Homily 22

Pronounced before the people

in the Basilica of Blessed John, so-called Constantine

April 6, 592 (Easter day)

The empty tomb

Nearly two months have passed since Saint Gregory preached for the last time. His health is not improving. She will go further and worse until the end of her pontificate. Even before becoming pope, he went through gout and gastralgia (stomach ache) that lasted for months, and that would have annihilated a less energetic temperament. He points out in the Dialogues (III, 7) that he was then plagued by haunting anxieties and was in constant contact with syncope.

Overcoming his deplorable state of health, the preacher went to the Lateran basilica to comment on a gospel different from that of the Easter holiday of the previous year. Is it because he could not go to Sainte-Marie-Majeure that he changed the reading of the day? Be that as it may, the pope interprets the story of the arrival of Peter and John at the tomb on Easter morning; then he meditates on the paschal mystery from the text of Exodus where Moses determines how to eat the paschal lamb.

I- (1-5) The first part contains the famous page on the race of the two apostles, figures of the Synagogue and the Church of the Gentiles: a beautiful symbolic interpretation, which is based on other affirmations of Scripture and leads to solid theology data. Here again, modern man must accept to abide by what Henri-Irenee Marrou rightly calls "a poetic game", a game which makes us "penetrate into a teaching of incomparable wealth and security. Because by these singular paths, it is to a simple, healthy, vigilant and strong doctrine that one is led [...] and who expresses himself, moreover, in a style of incomparable sweetness. "(In Spiritual Life, 69, 1943, 453)

II- (6-9) Beyond an allegorical grid whose virtuosity baffles us a little, the second part introduces us into the paschal mystery. Easter is the Solemnity of the Solemnities, because the Lord opens to us the gates of the Heavenly Kingdom. And since the lamb eaten by the Jews is the figure of Christ, all that Moses said about the paschal lamb can be applied to Jesus, the Lamb of God. His blood that preserves us is his Passion, celebrated at Mass and imitated in our lives. Unleavened bread and wild lettuce, the outfit in which the lamb is eaten, these various indications, by means of Gregory's explanations, provide the new baptized of the Easter night with precious instructions for Christian life, which the Pope urges them to implement without delay. Today, they can still; who knows if tomorrow, it will not be too late ...

Jn 20, 1-9

At that time, on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb in the morning, while the darkness still reigned, and she saw the stone removed from the tomb. So she ran and came to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, "The Lord has been taken away from the grave, and we do not know where he was put."

Peter and this other disciple therefore left, and they came to the tomb. They both ran together, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter, and he came first to the tomb. And having bent over, he saw the linen laid there, but he did not enter. Then Simon Peter, who followed him, arrived in his turn and entered the tomb. He saw the linen laid there, and the shroud that had surrounded the head, not laid with the linen, but rolled apart in another place. Then the disciple who had first arrived at the tomb came in his turn; he lives and he believed. For they had not yet understood the scripture, according to which he was to be raised from the dead.

The chronic pain that gnaws my stomach has long prevented me from commenting on your charity the Gospel readings. My voice itself can not withstand the effort of declamation, and unable to make me listen to many, I blush, I admit, having to speak to a large audience. But I blame myself for this shame that I feel. What! not being able to be useful to many, is this a reason not to take care of a few? And if I can not bring back a lot of sheaves from the harvest, do I have to go back to the threshing floor empty-handed? Although I can not wear as much as I should, I will wear at least some, if only two, or even one. And then, the very effort that one asks of his weakness is sure to be paid, because if our Supreme Judge takes into consideration the weight [of our works] during the retribution, it takes into account however the measure of our forces in estimating this weight.

2. The reading of the Holy Gospel that you have just heard, my brethren, is very clear as to the story, but it contains mysteries which we must briefly examine. "Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, while the darkness still reigned." The narrative notes the time, but the mystical meaning tells us about the state of mind of the one who sought. Mary, in fact, sought at the tomb the Creator of all things, whom she had seen dead in her flesh; and not finding it, she thought he had been taken away. Darkness still reigned when she came to the tomb.

