Luke XVI, 1-13. The Unfaithful Intendant.

Luke, XVI, 16-18.

"The Law and the Prophets lasted until John": not that the Law has ceased, but the preaching of the gospel begins: what is less seems indeed to come to an end when the best occurs. So let's do violence in the Kingdom of Heaven: whoever does violence hastens in a vehement desire, instead of dragging himself into a disposition of torpor. In faith, therefore, violence is religion, nonchalance fault. The law in many things followed nature; she granted something to natural desires, to call us to seek justice; Christ has carved in nature, subtracting even the natural pleasures. So do violence to nature, so that it does not get bogged down in the earth, but rises to the heights.

"Whoever forsakes his wife and takes another, is adulterous; and to marry the woman who has been abandoned by her husband is to be adulterous. We must first speak, I think, of the law of marriage, in order then to deal with the prohibition of divorce. Some indeed think that all marriage is of God, especially since it is written: "What God has united, let man not separate him" (Matt, XIX, 6). If, then, all marriage is of God, it is not permissible to dissolve any marriage; and how did the Apostle say, "If the unbelieving go away, let him go away" (I Cor. VII, 15)? In which he was admirable: he did not wish that there should remain among the Christians a cause of divorce, and he showed that all marriage is not of God: for the Christians do not unite with the Gentiles by the authority of God, since the law forbids it. But behold Solomon's word: "The fathers share in their sons their house and their goods; but it is God who will prepare man for his wife "(Prov., XIX, 14). Read in Greek, there is no opposition; because the Greek said precisely:? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ; harmony is indeed called assembly, the union that grants and adapts all things. There is harmony, when the pipes of an instrument grouped with order maintain the agreement of a right melody, when the whole of the strings remains adapted and tuned. Therefore, there is no harmony in a wedding where a Christian husband illegally unites with a pagan woman. So when there is marriage, there is harmony; when there is harmony, it is God who unites; when there is no harmony, there is struggle and dissension: what is not of God, since "God is charity" (I Jn, IV, 8). Beware therefore of repudiating your wife: it would be to deny that God is the author of your union. Indeed, if you must tolerate and amend the morals of others, especially those of your wife. Listen to what the Lord has said: "To repudiate his wife is to make her adulterous" (Matt. V 32). So indeed that it is not permissible for her to change home during her husband's lifetime, the pleasure of sin can slip into her home. Thus the one who caused his misguidance is guilty and at fault, when the mother wife is sent away with her little ones, when, aged and with a staggering gait, she is thrown out. It is wrong to drive out the mother, to keep the children, adding to the outrage to her love the wound to her affections; more cruel, to hunt because of the mother and at the same time the children, whereas the children should rather buy in the eyes of their father the wrong of the mother. What a risk, to expose to misguidance the weak age of a teenager! How hard, to abandon old age after deflowering youth! It would be better if an emperor dismissed a veteran without paying his services, without honors, by stripping him of the command he possessed, and a farmer expelling from his field the villager exhausted by his work! What is forbidden to the subjects would be allowed with regard to a spouse? You therefore dismiss your wife as of right, without grievance, and you believe it to be permissible because human law does not forbid it; but that of God forbids it. You obey men: fear God. Listen to the law of the Lord, to which those who enact the laws defy themselves: "What God has united, let not man separate him. But it is not only a precept of heaven that is destroyed here; it's like a work of God. Will you allow, I pray you, that during your lifetime your children depend on a father-in-law, or, their mother subsisting, live under a stepmother? Suppose the divorced woman does not marry: should she displease you when you were her husband, who keeps you faith, adulteresses? Suppose she gets married: the end where she is accusing you, and what you believe marriage is adultery. What does it matter whether you commit adultery by openly displaying your fault or by pretending to be a husband, except that it is more serious to commit the crime on principle than by stealth.

