A reflection for Feria Quinta infra Hebdomadam XVIII post Octavam Pentecostes — IV classis (1 October), with the Commemoration of S. Remigii Episcopi et Confessoris
Dirigat corda nostra, quæsumus, Domine, tuæ miserationis operatio: quia tibi sine te placere non possumus. “May the working of Thy mercy, we beseech Thee, O Lord, direct our hearts: for without Thee we are not able to please Thee.” — Collect of the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
I. Liturgical Context
On this Thursday the Church takes up again the Mass of the preceding Sunday, the Eighteenth after Pentecost, Da pacem, Domine, and joins to it the commemoration of St. Remigius, Bishop of Reims, the apostle of the Franks.
The Sunday Mass carries the marks of its origin. In the older Roman arrangement this Sunday followed the Ember Saturday of September, when the Church conferred Holy Orders, and the vigil Mass of ordination had so filled the night that the Sunday itself once stood without proper texts of its own. When its Mass was composed, the ordinations shaped it. The Introit asks peace for those who wait upon the Lord, “that Thy prophets may be found faithful” (Ecclus. 36:18). The Offertory recalls Moses consecrating the altar and offering holocausts upon it (Exod. 24:4-5). The Communion summons the people to “bring up sacrifices, and come into His courts” (Ps. 95:8-9). Between them stand an Epistle in which St. Paul gives thanks for the gifts of grace poured out upon a church, and a Gospel in which the multitude glorifies God “that gave such power to men.” Dom Guéranger saw the design plainly: this is the Mass of a Church contemplating the new priests she has just received, and the power entrusted to them.
Read on a weekday in the waning of the Pentecost season, and on the feast of a bishop who brought a whole nation into the Church by the waters of baptism, the Mass speaks with unusual unity. It concerns gifts that come down from God, the men through whom they come, and the end toward which they carry us.
II. The Epistle: Enriched in Every Thing (1 Cor. 1:4-8)
“I give thanks to my God always for you, for the grace of God that is given you in Christ Jesus, that in all things you are made rich in him, in all utterance and in all knowledge; as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you, so that nothing is wanting to you in any grace, waiting for the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Who also will confirm you unto the end without crime, in the day of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The Church of Corinth was the most troubled community St. Paul ever addressed: divided into factions, tolerating incest, suing one another before pagans, profaning the Lord’s Supper. Yet the Apostle opens with thanksgiving. This is not flattery. St. John Chrysostom, in the second of his homilies on this Epistle, observes that Paul praises nothing in the Corinthians that is their own. He gives thanks “for the grace of God that is given you,” so that the very praise becomes a correction. The Corinthians were proud of their eloquence and their knowledge and were dividing themselves according to the teachers who had given them these things. Paul answers that every gift they boast of came from God, came through Christ, and was given to all alike. A man cannot found a faction on what he has received as alms.
The point is the Collect’s point exactly: tibi sine te placere non possumus. Whatever in us is pleasing to God, God first put there. St. Augustine never tired of St. Paul’s question to these same Corinthians a few chapters later: “What hast thou that thou hast not received? And if thou hast received, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?” (1 Cor. 4:7). It was this verse, he confessed, that finally overturned his own earlier opinion that the beginning of faith lay in our power.
Then the Apostle looks forward. The gifts are given to a people “waiting for the manifestation of our Lord,” and God “will confirm you unto the end without crime,” confirmabit vos usque in finem sine crimine. Chrysostom notes the delicacy here: Paul does not say you are blameless, for they were not, but that God will make them so, if they persevere. The gifts of Corinth are not a possession to rest in. They are provisions for a journey whose destination is the Day of the Lord.
This is why the Church teaches that final perseverance is itself a gift. St. Augustine wrote a whole treatise, De dono perseverantiae, to establish that to remain in grace until the end is not something we add to God’s gifts, but the crowning gift He gives. The Second Council of Orange, held in 529 while St. Remigius still governed the Church of Reims, taught that even the regenerate and the holy must continually implore the help of God in order to reach a good end and to persevere in good works (can. 10). The Council of Trent, in its decree on justification, called perseverance that “great gift” which can be had from no other source than from Him who is able to establish the one who stands (Sess. VI, cap. 13; can. 16).
Here is the first lesson of the day. Gratitude and humility are not two virtues but one disposition seen from two sides. To thank God for His gifts is already to confess that they are His.
