A reflection for Monday within the Twentieth Week after the Octave of Pentecost — Feria Secunda infra Hebdomadam XX post Octavam Pentecostes, IV classis (12 October)
No saint holds the altar today, so the Church does what she always does on a free weekday: she sets yesterday’s Sunday Mass before us again. That small rubrical habit is itself a lesson for this particular Mass. Sunday is carried into Monday and into the working week. The Epistle commands us to redeem the time, and the liturgy obeys first by refusing to let the Lord’s Day stay on Sunday.
The Introit sets the tone of these last weeks before Advent. It is not a psalm of praise but the confession of Azarias in the fiery furnace: Omnia, quæ fecisti nobis, Domine, in vero iudicio fecisti — “All that Thou hast done to us, O Lord, Thou hast done in true judgment: because we have sinned against Thee, and have not obeyed Thy commandments: but give glory to Thy name, and deal with us according to the multitude of Thy mercy” (cf. Dan. 3:31, 29, 35). At the Offertory the Church sits down by the rivers of Babylon and weeps at the memory of Sion (Ps. 136:1). And in the Divine Office of these October weeks the Matins lessons are drawn from the Books of the Machabees, the chronicle of a faithful people under an occupying power. The season speaks with one voice. We are in exile; the days are evil; and God’s judgments, which are true, are also the occasion of His mercy.
Into that climate the Church places two readings: an Apostle telling a city church how to live wisely in bad times, and a frightened father on the road from Cana to Capharnaum.
I. Redimentes tempus: the Epistle
“See therefore, brethren, how you walk circumspectly: not as unwise, but as wise: redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore become not unwise, but understanding what is the will of God. And be not drunk with wine, wherein is luxury; but be ye filled with the holy Spirit, speaking to yourselves in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual canticles, singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to God and the Father: being subject one to another, in the fear of Christ.” (Eph. 5:15-21)
Walking circumspectly. The Vulgate’s caute renders a Greek word meaning exactly, with precision. St. Paul is not counselling timidity but accuracy: the Christian walks as a man crossing narrow ground, attending to where each foot falls.
Redeeming the time. The verb is a merchant’s word: to buy up, to buy out of the market, to purchase something before it is gone. St. Jerome, in his commentary on this Epistle, takes it in that commercial sense: the wise man buys back the present season, turning to profit the very days that evil men have made bad. St. John Chrysostom, preaching on the passage (Hom. in Eph. 19), presses the same point from the other side. The time, he says in substance, is not ours; we are sojourners in it, and we must spend it as men who know they are only passing through.
And what of the days that are evil? St. Augustine refuses to let his hearers hide behind the phrase. Men complain, he says, that the times are hard and the times are bad; but let us live well, and the times will be good, for we are the times — as we are, so are the times (Sermo 80). The days are not evil by their nature, for God made them. They are evil by the men who fill them, and they can be bought back by men who fill them otherwise.
Not wine, but the Spirit. The contrast recalls the morning of Pentecost, when the crowd in Jerusalem took the Apostles for men “full of new wine” (Acts 2:13). There is an intoxication proper to Christians, and it is the opposite of drunkenness. The Church sings of it this very Monday at Lauds, in St. Ambrose’s hymn Splendor paternæ gloriæ, asking that we may drink with joy the sober inebriation of the Spirit (sobriam ebrietatem Spiritus). Wine dissolves a man’s self-command; the Spirit perfects it. Wine loosens the tongue to foolish songs; the Spirit loosens it to psalms.
Chrysostom, in that same nineteenth homily, turns this into a household programme. He urges fathers to teach their children the psalms, to fill the house with sacred song rather than with the songs of the theatre, and to understand that the man who sings with attention draws the Spirit to himself. The psalms are not the property of monks and clerics; they are the native speech of every Christian home.
