A reflection for Feria Quarta infra Hebdomadam XV post Octavam Pentecostes, I. Septembris — IV. classis, with commemoration of S. Gorgonius, Martyr (9 September)
Bonum autem facientes, non deficiamus: tempore enim suo metemus non deficientes. “And in doing good, let us not fail. For in due time we shall reap, not failing.” — Galatians 6:9
I. A Wednesday in harvest-time
The Mass of this Wednesday is, once more, the Mass of last Sunday. The Church sets before us for the third time in a week the same Epistle and the same Gospel, and a reader who followed Monday’s reflection will already have walked with the two processions to the gate of Naim. We shall not walk that road again in the same way. A text heard three times must be heard three ways, or it is not being heard at all; and the Missal itself gives us the new key, because today the ferial Mass carries a commemoration. At the Collect, the Secret, and the Postcommunion, after the prayers of the Sunday, the priest adds the prayers of St. Gorgonius, Martyr. A martyr has been placed, quietly, in the margin of the Mass of the widow’s son.
It is also the second week of September, when the Breviary reads Job at Matins and the fields outside any northern town are being cut. St. Paul’s Epistle this week ends with an image drawn straight from that season: sowing, and reaping, and the patience that lies between. Monday’s Mass showed us the Lord bending down. Wednesday’s Mass, read under the sign of a martyr, asks what we are to do in the long interval before He does.
II. Quae seminaverit homo, haec et metet
The Epistle (Gal. 5:25-26; 6:1-10) begins in the Spirit and ends in the field. “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit” — si vivimus spiritu, spiritu et ambulemus — and then, after the great sentences on restoring a fallen brother in meekness and bearing one another’s burdens, the Apostle turns almost abruptly to agriculture:
“Be not deceived, God is not mocked. For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap. For he that soweth in his flesh, of the flesh also shall reap corruption. But he that soweth in the spirit, of the spirit shall reap life everlasting. And in doing good, let us not fail. For in due time we shall reap, not failing. Therefore, whilst we have time, let us work good to all men, but especially to those who are of the household of the faith.”
Deus non irridetur. St. Jerome, commenting on this verse, hears in it a warning against a particular kind of self-deception: the man who supposes that because the harvest is delayed there will be no harvest, and who therefore sows what he pleases. Jerome’s point is that the delay is not indulgence but ordinary agriculture. No farmer mocks the seed-time by expecting the sheaves the same afternoon; and no one mocks God by sowing in the flesh and expecting the Spirit’s harvest. The connection between seed and crop is as fixed as nature, because the same God made both.
St. John Chrysostom, in his homily on this chapter, presses the image toward hope rather than fear. The Apostle, he observes, does not say we shall be rewarded but we shall reap, and reaping is a word of abundance: what is gathered is always more than what was sown. And the qualification tempore suo — in its own time, in due season — is not a threat of postponement but a promise of certainty. The harvest has a fixed date, and the only way to miss it is to leave the field. Hence non deficiamus — let us not grow faint, let us not give out. Chrysostom’s word for the failure Paul forbids is not sin but exhaustion: the quiet abandonment of good works by a soul that has decided the season is too long.
On the last verse — maxime autem ad domesticos fidei, “but especially to those who are of the household of the faith” — St. Augustine, in his exposition of the Epistle, is careful to keep both halves. Charity is owed to all men, and Paul says so; but there is an order in charity, and those joined to us in the one faith and the one Body have a prior claim, as the members of a household have on one another. This is not a narrowing of love but its ordering, and Augustine notes that it flows directly from the earlier command to bear one another’s burdens: one cannot carry a burden for the whole world, but one can carry it for the brother beside one in the pew.
III. Deus visitavit plebem suam
The Gospel (Luke 7:11-16) has already been read twice this week, and its centre is not in doubt. But look this time at its edges — at the crowd, and at what the crowd says.
“And there came a fear on them all: and they glorified God, saying: A great prophet is risen up among us: and, God hath visited his people.” Deus visitavit plebem suam.
