A reflection for Thursday within the Sixteenth Week after Pentecost — Feria, IV classis, with the Commemoration of the Impression of the Stigmata of S. Francisci (17 September)
Today the Church gives us no proper Mass. It is a fourth-class feria, and the Missal simply repeats the Mass of last Sunday — Miserere mihi, Domine, quoniam ad te clamavi tota die: quia tu, Domine, suavis ac mitis es — with a commemoration of the Stigmata of St. Francis added at the Collect, Secret and Postcommunion. There is a lesson in the arrangement before a word of the readings is heard. The Church does not assume we understood the Sunday. She sets the same Epistle and the same Gospel before us on Thursday, on the supposition that a man who heard the parable of the wedding-feast four days ago has already found his way back to the higher seat.
And the two readings, taken together, are about measurement: one about a love whose dimensions cannot be taken, and one about men busy taking their own.
I. He bows his knees
St. Paul writes the Epistle (Eph. 3:13-21) from a Roman prison, and his first concern is not himself. 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.” He is afraid that his chains will discourage them. St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage, seizes the reversal: the Ephesians should not pity Paul but glory in him, for the sufferings of the apostle are the proof of how greatly God esteemed the Gentiles — that He would spend such a man on them.
Then the posture changes. Flecto genua mea ad Patrem Domini nostri Iesu Christi, ex quo omnis paternitas in caelis et in terra nominatur. He bends his knees to the Father, “of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named.” Chrysostom draws out what is hidden in that clause: fatherhood is not a human institution which we then extend to God by metaphor. It runs the other way. God is the Father from whom every family, every lineage, every paternity in heaven among the angelic orders and on earth among men takes its very name. What we call fatherhood is a derivation, a participation, a borrowing.
And what does he ask? Four things, which descend inward and then open outward:
“…that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened by his Spirit with might unto the inward man, that Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts; that being rooted and founded in charity, you may be able to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth: to know also the charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge, that you may be filled unto all the fulness of God.”
Note the two images St. Paul sets side by side — in caritate radicati et fundati, rooted and founded. One is taken from the field and one from the building site, and both of them go downward and both of them are invisible. A root is not admired; a foundation is not seen. Whatever is going to stand upright and bear fruit above ground has first been driven down. St. Augustine says it in a sentence we might carry about with us all day: if you ask what is first in the way to God, he answers humility; what is second, humility; what is third, humility — and he adds that as often as you ask, he will say the same (Ep. 118 to Dioscorus). The Apostle has therefore already prepared us for the Gospel before we reach it.
II. The breadth and length and height and depth
Quae sit latitudo et longitudo et sublimitas et profundum. St. Paul names four dimensions and does not say of what. The Fathers were not content to leave the noun empty, and the answer they gave has never been improved upon.
St. Augustine reads the four dimensions as the shape of the Cross itself (De doctrina christiana II; Ep. 140). The breadth is the transverse beam on which the hands are stretched — and the hands signify works; the length is the upright running down to the ground, on which the whole body is held erect — and that is perseverance; the height is the part rising above the crossbeam, where the head is — and that is the expectation of the reward above; the depth is the portion sunk into the earth and not seen at all — and that is the hidden and unsearchable grace of God, the reason why this man is called and not that one.
So the measure of the love of Christ is a measure taken from a gibbet. The dimensions of charity are the dimensions of the wood.
And then the Apostle says something that would be nonsense in any other order of knowledge: scire etiam supereminentem scientiae caritatem Christi — to know the charity of Christ which surpasseth knowledge. St. Gregory the Great gives the key: amor ipse notitia est, love itself is a kind of knowing (Hom. in Evang. 27). We do not first comprehend this charity and then love it; we love, and in loving we come to know what no analysis could have reached. Hence cum omnibus sanctis — with all the saints. It is not knowledge gained alone in a study. It is comprehended in company, in the Church, by those who are doing it.