She ran quickly and announced the news to the disciples. Those ran the fastest who liked the most, namely Pierre and Jean. "They were both running together, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter, and he came first to the tomb." Without, however, daring to enter. Peter arrived the second, and he entered. Well, my brothers, what does this race mean? This precise description of the evangelist, must we believe it without mysteries? No, certainly! Would he say that he came first, but did not come in, if he had not thought that his very hesitation contained a mystery? What does John, if not the Synagogue, and Peter, if not the Church, symbolize? Let us not be surprised that the Synagogue is represented by the youngest, and the Church by the oldest, for although the Synagogue worshiped God before the Church of the Gentiles, the multitude of the Gentiles used this world before the synagogue, as Paul testifies: "It is not the spiritual which comes first, but that which is animal" (1 Cor 15:46). Peter, the eldest, is therefore the Church of the Gentiles, and John, the youngest, the Synagogue of the Jews. They ran together, since from their birth to their decline, the Gentiles and the Synagogue ran in one and the same way, although they did not have one and the same way of seeing.

3. The Synagogue first came to the tomb, but it did not come in: it had received the commandments of the Law and heard the prophecies of the Incarnation and the Passion of the Lord, but it would not believe in a dead person. John saw the linen laid, but he did not enter: the Synagogue knew the mysteries of the Holy Scripture, but, incredulous, it delayed to enter it by faith in the Passion of the Lord. She whom he had so long foretold by the prophets, saw him when he was there, and she refused him; she despised her condition as a man, and she would not believe in a God who had become mortal because of his Incarnation. That's why she ran faster and yet remained idle in front of the tomb.

"Then Simon Peter, who followed him, came in his turn and entered the tomb." For the Mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ made man (1 Tim 2: 5), the Church of the Gentiles arriving, in turn, recognized him dead in his flesh, and seeing him alive, she believed that he was God.

"He saw the linen laid there, and the shroud that had wrapped around his head, not laid with the linen, but rolled apart in another place." What can it mean, my brothers, that the shroud of the head of the Lord is not with linens in the tomb, except that, "the head of Christ being God", as Paul asserts (1 Cor 11: 3), the incomprehensible mysteries of divinity are beyond the reach of our weak human knowledge, and that its power transcends the created nature? It should also be noted that according to the story, the shroud is not only found separately, but also rolled in another place. Now a rolled canvas, one sees neither the beginning nor the end. It is therefore fitting that the shroud of the head was found rolled, since the greatness of the deity did not begin to exist any more than it ceased to be. It does not begin with a birth, and it is not constricted by a term.

4. The text adds: "In another place" 1. It is very well said, for God is not in the division of spirits: God is in unity, and only deserve to obtain his grace those who do not separate from each other by schisms that scandalize [ the souls].

But since workers usually use a shroud to wipe away their sweat, the word "shroud" can also express the hard labor of God. Doubtless God remains in himself in a continual and immutable repose, but he does not reveal to us the laborious trouble he feels in bringing the terrible depravations of men. Thus he says in the voice of the prophet, "I have suffered hard to bear them" (Jer 6: 11). God, appeared in our flesh, toiled labor inherent in our weakness. And when the unbelievers saw him toil in the labor of his Passion, they did not want to worship him. The mortal seer in his flesh, they refused to believe him immortal in his divinity. Hence the word of Jeremiah: "Thou shalt give them back, Lord, according to the works of their hands; you will give them pain as a shield for their hearts "(Lm 3, 64-65). The unbelievers, who despised the pain that the Lord gave Himself in His Passion, used it in the manner of a shield, to prevent their heart from being penetrated by the spurts of preaching, so that the fact even to see him toil until death prevented his words from reaching them.

Are not we ourselves the members of our head, that is, of God? So the cloths of his body symbolize the bandages of the painful labors that surround all the chosen ones, his members. And the shroud that had surrounded his head is apart, for the Passion of our Redeemer is very different from ours: he suffered his own without having committed any fault, while we suffer ours loaded with our faults. This death to which we are only forced, he wanted to indulge himself.

