Communion antiphon completes the argument. The same Mass that warns of the fathers struck down after eating the spiritual food promises: qui manducat meam carnem… in me manet, et ego in eo. The Church does not withdraw the Sacrament on account of the danger. She teaches us to approach it as those who tremble, and to receive it as those who hope. The warning and the promise are not in tension. They are the two halves of a right disposition.
And the Temple is cleansed so that it may be taught in. The last word of the Gospel is not the expulsion but the daily teaching. So also the last word of the Christian life is not the struggle against sin but the indwelling of Him who has cleared the room.
V. Devotional Application
On presumption. The Epistle’s warning is aimed with unusual precision at the devout — at those who have the sacraments and are therefore tempted to security. Examine, then, not chiefly the gross sins, but the settled assumption that one is basically in good order. St. Thomas holds presumption to be a sin against hope, which means that it is a corruption of the very virtue by which we reach God. The remedy is not anxiety but a hope that rests wholly on the divine fidelity rather than on any inventory of one’s own progress.
On the day of visitation. Gregory’s moral reading demands a concrete application: the deferral of conversion is itself the sin of Jerusalem. If there is a confession postponed, a reconciliation delayed, a habit intended to be broken next month — that is the matter of this Sunday. In hac die tua. Do not let the Mass pass without naming the one thing that has been put off, and fixing a day for it.
On the temple of the soul. Approach the Sacrament of Penance this week with the Gospel’s own image before you: what traffic has been set up in the house of prayer? Where has something belonging to God been turned to private account — time, talent, authority, even piety itself made an instrument of reputation? Let the examination be specific. The Lord overturned particular tables.
On murmuring. Consider that the Apostle ranks murmuring with idolatry and fornication. A week without complaint — against superiors, against circumstances, against the Providence that arranged them — is a more searching penance than most, and a fitting one for this Sunday.
On St. Anne. The commemorated feast supplies the domestic application. Whatever the silence of Scripture concerning her, the Church honors St. Anne under a single formality: she is the one who raised the Mother of God. That is a vocation exercised entirely within a household, without office, without record, and it produced the Immaculate Virgin. Parents and grandparents may take her patronage as their own with particular confidence; the handing-on of the faith within a family is not a lesser work than the apostolate, and this feast is the Church’s testimony to it. The household, too, is a temple, and it too may become a den of thieves — or a house of prayer.
A practice for the week. Each evening, before the examination of conscience, put to yourself Gregory’s question in a single form: What did God offer me today that I did not recognize until now? Then thank Him for it, and ask for the grace to recognize tomorrow’s the sooner.
VI. The Collects
Oratio Dominicæ IX post Pentecosten
Pateant aures misericordiæ tuæ, Dómine, précibus supplicántium: et, ut peténtibus desideráta concédas; fac eos, quæ tibi sunt plácita, postuláre. Per Dóminum nostrum Iesum Christum, Fílium tuum: qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum. Amen.
Let the ears of Thy mercy, O Lord, be open to the prayers of Thy suppliants: and, that Thou mayest grant them their desires, make them to ask such things as please Thee. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
A Collect exactly fitted to the day. It does not ask that our desires be granted, but that our desires be corrected — which is precisely the grace Jerusalem lacked. To ask for what pleases God is already to have begun to know the time of one’s visitation.
Commemoratio S. Annæ, Matris B. Mariæ Virginis
Deus, qui beátæ Annæ grátiam conférre dignátus es, ut Genetrícis unigéniti Fílii tui mater éffici mererétur: concéde propítius; ut, cuius sollémnia celebrámus, eius apud te patrocíniis adiuvémur. Per eúndem Dóminum nostrum.
O God, who didst vouchsafe to bestow upon blessed Anne such grace that she merited to become the mother of her who brought forth Thine only-begotten Son: mercifully grant that we, who keep her festival, may be helped by her patronage with Thee. Through the same our Lord.
VII. Aspiratio
An original composition for private devotion, not a liturgical text.
