A reflection for Friday within the Twenty-Second Week after the Octave of Pentecost — Feria Sexta infra Hebdomadam XXII post Octavam Pentecostes, IV classis (30 October)
The Mass of the twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, set aside last Sunday for the Feast of Christ the King, comes back again on this free weekday. Yesterday was Thursday, and we read it in the light of the Cenacle. Today is Friday. It is the day the Church has always kept in memory of the Passion, the day she asks her children to abstain from flesh meat, and the same readings look different when we stand at Calvary.
In the Temple court the Lord asks a question about a coin: Cuius est imago hæc, et superscriptio? “Whose image and superscription is this?” Within a few days the question is asked again without words. Above His head on the Cross hangs another superscription, written by Caesar’s own governor in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. On a Friday we cannot hear the Gospel of the tribute money without seeing that second inscription.
The Mass still opens from the depths: Si iniquitates observaveris, Domine: Domine, quis sustinebit? “If Thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities, Lord, who shall stand it?” (Ps. 129:3). Friday answers that question. One has stood it: the One who took the iniquities on Himself. The Communion verse is a cry of the same kind: Ego clamavi, quoniam exaudisti me, Deus: inclina aurem tuam, et exaudi verba mea — “I have cried to Thee, for Thou, O God, hast heard me: O incline Thy ear unto me, and hear my words” (Ps. 16:6).
The Roman Martyrology also gives us a witness today. On the thirtieth of October it records the death of St. Marcellus, a centurion martyred at Tangier in the year 298. He has no Mass or commemoration in the 1962 calendar, but his story is a commentary on this Gospel, and we will come to him.
I. Qui cœpit… perficiet: the Epistle
“Being confident of this very thing, that he who hath begun a good work in you, will perfect it unto the day of Christ Jesus. As it is meet for me to think this for you all, for that I have you in my heart; and that in my bands, and in the defence and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers of my joy. For God is my witness, how I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ. And this I pray, that your charity may more and more abound in knowledge, and in all understanding: that you may approve the better things, that you may be sincere and without offence unto the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of justice, through Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.” (Phil. 1:6-11)
Begun and finished. St. Paul is confident that God will finish what He began in the Philippians. On a Friday we should ask where that confidence comes from. The answer is that God has already finished a work, on the Cross. The Epistle to the Hebrews calls Christ auctorem fidei et consummatorem, “the author and finisher of faith,” and in the same breath tells us how He finished it: He “endured the cross, despising the shame” (Heb. 12:2). His last word before He bowed His head was Consummatum est, “It is consummated” (John 19:30).
The work God begins in each soul is drawn from the work Christ finished on the wood. The Council of Trent teaches exactly this in its Decree on Justification (Session VI, chapter 7). The meritorious cause of our justification is God’s only-begotten Son, who by His most holy Passion on the wood of the Cross merited justification for us. So the Christian’s hope of perseverance does not rest on his own steadiness. It rests on a work that is already complete and cannot be undone. What God perfects in us “unto the day of Christ” He perfects out of what Christ accomplished on the day of His death.
In the bowels of Jesus Christ. Paul says that he longs for the Philippians in visceribus Iesu Christi, “in the bowels of Jesus Christ.” The Scriptures use “bowels” for the seat of compassion, as we would say “the heart.” Paul does not claim to love his converts with his own affection alone. He loves them with Christ’s.
On Friday that heart is opened. St. Augustine noticed that St. John chose his verb carefully. The soldier did not merely wound the Lord’s side; he opened it (John 19:34). Augustine explains (Tractatus in Ioannem 120.2) that a door of life was opened there, and from it flowed the sacraments by which the Church lives. St. Bernard, preaching on the Canticle’s dove that hides “in the clefts of the rock” (Cant. 2:14), took those clefts to be the wounds of Christ (Sermones super Cantica 61.3-4). Where, he asks in substance, can the weak find a safe and settled rest except in the wounds of the Saviour? And through those openings in the body, he says, the secret of the heart lies open. When Paul loves “in the bowels of Jesus Christ,” this is the heart he means: the one that was opened for us.
The fruit of justice. Paul prays that the Philippians will be “filled with the fruit of justice, through Jesus Christ.” The fruit grows on a tree. The Church sings in Passiontide, in the hymn of Venantius Fortunatus, that no forest ever bore a tree like the Cross in leaf, flower or seed: Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis. Charity that “abounds in knowledge” and learns to “approve the better things” will finally recognise the Cross as the better thing. It is the tree whose fruit is justice.
II. Cuius est imago hæc, et superscriptio?: the Gospel
“Then the Pharisees going, consulted among themselves how to insnare him in his speech. And they sent to him their disciples with the Herodians, saying: Master, we know that thou art a true speaker, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou dost not regard the person of men. Tell us therefore what dost thou think, is it lawful to give tribute to Cæsar, or not? But Jesus knowing their wickedness, said: Why do you tempt me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the coin of the tribute. And they offered him a penny. And Jesus saith to them: Whose image and superscription is this? They say to him: Cæsar’s. Then he saith to them: Render therefore to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s.” (Matt. 22:15-21)
The Fathers have taught us the main lesson of this passage. Caesar’s image is stamped on the coin, so the coin goes back to Caesar. God’s image is stamped on man (Gen. 1:27), so man goes back to God. St. Hilary of Poitiers draws this out in the commentary the Church reads at Matins for this Sunday. Tertullian had already put it in a sentence the tradition kept repeating. On Friday we may follow the passage further, into the Passion.