5. The text continues: "Then the disciple who first came to the tomb came in his turn." After Peter had entered, John also entered. He entered the second, when he had arrived first. It should be noted, my brethren, that at the end of the world, even the Jewish people will be brought to the faith of the Redeemer, as Paul testifies: "... until all the Gentiles entered, and so Israel be saved. "(Rom 11: 25-26)

"He saw and he believed." What then, my brethren, is it necessary to think that he believed? That the Lord, whom he sought, had risen? Certainly not, since the darkness still reigned near the tomb, and the words that follow say the opposite: "For they had not yet understood the scripture, according to which he was to be raised from the dead. Jean, what did he believe? He saw the linen laid there, and he believed that, as the woman had said, the Lord had been removed from the tomb.

We have to appreciate here with what magnificent wisdom God has prepared everything: he has inflamed the hearts of his disciples to seek, while allowing them not to find immediately. Thus, their weak and tormented soul of sadness, at the same time as it purified itself to find, became all the more motivated to preserve what it sought after having found it, that it had delayed more to discover it .

6. Having traveled quickly, dear brothers, the text of our gospel, we now have something to say to you of the excellence of so great a solemnity [that of Easter]. Is it not fitting that I speak of excellence for this solemnity, which has precedence over all others? And just as the Holy Scripture says, in order to mark its greatness, "the Holy of Holies" or "the Song of Songs", we can rightly call this feast the Solemnity of the Solemnities, since it is given to us as the exemplary type of our resurrection, having opened to us the hope of the heavenly homeland and made it possible to anticipate already on the glory of the Kingdom from above. Through her, the elect are brought back to the sweets of paradise, for even if they enjoyed complete tranquility, they were none the less kept in the prison of the underworld. The Lord fulfilled in his Resurrection what he had said before his Passion: "When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all to myself" (Jn 12:32). He drew everything to him, leaving none of his elect in hell. He took everything, namely all his elected officials. Indeed, by resurrecting, the Lord did not regenerate by his forgiveness the unbelievers, nor those who were condemned for their faults to eternal torments. But he has snatched from the prison of hell those whom he has recognized as belonging to him by their faith and works.

This is why he also rightly says, through Hosea's voice: "Death, I will be your death; hell, I'll be your bite.

(Bones 13, 14). To kill is to stop the existence of something; to bite is to tear off one part and leave another. Thus, since the Lord completely killed death in his chosen ones, he was the death of their death. But because he took only one part of hell and left another, he did not completely kill hell, just biting it. He says, "Death, I will be your death." It is as if he were saying clearly: "I will be your death, for I am suppressing you entirely in my chosen ones; Hell, I will be your bite, since in taking away my chosen ones, I tear you in part. "

What is the solemnity that broke the prison of hell and opened the doors of the heavenly kingdom? Let's get deeper into his name. Let's question the eminent preacher [Paul].

7. Let us see what he told us of his thought: "Christ, our Passover, was slain" (1 Cor 5: 7). If Christ is our Passover, we must examine what the Law says of the Passover, so that we may further investigate whether it may apply to Christ.

This is what Moses says: "We will take the blood of the lamb, and we will put it on the two uprights and on the lintel of the door of the houses in which we will eat it; and that night, the meat roasted in the fire with unleavened bread and wild lettuce. You will not eat anything raw or cooked in water, but only roasted in the fire. You will devour the head with the feet and the entrails, and nothing will be left in the morning. If anything is left, you will burn it in the fire. "And Moses adds," This is how you will eat it: you will tie your loins, you will have the sandals on your feet, the staff in your hand, and you eat it hastily "(Ex 12: 7-11). All these things will become very enlightening to us if we explain the mystical meaning.