But it may be said, "Why did Moses command to give a certificate of repudiation and to dismiss the wife" (Matt., XIX, 7)? Whoever speaks thus is Jewish; whoever speaks thus is not a Christian; and since he objects to what was objected to the Lord, let the Lord answer him: "It is," said he, "for the hardness of your heart, that Moses allowed you to give a certificate of repudiation and to send away your wives; but in the beginning it was not so "(Matt., XIX, 8). Moses, he said, allowed; it is not God who has ordained. But in the beginning there is the law of God. What is the law of God? "The man will leave father and mother, and he will be attached to his wife, and they will be two in one body" (Gen., II, 24, Matth., XIX, 5). So to send back his wife is to tear his flesh, it is to share his body. But this passage shows that what was written because of human weakness was not written by God. So the Apostle says, "I mean? not me, but the Lord? the wife not to leave her husband "(I Cor., VII, 10); and lower: "I say to others? me, not the Lord? if any brother has an unbelieving wife, and let him go ... "(Ib., 12). Thus, when there is unequal marriage, he adds, "If the unbeliever withdraws, let him withdraw" (Ib., 15). At the same time, the Apostle denied that the dissolution of any marriage was in the divine law; he also did not prescribe it; he did not allow abandonment; but he exonerated the abandoned. This as to the moral sense. However, since he has already published the announcement of the Kingdom of God, and having said that not a point of the Law can fall, He added: "Whoever forsakes his wife to take another, is adulterous The Apostle gives us a just warning that this is a great mystery concerning Christ and the Church (Ephesians V 32). So you find there a marriage of which no one can doubt that God has united him, since he says himself: "No one comes to me unless my Father, who sent me, draws him" (Jn, VI, 44). He alone could unite such nuptials, and this is why Solomon says, in the mystical sense: "It is God who prepares his wife for man" (Prov., XIX, 14). The Bridegroom is Christ, the Bride, the Church: wife by love, virgin by chastity. That he, therefore, whom God has drawn to Christ, should not be separated by persecution, diverted by debauchery; that he should not be ravaged by philosophy, corrupted by the Manichean, misled by the Arian, spoiled by the Sabellian. God has united him, that the Jew does not separate him. Adulterers are all who would adulterate the truth of faith and wisdom. "What is," he says, "the act of repudiation of your mother, by which I sent her away" (Is., L, 1)? You have heard: repudiation; believe there was union. You have heard what the same man said to the people of the Jews: "For your iniquities you have been sold, and for your sins I have sent away your mother" (Ib.). Stay then, you, in the house of the Father; stay with the Bridegroom, strive to please your husband. May your intelligence, by which you have believed in God, be a strong woman, such as the one - the soul in the Church, or the Church - of which Solomon says: "The strong woman, who will find her? More precious than precious stones is such a woman; her husband has confidence in her "(Prov., XXXI, 10 ssq.).

Let's see what she does for her Bridegroom, what is her work, what is her submission, why does Christ trust her? A good wife dresses her husband: may your faith put Jesus on his body, and put on his flesh in the radiance of his divinity: this is how the other had made double clothing for his husband (Prov., XXXI , 21 ssq.)? in order to honor him and presently and in the future century. It is not a woman of any kind whose work is so done; that which her husband finds not detangling the silky threads of wool, but handling the skeins of a precious virtue; the one who raises hands during the nights (Ps. 133, 2) and distributes the work "to the book", verifies the gravity of his manners, who also knows how to keep the measure in his actions, weaving the web of a glorious labor, worrying at the moment when his Bridegroom will return, anxious, sighing, desiring to be already with his Bridegroom, saying: my Bridegroom is slow in coming, I will hasten myself to Him; I will meet him face to face, when He will begin to come in His glory. Come, Lord Jesus, find your spouse without stain, without attack, who has not violated your dwelling, who has not neglected your commandments. May she say to you, "I have found Him whom my soul loved" (Cant. III, 4); to introduce you to the house of wine? for "wine rejoices the heart of man" (Ps 103, 15)? let her be drunk with the Spirit, recognize the mystery, make the oracle sound.

Luke, XVI, 19-31. The bad rich.

"But some rich man was dressed in purple. "