The Epistle then closes with the doxology that ought to silence every calculation we make about our own standing: Ei autem, qui potens est omnia facere superabundanter quam petimus aut intelligimus — to Him who is able to do all things more abundantly than we desire or understand. Hold that sentence in mind and walk into the Gospel, where a room full of grown men is doing sums about who should sit where.
III. They watched Him
The Gospel (Luke 14:1-11) opens with a sentence that tells us the temper of the house: et ipsi observabant eum — “and they watched him.” He has gone in on the sabbath to eat bread in the house of a certain prince of the Pharisees, and the hospitality is surveillance.
Et ecce homo quidam hydropicus erat ante illum. A man with the dropsy was there before Him. St. Cyril of Alexandria, commenting on St. Luke, suspects contrivance — the sick man set in the path like bait, to see whether the Lord would heal on the sabbath and so give them their charge. Whether by design or not, the Lord takes the question out of their mouths and asks it Himself: Si licet sabbato curare? And St. Luke records the most damning detail in the passage: At illi tacuerunt. They held their peace. They would not say yes, because they had come to trap Him; they would not say no, because they knew what the answer was. Silence is the refuge of a man who has already decided against the truth and does not wish to be caught saying so.
He heals the man, dismisses him, and then turns their own practice against them: which of you shall have an ass or an ox fall into a pit and will not immediately draw him out on the sabbath day? St. Ambrose, expounding this Gospel, sees the whole absurdity — the sabbath was given for the works of God, and they will loose a beast on it when their purse requires it but will not loose a man when mercy requires it. Their sabbath observance is not reverence; it is an accounting. Et non poterant ad haec respondere illi. Again, silence.
The Fathers were struck by the disease itself, and the moral reading is very old: dropsy is the condition in which a man swells with the very water that will not slake him, and drinks, and thirsts the more. It is the exact portrait of covetousness and of ambition. The sick man swollen with fluid is set in the midst of guests swollen with self-esteem, and only one of the two afflictions is going to be cured that afternoon, because only one of the two was confessed.
IV. The lowest place
Seeing them choose the first seats, the Lord tells the parable — go not up to the highest place, lest one more honourable than thou be invited and the host say Give this man place, and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room; but sit down in the lowest place, that he may say, Amice, ascende superius — “Friend, go up higher.” Then shalt thou have glory before them that sit at table with thee.
It would be a shallow reading to take this as mere table manners, or worse, as a technique: a strategy of ostentatious self-effacement calculated to be noticed. That is pride wearing the other coat, and St. Thomas warns against it — humility is not the pretence of lowness but the truth of it. Humility, he teaches, is the virtue by which a man restrains the movement of his appetite toward what is above his own measure, considering rightly what he is; and its chief work is to remove the obstacle that pride sets in the way of grace (cf. S.T. II-II, q. 161). St. Bernard defines it more sharply still: humilitas est virtus qua homo verissima sui cognitione sibi ipse vilescit — the virtue by which a man, from the truest knowledge of himself, becomes of small account in his own eyes (De gradibus humilitatis). Truest knowledge. Not a lower opinion than the facts warrant; the facts themselves.
And the Lord seals it with the sentence that the whole monastic West took as its charter: quia omnis qui se exaltat, humiliabitur: et qui se humiliat, exaltabitur. St. Benedict opens the seventh chapter of his Rule, on humility, by quoting precisely this verse of St. Luke, and builds his twelve degrees upon it. He is not interested in seating arrangements either. He is interested in a man’s whole posture before God.
Set the two readings side by side and the point stands out. The Pharisees are measuring — this seat against that seat, this guest against that guest, the width of a man’s honour to within an inch. St. Paul is on his knees in a prison praying that we might be given strength to comprehend a breadth and length and height and depth that cannot be measured at all. The one activity crowds out the other. A man fully occupied with where he sits will never find out how wide the love of Christ is, because he has no attention left over, and because the only place from which those dimensions can be seen is the low one.
