A reflection for Feria Secunda infra Hebdomadam XV post Octavam Pentecostes, I. Septembris — IV. classis (7 September)
Adolescens, tibi dico, surge. Et resedit qui erat mortuus, et coepit loqui. Et dedit illum matri suae. “Young man, I say to thee, arise. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak. And he gave him to his mother.” — Luke 7:14-15
I. The Church repeats herself
A Monday of the fourth class has no Mass of its own. The Missal sends the priest back to yesterday: the same Introit, the same Epistle, the same Gospel, the same Collect. This is not liturgical poverty but liturgical method. The Church has always known that a thing heard once on Sunday is heard again on Monday differently, in the quiet of a nearly empty church, with the week’s work already begun. She repeats herself because we are slow, and because the mysteries are deep enough to bear a second hearing.
There is a second repetition at work this week. With the first Sunday of September the Breviary opens the Book of Job at Matins, and the I. Septembris in today’s heading marks the week in which the Church’s night office begins to read the story of the man who lost everything and was given it back. The Mass we hear this morning — a widow who has lost everything, and the Lord who gives it back — is being said under the roof of Job. We shall come to that.
II. Inclina, Domine
The Introit sets the register: Inclina, Domine, aurem tuam ad me, et exaudi me… quia pauper et inops sum — “Incline Thy ear, O Lord, and hear me, for I am needy and poor” (Ps. 85:1). It is the prayer of someone with no leverage. He does not say I have served Thee or I have merited; he says I am poor, and asks God to bend down.
The whole Mass answers that petition. The Epistle will describe the poverty of a Christian who has fallen and cannot lift himself; the Gospel will show a woman whose only son is being carried past her to the grave; and the Lord will bend down — inclinabit aurem — to both. The Offertory completes the arc in the same Psalter voice: Exspectans exspectavi Dominum, et respexit me… et eduxit me de lacu miseriae — “With expectation I have waited for the Lord, and He looked upon me, and drew me out of the pit of misery” (Ps. 39:2-3). The poor man is heard; the pit is emptied.
III. If we live in the Spirit: the Epistle
The Epistle (Gal. 5:25-26; 6:1-10) is an ethics of the fallen. St. Paul has just finished contrasting the works of the flesh with the fruit of the Spirit, and now he turns to the practical question: what does a community of people living in the Spirit do when one of them stops?
He begins by removing the two temptations that make such a community impossible. “Let us not be made desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another” (5:26). Vainglory is the desire to be seen as better; envy is the pain of seeing another as better. Between them they turn every fall into an occasion — either to display one’s own standing or to enjoy another’s loss. St. John Chrysostom, commenting on this chapter, observes that Paul strikes at the root before he prescribes the remedy: a man cannot restore his brother while he is secretly pleased that his brother needs restoring (In Epistulam ad Galatas commentarius, cap. 6).
Then the prescription: “if a man be overtaken in any fault, you, who are spiritual, instruct such a one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (6:1). St. Augustine, in his commentary on Galatians, gives this verse one of the most searching readings in the whole patristic tradition. Nothing, he says, proves a man to be truly spiritual so much as the way he deals with another’s sin: whether he sets out to deliver the sinner or to insult him, whether he looks to the other’s healing or to his own superiority. And he draws the rule that governs all fraternal correction: no one should undertake to correct another unless he has first asked himself, before God, whether he would want to be corrected in the same way (Expositio Epistulae ad Galatas, on 6:1). “Considering thyself” is not a footnote to the command; it is the condition of it.
“Bear ye one another’s burdens; and so you shall fulfil the law of Christ” (6:2). St. Jerome identifies the law of Christ simply: it is charity, and the burden borne is the weakness of the brother — his temptation, his fault, his slowness — carried as one carries a load that is not one’s own (Commentarius in Epistulam ad Galatas, lib. III, on 6:2). Chrysostom adds the reason no one is exempt from the carrying: none of us is without a burden of his own, and the man who will not stoop to another’s has forgotten his own (In Gal., cap. 6). The Apostle’s apparent contradiction three verses later — “every one shall bear his own burden” (6:5) — is resolved by the same commentators in the same way: in this life we carry one another; at the judgment each answers for himself. The first is the reason to be gentle now; the second is the reason not to be careless.