Dómine Iesu, qui flevísti super civitátem: da mihi cognóscere tempus visitatiónis meæ, dum adhuc dies mea est. Munda templum cordis mei, et doce in eo quotídie. Ne permíttas me stáre in me ipso, sed in fide tua, qui fidélis es.
O Lord Jesus, who didst weep over the city: grant me to know the time of my visitation, while yet my day endures. Cleanse the temple of my heart, and teach daily therein. Suffer me not to stand in myself, but in Thy faithfulness, who art faithful. Amen.
VIII. For Further Study
Sacred Scripture and the liturgical text
- 1 Corinthians 10 entire, read with Exodus 14–17 and 32, and Numbers 14, 21, and 25 — the Apostle’s typology cannot be grasped without its Old Testament substrate.
- Luke 19:41–47 alongside Matthew 23:37–39 (the lament over Jerusalem) and Luke 21:20–24 (the extended prophecy of the siege).
- John 6 in full, as the doctrinal ground of this Sunday’s Communion antiphon.
- The Office of the day, where St. Gregory’s homily is appointed for Matins.
Patristic and medieval
- St. Gregory the Great, Homiliæ in Evangelia, hom. 39 (CCSL 141) — the governing patristic reading of this Gospel.
- St. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, lib. X (CCSL 14).
- St. Bede, In Lucæ Evangelium expositio (CCSL 120) — for the threefold sense of the Temple cleansing.
- St. John Chrysostom, Homiliæ in epistulam I ad Corinthios, hom. 23 (PG 61).
- St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentarii in Lucam.
- St. Augustine, De correptione et gratia and De dono perseverantiæ — the doctrinal frame for verse 12.
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Super I ad Corinthios, cap. 10; and Summa Theologiæ I-II q. 109 (necessity of grace), I-II q. 112 a. 5 (certitude of grace), II-II q. 21 (presumption), II-II q. 17–18 (hope and its object).
Within this project
- Lives of the Saints — the companion vita of St. Anne, with the necessary distinction between what is historically attested and what belongs to traditio pia.
- Theology and Doctrine — the standing dossier on grace, merit, and final perseverance, which takes up Trent, Session VI, on the impossibility of certitude regarding one’s own election, and its patristic antecedents in Augustine.
- Sacred Liturgy — the study of the Sundays after Pentecost as a course of formation in perseverance, and the relation of the Communion antiphon to the Epistle in the Roman propers.
- Church History — the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and its reception in patristic apologetic, from Eusebius forward.
IX. Source Transparency
This reflection follows the tiering discipline of the project.
Tier 1 — Primary documentary witness. The Scriptural texts, given in the Vulgate with the Douay-Rheims English. The liturgical texts are those of the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost and the commemoration of St. Anne in the Roman rite as codified in 1962; they are reproduced here from the propers of the day and remain subject to final collation against a printed edition of the Missale Romanum before they are treated as settled.
Tier 2 — Strongly attested tradition. The patristic and Scholastic material. Every Father cited is given with his work and, where applicable, the critical series in which the text is edited (CCSL, PG). These citations are rendered as paraphrase with locus, not as direct quotation. The substance of each Father’s argument is given faithfully; the words are mine, and the reader who wishes the Father’s own words should go to the edition named. This is a deliberate discipline against the circulation of unverified quotations, which is a besetting vice of devotional writing.
The homily of St. Gregory the Great on this Gospel enjoys a special standing here, since the Church herself appoints it for the Matins of this Sunday; the moral reading offered above is therefore not one interpretation among many but the liturgy’s own.
Tier 3 — Traditio pia. The names of St. Anne and St. Joachim, and the narrative of the Virgin’s conception and childhood, derive not from Scripture but from the second-century Protoevangelium Jacobi and the tradition that flows from it. This material is retained for its devotional and catechetical weight and is not asserted as established historical fact. Nothing in the above depends upon it: the Church’s honor of St. Anne rests upon the fact that the Mother of God had a mother, and upon the veneration the faithful have paid her in the East from great antiquity and in the West from the later Middle Ages.
Excluded. Post-1969 calendar and lectionary arrangements are outside the scope of this series and are not treated here.
Sancta Anna, mater Matris Dei, ora pro nobis.