V. The Commemoration: the marks in the flesh
Today’s commemoration gives us the man who took the Gospel’s counsel to its extreme and received the Epistle’s answer in his body.
In September of 1224, two years before his death, St. Francis was at prayer on Mount La Verna with a few companions, about the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. St. Bonaventure, in the Legenda Maior, relates that he saw a Seraph with six wings, burning, descending from heaven, and bearing between the wings the figure of a man crucified; and that when the vision passed it left a glow in his heart and, in his flesh, the marks of the nails in the hands and the feet and the wound in the side. Brother Elias announced the miracle to the whole Order in the letter he wrote the day after Francis died.
The Franciscans received permission to keep a feast of it from Benedict XI in 1304; the seventeenth of September was chosen because the fourteenth was already the Exaltation of the Cross, the fifteenth the octave of Our Lady’s Nativity, and the sixteenth the feast of Ss. Cornelius and Cyprian. Paul V placed it on the general calendar in 1615, Clement IX made it obligatory, and Clement XIV — the last Franciscan pope — raised it to a double. Under the rubrics of 1960 it has come down to a commemoration, which is where we find it today.
The Collect is one of the most beautiful in the Missal: Domine Iesu Christe, qui, frigescente mundo, ad inflammandum corda nostra tui amoris igne, in carne beatissimi Francisci passionis tuae sacra Stigmata renovasti — “O Lord Jesus Christ, who, when the world was growing cold, didst renew in the flesh of most blessed Francis the sacred marks of Thy Passion, that our hearts might be set on fire with the flame of Thy love.”
Frigescente mundo. When the world was growing cold. And the remedy God chose was not an argument but a man, and the argument He wrote on the man was the four dimensions of the Cross, written in his hands and his feet. Francis had called his brothers minores, the lesser ones; he had spent his life taking the lowest place with a literalism that embarrassed his own century. And in the end it was said to him, in a manner said to no one before him: Amice, ascende superius.
VI. A word for practice
First, examine where you take your seat. Not the abstract question — everyone will confess to pride in general and change nothing — but the particular table. There is one room, one email thread, one family gathering, one parish committee, in which your position matters to you more than you would like to admit. Name it today. That is the seat you are being asked to move down from.
Second, loose the ox from the pit. Somewhere near you is a work of mercy that would cost you the day’s ordered comfort — an inconvenient visit, a phone call you have been deferring, a person whose need arrives at the wrong hour. The Pharisees’ fault was not that they kept the sabbath but that they kept their accounts. Do the thing that does not balance.
Third, pray the Epistle for somebody else. St. Paul bends his knees not for himself but for the Ephesians. Kneel tonight and say Ephesians 3:14-19 aloud for one person by name — that Christ may dwell by faith in his heart, that he may be rooted and founded in charity, that he may comprehend with all the saints the breadth and length and height and depth. It is a better prayer than most of the ones we compose, and it was given to us to use.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the Sunday, said slowly through the week — Tua nos, quaesumus, Domine, gratia semper et praeveniat et sequatur: ac bonis operibus iugiter praestet esse intentos. “May Thy grace, O Lord, we beseech Thee, always go before us and follow after us, and make us continually intent upon good works.” Grace before, grace behind; nothing of our own in front.
Suggested devotion: the Stations of the Cross, or the Sorrowful Mysteries, made today with St. Augustine’s four dimensions in mind — the breadth of the hands, the length of the body, the height of the head, the depth sunk in the earth and unseen. And for the commemoration, the Anima Christi, or the simple ejaculation of the Seraphic Father: Deus meus et omnia.
If you wish to go deeper, this feria opens onto two of our paths. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up humility in the Thomistic order — why it is the foundation and not the summit, how it stands beneath charity, and how it differs from pusillanimity, which is a vice. The Lives of the Saints path treats St. Francis at length, and the theology of the stigmata: what the Church does and does not hold about such marks, and why she has given a liturgical feast to only one instance of them.
Sancte Francisce, ora pro nobis.