What is the blood of the lamb, it is no longer for having heard of it that you have come to know it, but for drinking it. This blood is put on the two uprights of the door when it is not absorbed only by the mouth of the body, but also by that of the heart. The blood of the lamb is put on the two door posts when, receiving for its salvation the sacrament of the Passion of the Lord, one also thinks with all one's mind of imitating it. For whoever receives the blood of his Redeemer without necessarily imitating his Passion puts this blood on only one amount, while it should also put on the lintel of the door of the houses. Do houses, in the spiritual sense, not signify our minds, that we live by thought? And the lintel of such houses is the will that governs our action. Thus, he who applies his will and thought to imitate the Passion of the Lord puts the blood of the lamb on the lintel of his house. Unless our houses are our own bodies, in which we live as long as we live: we put the blood of the lamb on the lintel of the house when we carry on our forehead the cross of his Passion.3

The text adds about this lamb: "And that night we will eat the meat roasted in the fire." It is well at night that we eat the Lamb, since we do not receive the body of the Lord than sacramentally, without us yet being able to see the consciences of each other.4

Its flesh must be roasted in the fire: in a cooking with water, the flesh disintegrates under the action of the fire, whereas they firm themselves if they are roasted with the fire without water. They were burnt in the fire, the flesh of our Lamb, because it is the vehemence of his Passion that gave him more power in his resurrection and made him firmer in his incorruptibility. The flesh of the one who was reinvigorated by death was thus strengthened by fire. This is why the psalmist says, "My strength has withered like a pottery shard." (Ps 22:16). Before going into the fire, the shard of pottery is only soft earth. It is the fire that solidifies it. Thus, the virtue of the humanity of the Lord has dried up like a shard, since the fire of the Passion has communicated to him a virtue of incorruptibility.

8. The mere reception of the sacraments of our Redeemer is not enough to really celebrate the solemnity, if we do not add good works too. What good is it, indeed, to receive by the mouth the body and the blood of the Lord, if we oppose him by bad morals? This is why the text adds that we must also eat "unleavened bread and wild lettuce". To eat unleavened bread is to perform righteous deeds without corrupting them by vain glory, it is to keep the commandments of mercy without sin, lest we divert, by perversion, what we had, so to speak, built well straight. It was this same ferment of sin that their good deeds had mixed up with whom the Lord blamed by the voice of the prophet, saying to them, "Go to Bethel and act like ungodly ones." And a little further: "And offer a sacrifice of praise with leaven "(Am 4: 4-5). To offer a sacrifice of praise with leaven is to prepare a sacrifice to God with the product of rapine. As for wild lettuce, they are very bitter. The flesh of the lamb must therefore be eaten with wild lettuce, in the sense that we must shed tears for our sins when we receive the body of the Redeemer, so that the bitterness of our penance will purge our spiritual stomach of the moods that our disorderly life has introduced it.

And the text to add: "You will not eat anything believed or cooked in water." Here the very words of this story reject us far from a literal interpretation. Could it be, dear brothers, that the people of Israel have been accustomed to eating raw lamb during their stay in Egypt, so that the Law may say to them, "You shall not eat anything believed," and that she adds: "Not cooked in water"? But what does water mean, if not human science? This is what Solomon affirms when he puts these words into the lips of heretics: "The stolen waters are sweeter" (Pr 9, 17). As for the raw flesh of the lamb, what do they symbolize, if not the humanity of the Lord, which our mind does not take into consideration, and from which it turns away its thought and respect? Because all that we deepen by thought, we bake it so to speak in our mind. But the flesh of the lamb should not be eaten raw or boiled in water, because one should no more consider our Redeemer as a pure man than to probe by human wisdom how God was able to incarnate . Those who believe that our Redeemer was a pure man, do they not eat the flesh of the Lamb, since they refuse to cook them by considering his divinity? And those who strive to penetrate the mystery of his Incarnation according to human wisdom, want to water the flesh of the Lamb, that is to say, to clarify the mystery of the economy of salvation by means of their poor impotent science. Whoever wishes to celebrate the Easter holidays with joy, must neither cook the Lamb in the water nor eat it raw: nor desire to penetrate the mystery of his Incarnation through human wisdom, nor to believe in him as a pure man; but he must eat the flesh of the Lamb roasted in fire, that is to say, know that everything has been arranged by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Our text then aptly adds: "You shall devour the head with the feet and the entrails." Is not our Redeemer the alpha and the omega, that is, God before the ages? and man at the end of the centuries? As we have already told you, my brethren, we learned earlier from Paul's testimony that "the head of Christ is God." To eat the Lamb's head is therefore to recognize his divinity by faith. To eat the feet of the Lamb is to follow his humanity to the trace by loving and imitating him. As for the entrails, what are they, if not the hidden and symbolic commands contained in his words? We devour them when we eagerly absorb the words of life. This word "to devour" certainly reproaches us for our lazy inertia: we who, on the one hand, do not inquire of his words and his mysteries, and on the other hand, listen to them only with regret when others us them exhibit.