Giving thanks always, for all things. Here the Epistle meets the Introit. Azarias in the furnace confesses that all God has done, He has done in true judgment, and he gives thanks there, in the fire. Chrysostom insists that the Apostle means precisely this: thanksgiving not only for benefits but for afflictions, because the God who sends both is good, and the soul that thanks Him in trouble has already escaped the worst of it. St. Thomas treats gratitude as a part of justice (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 106): it is owed, and owed most of all to God, from whom every good proceeds and by whom every evil is permitted for a good end.
Subject one to another. The last verse is a hinge. It leads directly into St. Paul’s teaching on husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants, which follows in the next verses. The Spirit-filled life of thanksgiving is not lived in the abstract. It is lived in a household.
II. Vade, filius tuus vivit: the Gospel
“There was a certain ruler, whose son was sick at Capharnaum. He having heard that Jesus was come from Judea into Galilee, went to him, and prayed him to come down, and heal his son; for he was at the point of death. Jesus therefore said to him: Unless you see signs and wonders, you believe not. The ruler saith to him: Lord, come down before that my son die. Jesus saith to him: Go thy way; thy son liveth. The man believed the word which Jesus said to him, and went his way. And as he was going down, his servants met him; and they brought word, saying, that his son lived. He asked therefore of them the hour wherein he grew better. And they said to him: Yesterday, at the seventh hour, the fever left him. The father therefore knew, that it was at the same hour that Jesus said to him, Thy son liveth; and himself believed, and his whole house.” (John 4:46-53)
The regulus is a royal officer, very likely of the court of Herod Antipas: a man of standing, accustomed to summoning and being obeyed. He has come up from the lakeside at Capharnaum into the hills to Cana, and he asks the Lord to come down.
St. Gregory the Great, whose homily on this Gospel the Church reads at Matins (Hom. in Evang. 28), diagnoses the father’s faith with surgical precision. It was real, for he came; but it was defective, and in two ways. He asked the Lord to come in body, as though Christ could not heal unless He were present; and he asked Him to come before the boy died, as though Christ could not raise the dead. He believed in a physician. He did not yet believe in God.
Gregory then draws the contrast that gives the homily its sting. When the centurion asked for the healing of his servant, the Lord offered at once to go to his house (Matt. 8:7). When the nobleman asked for the healing of his son, the Lord declined to go. Why? To strike at our pride, says Gregory, which honours in men not the nature by which they are made in God’s image but their riches and their rank. The Lord would walk to a slave’s bedside and would not walk to a courtier’s. We, who would hurry to the great man’s house and make excuses to the poor one, are judged by that refusal.
The rebuke — “Unless you see signs and wonders, you believe not” — is addressed, St. Augustine observes (Tract. in Ioannem 16), to a whole people and not to the ruler alone. Only days before, in the same chapter, the Samaritans of Sichar had believed in Christ on the strength of His word alone, without a single miracle (John 4:39-42). The Galileans, His own countrymen, wanted wonders. The despised Samaritan believed on hearing; the respectable Jew demanded to see.
And yet the Lord heals him. He does not withhold the gift because the faith is weak; He gives the gift in a form that will strengthen the faith. He does not come down. He speaks a word, and sends the father down the road with nothing in his hands but that word. Credidit homo sermoni. The man believed the word and went.
Notice what follows. On the road he meets his servants, and he asks them the hour. Both Augustine and Chrysostom (Hom. in Ioannem 35) seize on this. If he already believed fully, why ask? Because his faith was still being formed. He believed enough to walk; he did not yet believe enough not to check. Then, when he learns that the fever broke at the very moment the word was spoken, the Evangelist says a second time that he believed, and now his whole house with him. Faith, as St. Thomas teaches, can be greater or lesser in the same man as his assent becomes firmer and his devotion readier (II-II, q. 5). The ruler’s faith grew in three steps: from seeking a sign, to trusting a word, to recognizing the Word Himself.
The seventh hour. The detail is historical, about one in the afternoon, and it explains why the father could reach home only the next day. But the medieval commentators gathered in St. Thomas’s Catena Aurea also read it spiritually: seven is the number of the Holy Spirit’s gifts, and the fever of the soul departs by the sevenfold grace of the Spirit. St. Ambrose, commenting on another healing of fever, interprets the fever itself as the heat of disordered desire, the restless burning of the passions (Expositio in Lucam, Book IV). The allegory is not the literal sense, and must not be pressed as though it were. But it is not arbitrary either, and it sends us straight back to the Epistle: be filled with the holy Spirit.