St. Bede, in his commentary on Luke, notices the two acclamations and their order. The crowd says first a great prophet, which is true, and then God hath visited His people, which is truer than they know. They are reasoning upward from the miracle: one who raises the dead by a word must be at least a prophet, as Elias was at Sarephta and Eliseus at Sunam. Bede allows them their conclusion and then corrects its measure. Elias stretched himself three times upon the widow’s son and prayed; Eliseus lay upon the child mouth to mouth and eye to eye. This Prophet touches the bier and speaks. The difference is the difference between one who asks for life and One who has it in Himself to give.
St. Cyril of Alexandria, preaching on this passage, presses the touch. Why did the Lord touch the bier, when a word would have served? Because, says Cyril, He willed to show that His body is the instrument of the life-giving Word — that the flesh assumed from the Virgin is not merely the vehicle of the divine power but is itself charged with it, so that contact with that flesh is contact with life. Cyril is thinking, as he always is, of the Eucharist: the same body that halted the bearers at Naim is the body we receive at the rail.
St. Ambrose, who read this Gospel as a figure of the Church weeping for her dead children, draws attention to a small detail that is easy to pass over: hi autem qui portabant, steterunt — “they that carried it stood still.” The bearers stop. Ambrose sees in them the whole apparatus of death — the customs, the fears, the momentum of a funeral that seems as unstoppable as any procession in the world — and observes that all of it halts at the touch of Christ. Death has bearers; it does not have authority.
And then the verb that governs the crowd’s cry. Visitavit. God has visited. The Fathers read this word with its full Old Testament weight: the visitatio Dei is His coming to His people in mercy or in judgment, His remembering of them in their affliction. Zachary sang it at the birth of the Baptist — visitavit et fecit redemptionem plebis suae (Luke 1:68). The crowd at Naim, without knowing it, is completing the Benedictus. The Visitation promised at the Jordan has come to a town in Galilee and stopped a funeral.
IV. The martyr in the margin
Now set the martyr beside the widow.
Of St. Gorgonius the Church knows less than she once thought she knew. The Roman tradition venerates a martyr of that name buried on the Via Labicana, at the cemetery inter duas lauros, whose tomb was honoured with an inscription by Pope St. Damasus in the fourth century; this is the Gorgonius of the Roman calendar and of today’s commemoration. Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History, tells of another — or perhaps the same — Gorgonius, a chamberlain of the imperial household at Nicomedia, put to death with his companion Dorotheus in the persecution of Diocletian for refusing to sacrifice. The two traditions were joined early and are not easily separated now. In the eighth century the relics of the Roman Gorgonius were carried across the Alps by St. Chrodegang of Metz to the abbey of Gorze in Lorraine, where his cult flourished for centuries.
What the Church asserts of him is the one thing the Collect asks for: that he is a saint, that he intercedes, and that his day is a cause of joy. And what his presence in today’s Mass does is to give a face to St. Paul’s non deficiamus.
A martyr is the man who did not fail in the doing of good. He is the man who was told, in effect, that the harvest would never come — that the field was about to be burned with him in it — and who kept sowing. St. Thomas teaches that martyrdom is the act of the virtue of fortitude, and that it is of all human acts the one that most perfectly demonstrates charity, because it gives up the greatest natural good, life itself, for the sake of the greatest supernatural one (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 124). Chrysostom’s exhaustion is exactly what the martyr refuses. He does not give out.
And here the Gospel closes on him. The martyr’s body, too, is carried out of the gate on a bier, with a crowd about it — Gorgonius’s bearers took him to the Via Labicana, and Chrodegang’s took him to Gorze — and in due season the Lord will come near and touch the bier and say, Tibi dico, surge. The resurrection at Naim is a sign of what the martyr sowed for. Every relic in every altar-stone is a seed in the ground awaiting tempore suo.
V. Synthesis: sowing in time, reaping in eternity
The theological arc of this Mass, read under its commemoration, is the arc of patience. In the Thomistic order, the creature goes out from God and returns to Him; but the return is not instantaneous. It is lived in time, and time is the field. God’s part in the return is visitatio — He comes down, He touches, He raises. The creature’s part is seminatio — he sows in the Spirit, day after day, without seeing the crop.