It is, it seems, a story rather than a parable, as long as the name itself is expressed. It is not without reason that the Lord has shown here a rich man having exhausted the delights of the world, installed in hell in the torment of a perpetual hunger (and it is not in vain that we see him five brothers, that is to say, the five senses of the body, united by a sort of fraternity of nature, which burned with lusts without measure and without number); on the other hand, He has lodged Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham, as in a quiet harbor and an inviolable asylum, lest, tempered by the pleasures present, we remain in vices, or, overcome by weariness, 'Dodge the toil and toil. So let it be Lazarus, poor in the world but rich before God, or one who, according to the Apostle, is poor in word, rich in faith (Jac., II, 5) - because all poverty is not holy or all reprehensible riches, but, as debauchery dishonours wealth, sanctity recommends poverty - therefore of the apostolic man who keeps true faith, who does not seek the diadem of words, the makeup of reasonings, the sumptuous clothes of the phrases, he receives his reward with attrition while fighting the heretics: the Manichean, Marcion, Sabellius, Arius and Photin - these are indeed simply the brothers of the Jews, to whom the family of the the false belief - repressing on the other hand the lusts of the flesh, which, as I said, are fanned by the five senses, it receives, I say, its reward with usury, having in payment of superabundant riches and the rent of eternity. And we do not believe it wrong to think that this passage also concerns faith: Lazarus collects it rejected from the table of the rich; his ulcers, in the literal sense, would certainly horrify the rich disgusted, and among his sumptuous feasts and his perfumed guests he would not bear the odor of ulcers licked by dogs, he who gets tired of the scents of air and nature itself; and yet the arrogance and morgue of the rich is translated into appropriate signs, being so oblivious to their condition as men that, as they are established above nature, they find in the miseries of the poor a seasoning to their pleasures, laugh at the needy, insult the miserable, and rob those who should be pitied. So let's get the two points of view, if you will - like Lazare. I find a resemblance to him who, several times scourged by the Jews (II Cor., XI, 24) to give patience to the believers and to call the Gentiles, offered, so to speak, the ulcers of his body to lick at dogs ; for it is written, "They will turn to the evening, and endure hunger like dogs" (Ps 58, 15). The Chananean recognized this mystery, and it is said to her: "No one takes the bread of the children to throw it to the dogs. She acknowledged that this bread is not the bread that is seen, but the one that understands itself; so she replied: "No doubt, Lord; but the little dogs eat crumbs which fall from the table of their masters. These crumbs come from this bread; and since bread is the word, and faith in the word, the crumbs are, so to speak, the dogmas of faith.

Thereupon, the Lord answers, to show that she had spoken as a believer: "O woman, great is your faith" (Matt., XV, 22ff.).

 O blessed ulcers, which prevent eternal suffering! O abundant crumbs, who chase the endless fast, who fill eternal food with the poor who gather you! The head of the Synagogue rejected you from his table, when he rejected the intimate mysteries of the prophetic writings and the Law: for the crumbs are the words of the Scriptures, of which it is said, "And you have rejected my speeches behind you" ( Ps. 49, 17). The scribe rejected you; but Paul collected you with the greatest care, drawing the people by his sufferings. These licked his ulcers which saw him, bitten by the serpent, without fear of shaking the serpent, and who believed (Act., XXVIII, 3ff.). The guardian of the prison licked them: he washed Paul's wounds, and he believed (Ib., Xvi, 33). Happy dogs, on whom dripping the liquid of such ulcers, to fill their hearts and fortify their throats, so that they train to keep the house, to defend the flock, to watch over the wolves!

 Now represent the Arians, applied to the worries of the world, seeking the alliance of royal power to attack the truth of the Church with warlike weapons. Do not they seem to you stretched out on beds made of purple and fine linen, defending their makeup as truth, lavish of sumptuous speeches, when they argue that the earth trembled under the body of the Lord, that the sky was covered with darkness, that his word has raised or soothed the seas, and yet deny that he is true Son of God? Also call on the poor man, who, knowing that the Kingdom of God is not a question of words but of virtue (I Cor. IV, 20), expressed his thought in a few words, saying: "You are the Son of the living God "(Matt. XVI, 16). Do not you think that these riches are destitute, this opulent poverty? Heresy, rich, has composed many gospels; poor faith has kept the only gospel she has received. Philosophy, rich, has made many gods; the poor Church knows only one God. Between the poor and the rich there is therefore a "great abyss", because after death the merits can not be changed: so we are shown the rich in hell, wishing to suck the poor a little refreshing breeze ; for water is the comfort of the soul in a state of suffering; from her, Isaiah says: "And water will flow nicely from the sources of salvation" (Is., XII, 3). But why is he tortured before judgment? Because for a debauchee the deprivation of pleasures is a punishment; for the Lord says again, "There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of heaven" (Lk 13:28). Now, in the long run, this rich man mixes himself with being a master, whereas for him it is time to learn, and not to teach. In this passage the Lord declares with the last evidence that the Old Testament is the foundation of faith; He rebuffs the incredulity of the Jews and cuts short the wiles of the heretics who make the weak soul stumble; for the little ones are those who do not yet know the growth in virtue. Now it is permissible to remark that above the parable of the bursar (Lk. XVI, 1ff.) And here that of the rich contain a call to mercy: perhaps there he teaches to give to the saints, whom he calls friends and to whom He attributes tents (Ib., 9), and here to the poor.