III. The Gospel: Power Given to Men (Matt. 9:1-8)
“And entering into a boat, he passed over the water and came into his own city. And behold they brought to him one sick of the palsy lying in a bed. And Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the man sick of the palsy: Be of good heart, son, thy sins are forgiven thee… But that you may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then said he to the man sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go into thy house. And he arose, and went into his house. And the multitude seeing it, feared, and glorified God that gave such power to men.”
Seeing their faith
St. Matthew tells us that Jesus saw their faith, fidem illorum: not the paralytic’s alone, but that of the men who carried him. St. Jerome remarks on this in his commentary on St. Matthew, and St. Ambrose, treating the parallel passage in St. Luke, draws the consequence with characteristic boldness: great is the Lord, who for the merit of some pardons others, and who, approving these, forgives the faults of those. If you despair of pardon for some grave sin, he says, take others to plead for you; call the Church to pray for you (Expositio in Lucam, V). The paralytic could not walk to Christ. Others brought him. This is the communion of saints in a single image, and it is the whole economy of intercession and of apostolic labour.
The soul before the body
The man was brought for the healing of his limbs. Christ speaks first of his sins. St. John Chrysostom, in his twenty-ninth homily on St. Matthew, sees here the order of the divine physician: He cuts the root of the disease before He treats its symptoms, and He heals the soul first because it is the greater and more needful cure. Our Lord’s first word is not rise but confide, fili, “be of good heart, son.” Before any visible miracle, He gives the man the name of a son.
Who can forgive sins but God?
The scribes judge silently that He blasphemes. They are correct in their premise: as St. Mark records, they reasoned that none can forgive sins but God alone (Mark 2:7). Their error lies only in the conclusion they draw from it. St. Jerome points out that Christ answers them by reading their unspoken thoughts, which is itself a work proper to God, who alone searches the heart. He thus proves His divinity by the very act they had denied Him the right to perform.
Then the question: “Whether is easier, to say, Thy sins are forgiven thee: or to say, Arise, and walk?” Jerome explains the logic. To say either is equally easy. To do either belongs to God alone. But the forgiveness of sins is invisible, and an impostor could claim it without fear of being exposed. So Christ performs the visible work to certify the invisible one. The healed limbs are the public seal on the hidden absolution.
Go into thy house
St. Hilary of Poitiers, in his commentary on St. Matthew, reads the command allegorically: the man is told to carry the bed that once carried him, that is, to govern the body that had held him captive, and to return to his house, which Hilary understands as the home of paradise from which our first parents went out. Healing ends in homecoming.
Such power to men
The multitude “glorified God that gave such power to men,” qui dedit potestatem talem hominibus. The crowd speaks more truly than it knows. St. Ambrose, writing against the Novatians who denied that the Church could forgive grave sins committed after baptism, insists that Christ gave this power to His Church and to her priests, and that to deny it is to make void the gift of God (De paenitentia, I). On the evening of the Resurrection the Lord breathed upon the Apostles and said, “Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them” (John 20:23), and the Council of Trent defined that these words confer the true power of forgiving and retaining sins in the sacrament of Penance (Sess. XIV, can. 3). The Ember-tide setting of this Mass makes the application unmistakable. The newly ordained priest walks out of the ordination rite carrying in his hands the power that astonished Capharnaum.
IV. Synthesis: From God, Through Men, to Home
St. Thomas teaches that all things come forth from God and return to Him as to their end, and that grace is the means of that return in the rational creature: the exitus and reditus of creation. Today’s Epistle and Gospel trace the same arc in miniature.
The going forth is grace descending. St. Paul’s Corinthians possess nothing they have not received; “the grace of God that is given you” is the source of every gift. In the Gospel, the forgiveness that only God can give comes down to a paralytic on a stretcher through the mouth of One who is God made man, and is then, the crowd marvels, given to men.
The mediation is the visible Church. Gifts reach Corinth through Apostles; the paralytic reaches Christ through friends; pardon reaches the penitent through priests. God, who could save without any instrument, chooses to save through instruments, so that charity may circulate among those He saves. This is why the Collect’s confession of helplessness is not despair. “Without Thee we cannot please Thee” is the prayer of men who know where the help is to be found and through whom it has been appointed to come.