"And there will be nothing in the morning", since we must scrutinize the words of the Lord with great care, so that everything he commands us, we assimilated in the night of the present life by applying ourselves to understanding and putting it into practice before the day of the resurrection. But as it is very difficult to come to understand all the Holy Scripture and to assimilate all its mystery, the text rightly adds: "If there is anything left, you will burn it in the fire." For us, to burn with fire who remains of the Lamb is to humbly reserve for the power of the Holy Spirit what we can not understand or assimilate in the mystery of the Incarnation, so that we do not have the pride to despise or to refuse what one does not understand, but to pass it on fire, reserving it to the Holy Spirit.

9. Since we are now informed about how to eat the Passover, let us now learn in which arrangements we should do it. The text goes on to say, "This is how you will eat it: you will put on your loins." What are the kidneys, if not the delectation of the flesh? This is why the psalmist makes this prayer: "Pass my loins to the fire." (Ps 26,2). If he did not know that carnal desire had its seat in his loins, he would not ask God to put them into the fire. And because the power of the devil over the human race has prevailed above all by lust, the Lord pronounces on him the saying, "His strength is in his loins" (Jb 40:16). To eat the Passover therefore requires to have the loins girded, so that, in celebrating the solemnity of the Resurrection and the incorruptibility, the slave of any corruption is no longer rendered by his vices, the voluptuousness is completely dominated, and keep his flesh away from lust. For he whom his incontinence still submits to corruption, does not know what this solemnity of incorruptibility is. These words are hard for some to hear, but they are narrow, the gateway to life (Mt 7:14). And we already have many examples of people who have lived chastely.

That is why it is added very aptly: "You will have sandals on your feet." Feet, indeed, are our works, and sandals, skins of dead animals that strengthen our feet. These dead animals whose skins strengthen our feet, are the ancient Fathers who preceded us in the eternal homeland. We strengthen the feet of our works by meditating on their examples. To have the sandals on one's feet is to meditate on the life of those dead and to preserve our footsteps from the wound of sin.

"Stick in hand." What does the Law mean by the stick, if not the pastoral charge? It should be noted that the Law requires us first to gird our loins, and only afterwards, to hold our staff: they must take care of souls only those who first knew how to dominate in their bodies the weaknesses of lust, in order to preach courage to others, they do not themselves succumb loosely to sensual desires.

The text rightly adds, "And you will eat it hastily." Notice, dear brothers, notice the phrase "hastily." The commandments of God, the mysteries of the Redeemer, the joys of the heavenly homeland, hasten to know them. And hurry to fulfill the precepts of life. That it is still possible to do good today, we know it; if it will be tomorrow, we do not know it. Therefore, eat the Passover in a hurry, that is to say, aspire to the feasts of the heavenly homeland. Let no one fall asleep in the path of this life for fear of losing one's place in the homeland. Let no one delay in the execution of his plans, but let all finish what they have done, lest they be able to finish what they are beginning. If we are not lazy to love God, it is the very one we love, our Lord Jesus Christ, who will help us, who, being God, lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Spirit, for ever and ever. Amen.

______________________________

1 On the word "compunction", cf. the introduction to homily 15.