The Epistle names the creature’s part and the Gospel names God’s. The widow at Naim did nothing; she wept, and He came. That is grace, and it is pure gift. But the same Epistle that promises the harvest also says dum tempus habemus, operemur bonum — “whilst we have time, let us work good.” The gift is not earned by the sowing, but it is received by those found sowing. Job, whom the Church is reading at Matins this week, is the pattern: stripped of everything, he neither curses nor stops, and the Lord in due time restores double. The martyr is the pattern perfected: stripped of life itself, he neither curses nor stops, and the Lord in due time restores it incorruptible.
The Introit of this Mass, Inclina, Domine, aurem tuam — “Incline Thy ear, O Lord, for I am needy and poor” (Ps. 85:1) — is therefore the prayer of the sower as much as of the widow. It is prayed by someone who has put seed in the ground and cannot make it grow.
VI. A word for practice
Wednesday is the middle of the week, and the middle of anything is where people give out. Three things for today:
First, name the field. There is some good work in your life — a duty of state, a charity, a discipline of prayer, a person you are trying to be patient with — that has yielded nothing visible for a long time. Do not ask today whether it is working. Ask whether you are still sowing.
Second, bear a burden for someone in the household of the faith. Paul’s maxime is a permission as well as a command: you are allowed to put your own parish, your own family in Christ, first. Find one need there and meet it, this week.
Third, pray for the grace of non deficere — not to give out. Ask it of St. Gorgonius, who did not, and whose reward the Church has kept in her calendar for sixteen hundred years while nearly everything else about him was forgotten.
VII. The Collects
Of the feria (Sunday XV after Pentecost):
Ecclesiam tuam, Domine, miseratio continuata mundet et muniat: et quia sine te non potest salva consistere; tuo semper munere gubernetur. Per Dominum.
“Let Thy continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend Thy Church: and because without Thee she cannot stand in safety, let her ever be governed by Thy bounty. Through our Lord.”
Commemoration of St. Gorgonius, Martyr:
Sanctus tuus, Domine, Gorgonius sua nos intercessione laetificet: et pia faciat solemnitate gaudere. Per Dominum.
“May Thy saint Gorgonius, O Lord, gladden us by his intercession, and make us to rejoice in his holy festival. Through our Lord.”
Notice that the Sunday Collect asks for a continued mercy — miseratio continuata — and the martyr’s Collect asks for gladness. Between them they contain the whole Mass: the mercy that touches the bier and does not stop touching, and the joy of one who sowed to the end.
VIII. Aspiration
Domine, ne deficiam: fac me seminare in spiritu, et tempore tuo metere. “Lord, let me not give out: make me to sow in the Spirit, and to reap in Thy time.”
Or, more simply, the Introit’s own petition: Inclina, Domine, aurem tuam ad me.
IX. For further study
If you wish to go deeper, this Mass opens onto three of our paths. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up fraternal correction — quis putas the “spiritual” man of Galatians 6:1 is, and what St. Thomas means by correction as an act of charity (II-II, q. 33) — and, separately, martyrdom as the perfection of fortitude (II-II, q. 124). The Church History path follows St. Gorgonius across the Alps to Gorze and asks what the Carolingian translations of Roman martyrs did to the Church north of the Alps. The Lives of the Saints path is quietly accumulating a series on saints of whom almost nothing is known — Gorgonius among them — and what the Church means by keeping their names when she has lost their stories.
Sources consulted for this reflection: the Epistle and Gospel are given in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; the patristic material is drawn from St. Jerome’s and St. Augustine’s commentaries on Galatians, St. John Chrysostom’s homilies on Galatians, St. Ambrose’s and St. Bede’s expositions of St. Luke, and St. Cyril of Alexandria’s homilies on St. Luke, and is given as faithful paraphrase rather than direct quotation; the notice of St. Gorgonius follows the Roman Martyrology, Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, and the Damasan epigrams; the Collects are those of the 1962 Missale Romanum.
Sancte Gorgoni, Martyr Christi, ora pro nobis.