The return is perseverance unto the end. Paul’s converts are “waiting for the manifestation of our Lord,” to be confirmed “unto the end without crime.” The paralytic is sent, healed and forgiven, “into his house.” Every grace has a destination, and that destination is the Father’s house. The Secret of this Mass names it in the boldest terms the Roman liturgy permits: by the venerable exchange of this Sacrifice, God makes us partakers of His one supreme divinity.
St. Remigius stands at precisely this junction. He was the minister through whom the grace of baptism came down upon Clovis and upon the Franks. But the king was, in a sense, a paralytic brought by others: Gregory of Tours records that it was Queen Clotilde who long prayed and pleaded for her husband’s conversion, and that Remigius was summoned to instruct him. Christ saw their faith. When at last Clovis came to the font, Gregory reports the bishop’s words to him: bow your neck in meekness, Sicambrian; adore what you have burned, and burn what you have adored. That is the reditus of a whole people, effected through the faith of a wife and the ministry of a bishop. A nation that had gone out from God in paganism was brought into His house.
V. Devotional Application
Examine. St. Paul’s thanksgiving asks a searching question: which of my gifts do I privately treat as my own achievement? Talent, intelligence, a good name, even piety itself. Name one, and give thanks for it explicitly as received.
Confess. The Gospel of the paralytic is the Gospel of the sacrament of Penance. If it has been long since your last confession, today’s Mass is an invitation addressed to you by name: Confide, fili. Go, and receive from the hands of a man the pardon that only God can give.
Carry someone. There is someone in your life who cannot or will not walk to Christ on his own. You are being asked to be one of the four who carry the stretcher. Pray for that soul by name today, as Clotilde prayed for Clovis, and ask St. Remigius to intercede for him.
Pray for priests. This is the Mass of the September ordinations. Offer a prayer for the priests who have absolved you, and for those newly ordained this year, that the power given to men may be exercised by holy men.
Ask for perseverance. Make a habit, at night prayer, of asking expressly for the gift of final perseverance. The Church teaches that it is a gift. Gifts are asked for.
VI. Collects
Of the Feria (from the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost):
Dirigat corda nostra, quæsumus, Domine, tuæ miserationis operatio: quia tibi sine te placere non possumus. Per Dominum nostrum.
“May the working of Thy mercy, we beseech Thee, O Lord, direct our hearts: for without Thee we are not able to please Thee. Through our Lord.”
Commemoration of St. Remigius:
Da, quæsumus, omnipotens Deus: ut beati Remigii Confessoris tui atque Pontificis veneranda solemnitas, et devotionem nobis augeat et salutem. Per Dominum nostrum.
“Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that the venerable solemnity of blessed Remigius, Thy Confessor and Bishop, may increase in us both devotion and salvation. Through our Lord.”
VII. Aspiration
Sine te placere non possumus. “Without Thee we cannot please Thee.”
Or, for the confessional: Confide, fili; remittuntur tibi peccata tua. “Be of good heart, son; thy sins are forgiven thee.”
VIII. For Further Study
If you wish to go deeper, today’s Mass opens onto several of our paths.
The Theology and Doctrine path treats the necessity of grace and the gift of final perseverance in the Thomistic order, together with the Augustinian teaching confirmed at Orange and defined at Trent. The same path takes up the sacrament of Penance and the priestly power of the keys.
The Sacred Liturgy path examines the Ember Days and the ordination Masses of September, and how they shaped the propers of this Sunday.
The Church History path continues the story of the Merovingian Church: Clotilde, Clovis, Remigius, and the baptism at Reims from which France took the title of eldest daughter of the Church.
The East-West thread may note that the Byzantine Church also reads the healing of the paralytic from St. Matthew on a Sunday after Pentecost, and that the cult of St. Remigius belongs to the undivided Church of the West before the Schism.
IX. Source Transparency
Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims version, with Vulgate phrases given inline. Patristic witnesses are given as faithful paraphrase with their locus rather than as verbatim quotation: St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Corinthians (Hom. 2) and Homilies on Matthew (Hom. 29); St. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew; St. Hilary of Poitiers, Commentary on Matthew; St. Ambrose, Exposition of the Gospel of Luke (Book V) and On Penance (Book I); St. Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance. Conciliar teaching is cited from the Second Council of Orange (529) and the Council of Trent, Sessions VI and XIV. The account of the baptism of Clovis follows St. Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, Book II; the exact year of that baptism is disputed among historians. The liturgical history of the Ember Sunday follows Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year.
Sancte Remigi, ora pro nobis.