III. The Mass as a whole: going out and coming back
St. Thomas teaches that all things go forth from God and return to Him, and the shape of today’s Mass follows that movement.
Everything begins in God’s sovereign action: Omnia quæ fecisti — all that Thou hast done. Even affliction, exile, the evil days and the sick child come forth within His providence and His “true judgment.” The return is made by the path the Epistle describes: walking wisely, buying back the time, being filled with the Spirit, giving thanks for all things, and living in mutual subjection. The Gospel then shows us a single soul walking that path.
The thread that binds the two readings is time. The ruler’s prayer is a demand about time: come down before my son dies. He wants to set the hour. Christ refuses to be scheduled, and instead gives him something to do in the present: go. The hour is revealed only afterward, on the road, to the man who has already obeyed. That is what it means to redeem the time. We do not buy back the days by controlling them. We buy them back by spending the present moment in obedience to a word we cannot yet verify, and we discover later that the hour of grace and the hour of our obedience were the same hour.
And the thread that binds the readings at the end is the household. The Epistle ends by turning toward the Christian home; the Gospel ends with a whole house believing. The father’s faith did not stay private. It became the faith of his servants, his wife, and the son who had been given back to him. Chrysostom’s vision of a home filled with psalms is not a pious extra. It is how faith that begins in one man becomes the atmosphere of a family.
IV. The Collect
Largire, quæsumus, Domine, fidelibus tuis indulgentiam placatus et pacem: ut pariter ab omnibus mundentur offensis, et secura tibi mente deserviant.
“Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord, being appeased, pardon and peace to Thy faithful: that they may be cleansed from all their offences, and serve Thee with a quiet mind.”
The Collect asks for two things, indulgentia and pax, and names their fruit: a mens secura, a mind free from anxiety. This is the gift the ruler lacked when he arrived at Cana and received on the road home. He came full of fear, bargaining with the clock; he left with nothing but a word, and found that the word was enough. Pardon removes the guilt that makes us afraid of God. Peace removes the anxiety that makes us try to manage Him. What remains is service offered with a settled heart.
V. A word for practice
Examine. Where am I asking God to “come down before” — dictating not only what He must do but when? And where am I using the evil of the times as an excuse, forgetting Augustine’s rebuke that we are the times?
Do. Take Chrysostom at his word. Tonight, pray one psalm aloud in your home with whoever lives there: Compline’s Psalm 90, Qui habitat, is a natural choice. And give thanks to God, deliberately and by name, for one thing in your present circumstances that you would not have chosen.
Pray. The Collect of the day, slowly, attending to the words secura mente.
Aspiration. Domine, adauge nobis fidem. “Lord, increase our faith” (Luke 17:5).
Devote. October is the month of the Holy Rosary. Pray the Glorious Mysteries, lingering on the third, the Descent of the Holy Ghost, and ask for the sober inebriation of the Spirit that the Apostles received in the Cenacle.
If you wish to go deeper: the Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up the domestic praying of the psalms, and how Compline and the Little Office can become a family’s evening prayer. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the act of faith and its growth, and gratitude as a part of justice, following St. Thomas. The Sacred Liturgy path examines the Sundays after Pentecost as a season of exile and expectation, and why the Church repeats the Sunday Mass on free weekdays.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 28; St. Augustine, Tractatus in Ioannem 16 and Sermo 80; St. John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Epistolam ad Ephesios 19 and Homiliae in Ioannem 35; St. Jerome, Commentarius in Epistolam ad Ephesios; St. Ambrose, the hymn Splendor paternæ gloriæ and Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, Book IV; and St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, qq. 5 and 106, and the Catena Aurea on John 4.
Fac nos, quæsumus, Domine, tuis semper oboedire mandatis.