The passage ends with the law of the harvest: “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” (6:7-8). Hold that word corruption. The Gospel is about to show us what it looks like when it is carried out of a city on a bier.
IV. The gate of Naim: two processions
The Gospel (Luke 7:11-16) is built on a meeting. Our Lord is going into the city with His disciples and “a great multitude.” A dead man is being carried out of it, “the only son of his mother; and she was a widow: and a great multitude of the city was with her.” Two crowds, moving in opposite directions, meet at the gate.
St. Ambrose, in his commentary on St. Luke, will not let the geography go to waste. The widow is the Church, he says, weeping over a son who has died in sin and is being carried out to burial; and it is her tears — the tears of the mother, not the merits of the dead — that move the Lord to stop the procession. The bearers halt when He touches the bier; the corpse sits up at His word; and the mother, who was weeping for one son, receives him back and weeps now for joy (Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, lib. V). St. Bede follows Ambrose nearly word for word and adds only that the young man, restored, “began to speak” — for the sinner raised to life is known by his confession (In Lucae Evangelium expositio, lib. II).
Notice what the Lord does and does not require. He does not ask the widow for faith, as He asks Jairus and the father of the epileptic boy; she has asked Him for nothing. He does not ask the dead man for anything; the dead cannot be asked. The initiative is entirely His. “Whom when the Lord had seen, being moved with mercy towards her, he said to her: Weep not” (7:13). Misericordia motus — moved by mercy. This is the Inclina, Domine of the Introit answered before it was finished being prayed. The poor woman had no leverage, and He bent down.
Then He touches the bier. St. Cyril of Alexandria, preaching on this passage, draws attention to the touch: the Lord could have raised the boy by a word from a distance, but He lays His hand on the thing that carried death, so that we should learn that His very flesh is life-giving — that the body of the Word is not a barrier to His power but its instrument (Homiliae in Lucam, hom. 36). Cyril is thinking of the Eucharist, and so is the Missal: the Communion antiphon of this Mass is Panis quem ego dedero, caro mea est pro saeculi vita — “The bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world” (John 6:52). The same flesh that touched the bier at Naim is given at the rail.
V. The three dead
St. Augustine’s homily on this Gospel — the one the Breviary itself sets for Matins of the fifteenth Sunday — reads the three raisings in the Gospels as a single teaching on sin (Sermo 98). The daughter of Jairus is raised inside the house: she is the soul that has consented to sin in thought but not yet acted. The widow’s son is raised outside the gate: he is the soul that has gone on to the deed and is being carried out in public. Lazarus is raised from the tomb, already four days dead and stinking: he is the soul in which sin has hardened into habit. Augustine’s point is not to rank the dead but to abolish despair. The Lord raised all three. There is no stage of spiritual death at which His word Surge has lost its authority.
But Augustine is also careful about how the widow’s son is raised, and here the Epistle and Gospel lock together. The boy is raised at the touch of the bier and at the tears of his mother. He does nothing. The Church weeps for him; the Lord stops the procession. This is what the Epistle meant by “you, who are spiritual, instruct such a one in the spirit of meekness.” The community of the Spirit does not stand at the gate and watch the bier go by with satisfaction. It weeps, it carries, it bears the burden — and it is because of that carrying, and because the Lord is moved by it, that the dead begin to speak.
St. Thomas, treating Christ’s miracles on the bodies of men, notes that the raising of the dead is the highest of them, because life is the form of the body and only He who is Life can restore it; and he holds that Christ worked such signs both as proofs of His divinity and as figures of the spiritual resurrection He came to accomplish (cf. Summa Theologiae III, q. 44). The Naim boy will die again; that is the difference between a resuscitation and the Resurrection. But he is raised as a sign of the one raising that does not end, and the crowd’s cry — “God hath visited his people” — is a truer statement than they knew.
VI. Under the roof of Job
This is the week the Church begins to read Job at night, and the Mass by day is read under that roof. Job, too, lost his sons; Job, too, was the just man in the pit; and Job is the Old Testament’s clearest voice on the very thing the Naim Gospel dramatizes: Scio quod Redemptor meus vivit, et in novissimo die de terra surrecturus sum… et in carne mea videbo Deum meum — “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth, and in my flesh I shall see my God” (Job 19:25-26).