The Image they were testing. The men holding the coin asked whose image it bore. The Man they were questioning is the Image. St. Paul calls Christ “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). The Epistle to the Hebrews calls Him “the figure of [the Father’s] substance” (Heb. 1:3), and the Greek word there, charaktēr, is the word for the stamp struck into a coin or a seal. The Pharisees showed Him Caesar’s stamp. They were standing in front of God’s.
The trap that did not need an answer. The Lord escaped their snare in the Temple court. His answer was so exact that, as St. Matthew records in the next verse, they “wondered, and leaving him, went their ways.” But it made no difference in the end. When they brought Him to Pilate, the charge they laid was this: “We have found this man perverting our nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Cæsar” (Luke 23:2). He had said the opposite, publicly, before witnesses. They accused Him of it anyway. Truthfulness did not protect Him from calumny, and He did not expect it to. That too belongs to Friday.
“We have no king but Caesar.” The scene before Pilate turns the tribute question inside out. The chief priests press the governor: “If thou release this man, thou art not Cæsar’s friend” (John 19:12). When Pilate shows them their King, they answer: “We have no king but Cæsar” (John 19:15). Here is the one thing Caesar could never rightfully claim, the allegiance of the people whose King is God, and they render it to him. Long before, when Israel demanded a king like the nations, the Lord told Samuel: “they have not rejected thee, but me, that I should not reign over them” (1 Kings 8:7). On Good Friday that old refusal reaches its end. The men who had asked whether to give Caesar a coin now give him what belongs to God.
Our Lord, meanwhile, renders to Caesar what is Caesar’s even here. He does not deny Pilate’s authority. He names its source: “Thou shouldst not have any power against me, unless it were given thee from above” (John 19:11). The governor’s power is real, it comes from God, and it will answer to God for what it does.
The second superscription. Then Pilate writes. “And there was also a superscription written over him in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew: This is the King of the Jews” (Luke 23:38). St. Luke’s Vulgate uses the same word the Lord had used of the coin, superscriptio. When the chief priests ask him to change it, Pilate refuses: “What I have written, I have written” (John 19:22). Caesar’s officer, holding Caesar’s authority, has written the title of the true King in the three languages of the world, and will not take it back. Whose image and superscription is this? On the Cross the answer is no longer Caesar’s.
The defaced Image. Yet the image on the Cross is hard to recognise. Isaias foresaw that “his visage [shall be] inglorious among men” (Is. 52:14), and Pilate presented Him crowned with thorns: Ecce homo. St. Athanasius explains why it had to be so (De Incarnatione 14). When a portrait painted on wood has been ruined by stains, he says in substance, the painter does not throw the panel away. The subject of the portrait must come and sit again, so that the likeness can be restored on the same material. Our nature was that ruined panel. The Son, who is the original of the image, came and took that very nature, so that the image in it could be painted again. On Good Friday the Original allows Himself to be defaced, on wood, so that the copies can be renewed.
St. Marcellus: where Caesar’s claim stops. The same Gospel also tells us when we must refuse Caesar. In the summer of 298 the legion stationed at Tangier was celebrating the birthday of the emperors with feasting and the customary honours to the gods. According to his Acta, which are early and generally regarded as reliable in substance, the centurion Marcellus threw down his soldier’s belt before the standards. He declared that he served Jesus Christ, the eternal King, and would not serve gods of wood and stone. He was tried and beheaded on the thirtieth of October.
The tradition has been careful about what his example means. St. Augustine, writing to the Christian general Boniface (Epistula 189), insists that soldiering is not in itself forbidden to a Christian. When soldiers asked St. John the Baptist what they should do, he did not tell them to leave the army. He told them to do violence to no man and be content with their pay (Luke 3:14). Marcellus could render to Caesar his service and his obedience. What he could not render was worship, and when Caesar’s birthday asked for it, he gave Caesar his belt back and gave God his life. St. Ambrose, refusing to surrender a Milan basilica to the Arians at the court’s demand, said the same thing in substance (Sermo contra Auxentium 35-36). The tribute belongs to Caesar, and the Church does not refuse it. But the Church belongs to God and may not be handed over to Caesar. The emperor, Ambrose says, is a son of the Church, within it and not above it.
III. The Mass as a whole: the Image goes out and returns
The Thomistic pattern of exitus and reditus, all things going out from God and returning to Him, took the form of a coin yesterday: minted, circulated, returned in tribute. On Friday we see that the pattern was first lived by Christ Himself.