St. Gregory the Great reads Job as a figure of Christ and of Christ’s Body the Church — Christ in his innocent suffering, the Church in her patience and her losses (Moralia in Iob, praefatio). Job’s confession of the resurrection, Gregory says, is the point on which the whole book turns: the sufferer has not been told the reason for his suffering, and he does not need to be, because he has been given something better than a reason — a Redeemer who lives and will stand upon the earth at the last (Moralia, lib. XIV). The widow of Naim is not given a reason either. She is given her son.
And the Psalmist, whom Job would have understood, says of the Lord in the Gradual: Bonum est confiteri Domino… ad annuntiandum mane misericordiam tuam, et veritatem tuam per noctem — “It is good to give praise to the Lord… to show forth Thy mercy in the morning, and Thy truth in the night” (Ps. 91:2-3). Mercy in the morning at the gate of Naim; truth in the night in the Book of Job. The Church has arranged her week so that we hear both.
VII. Et dedit illum matri suae: the shape of the return
The whole of Catholic theology may be drawn, as St. Thomas draws it, on a single arc: all things go out from God and all things return to Him — exitus and reditus. Sin is a going-out that does not come back; it is the son carried out through the gate toward the field where things are buried. Grace is the return.
Watch the Gospel on this pattern. The son goes out of the city — the exitus of death, the natural end of “sowing in the flesh.” The Lord comes in — the ingressus of the Word who did not consider it robbery to be equal with God but went out from the Father to seek what was lost. The two processions meet, and the one is reversed by the other. The dead man sits up. And then the verse the Fathers loved most: et dedit illum matri suae — “and he gave him to his mother.” The return is not merely a return to life; it is a return to someone. The son is given back to the Church that wept for him. The reditus is completed not when the sinner breathes but when he is restored to the body from which he was being carried away.
The Collect asks for exactly this, and asks it for the whole Church: Ecclesiam tuam, Domine, miseratio continuata mundet et muniat: et quia sine te non potest salva consistere, tuo semper munere gubernetur — “Let Thy continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend Thy Church; and because without Thee she cannot stand safe, may she ever be governed by Thy gift.” Sine te non potest salva consistere. The widow could not raise her son; the Church cannot raise hers. Ambrose’s identification is confirmed by the prayer: she is the mother at the gate, and she has nothing but her tears and the mercy that bends to them.
VIII. A word for practice
The Epistle and Gospel between them describe a single obligation from two sides. From the Epistle: you are to bear your brother’s burden, correct him in meekness, and consider yourself. From the Gospel: you are to be the mother who weeps, not the crowd that watches. Both come to the same thing. Somewhere near you there is a bier going out through the gate — a relative who has left the faith, a friend in a sin he is no longer troubled by, a soul you have been quietly satisfied to see carried past. The Lord is moved by tears. He is not recorded as being moved by commentary.
Examine. Take one person whose fault you know. Ask Augustine’s question: if I were in his place, how would I want to be corrected? Then ask the harder one: have I wept for him, or only judged him?
Do. Bear one burden this week that is not yours to bear. Make it concrete — a debt, a chore, a difficult conversation someone else has been dreading — and do it without telling anyone, so that vainglory has no purchase on it.
Pray. The Collect of the day, said for the Church and for one particular member of her whom you name. Or, for a soul that seems past reach: Adolescens, tibi dico, surge — said slowly, with the name substituted, and left in the Lord’s hands.
Devote. The Fourth Glorious Mystery, the Assumption, where the Mother who wept at the foot of the Cross is given back her Son and taken to Him; or the Joyful Mysteries, attending to the Finding in the Temple, where a mother searches three days for a Son she thought lost. And this week, if the Breviary is not your custom, read Job 19 by night.
If you wish to go deeper, this Mass opens onto three of our paths. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the September Scripture cycle and why the Church places Job at the threshold of autumn. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up fraternal correction in St. Thomas — when it binds, when it does not, and why meekness is its form. The Spiritual Practices path treats intercession for the dead in sin, and the tears of the Church as a form of prayer.
Domine, qui viduae filium ad portam Naim suscitasti, inclina aurem tuam ad nos pauperes et inopes, et da nos matri nostrae Ecclesiae vivos.