The eternal Image went out from the Father into Caesar’s world. He was born under an imperial census (Luke 2:1), lived in a province that paid Caesar’s tribute, and was judged by Caesar’s governor. He submitted to all of it as far as justice allowed and no further. Then, on the Cross, He returned to the Father: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). He did not return alone. He carried our nature with Him, the stained panel restored, and with it the possibility for every soul to be restamped in Baptism and returned to God.
This is why St. Paul could be “confident of this very thing.” The good work begun in the Philippians was a share in a return already accomplished. The Apostle puts it elsewhere in words that suit this day: “as we have borne the image of the earthly, let us bear also the image of the heavenly” (1 Cor. 15:49). What we owe God is His image, and what He asks of us is that we let Him restore it.
The Introit asked who could stand if God marked iniquities. The Epistle answers with the One who finishes what He begins. The Gospel answers with the Image who was defaced to restore ours. Friday answers with the Cross, where the iniquities were marked, and borne, by the only One able to stand.
IV. The Collect and the Secret
Deus, refugium nostrum et virtus: adesto piis Ecclesiæ tuæ precibus, auctor ipse pietatis, et præsta; ut, quod fideliter petimus, efficaciter consequamur.
“O God, our refuge and strength, Thou who art the author of all godliness, give ear to the devout prayers of Thy Church; and grant that what we ask in faith we may effectually obtain.”
Read on a Friday, the Collect’s first words recall St. Bernard’s sermon. God is refugium nostrum, our refuge, and the refuge He has opened to us is the clefts of the rock, the wounds of His Son. He is auctor ipse pietatis, the author of godliness itself, as the Son is auctor fidei et consummator, the author and finisher of faith, on the Cross. We ask with confidence that what we seek in faith may be obtained in fact, because what we seek has already been won.
The Secret then asks for the fruit of the Sacrifice about to be offered:
Da, misericors Deus: ut hæc salutaris oblatio et a propriis nos reatibus indesinenter expediat, et ab omnibus tueatur adversis.
“Grant, O merciful God, that this saving oblation may unceasingly free us from our own guilt and defend us from all adversities.”
The salutaris oblatio on the altar is not a different offering from the one on Calvary. The Council of Trent teaches (Session XXII, chapter 2) that in the Mass the same Christ is offered in an unbloody manner who once offered Himself in a bloody manner on the altar of the Cross. Every Mass is a Friday in this sense. This Friday’s Mass makes it easy to see.
V. A word for practice
Examine. Where have I, in practice, said “We have no king but Caesar”? Have I let my work, my comfort, public opinion or my own will rule areas of my life that belong to Christ? Have I rendered honestly what I owe to lawful authority, without resentment? When I have been misrepresented, as the Lord was before Pilate, have I answered with His patience?
Do. Keep today’s Friday abstinence deliberately, as something rendered to God, and add a small sacrifice of your own. Spend five minutes before a crucifix and read the title over the Lord’s head as a personal act of allegiance: This is the King. Pray for those who hold civil authority (1 Tim. 2:1-2), that they may use the power given them “from above” as men who will answer for it.
Pray. The Collect of the day, resting on the words refugium nostrum. Then the Anima Christi, especially its petition Intra tua vulnera absconde me, “Within Thy wounds hide me.”
Aspiration. Regnavit a ligno Deus. “God hath reigned from the tree.” The line comes from the Vexilla Regis of Venantius Fortunatus. It echoes a reading of Psalm 95:10 found in some early Latin psalters and cited by Tertullian, though it is not in the Vulgate.
Devote. Ask St. Marcellus the Centurion for the courage to give Caesar everything that is his and nothing that is God’s. This Sunday is the Feast of All Saints and Monday is All Souls. Let this last Friday of October be spent at the foot of the Cross, where both the saints and the holy souls were purchased.
If you wish to go deeper: the Theology and Doctrine path takes up the meritorious cause of justification in Trent’s sixth session, and the doctrine of Christ as the Image of the Father (Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3) as St. Athanasius and St. Thomas expound it. The Church History path treats the relation between the Church and civil power, from the martyr-soldiers of the Diocletianic era to St. Ambrose at Milan. The Lives of the Saints path tells the story of St. Marcellus and the soldier-martyrs more fully. The Spiritual Practices path offers devotion to the Five Wounds and the traditional Friday observances.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims, with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. Augustine, Tractatus in Ioannem 120.2 and Epistula 189 (to Boniface); St. Bernard, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum 61.3-4; St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbi 14; St. Ambrose, Sermo contra Auxentium de basilicis tradendis 35-36; St. Hilary of Poitiers, Commentarius in Matthæum, canon 23; and Tertullian, De idololatria 15 and Adversus Marcionem III.19. Hymnody: Venantius Fortunatus, Pange lingua gloriosi prœlium certaminis and Vexilla Regis prodeunt; the Anima Christi. Hagiography: the Acta Marcelli and the Roman Martyrology for 30 October. Magisterial texts: Council of Trent, Session VI, Decretum de iustificatione, chapter 7; Session XXII, Doctrina de sanctissimo Missæ sacrificio, chapter 2.
Regnavit a ligno Deus.