Thursday 12 May 2022
Thursday of the 4th week of Eastertide
or Saints Nereus and Achilleus, Martyrs
or Saint Pancras, Martyr
Spiritual Reading
Your Second Reading from the Office of Readings:
Thursday of the 4th week of Eastertide
From a treatise on John by St Augustine
The new commandment
The Lord Jesus declares that he is giving his disciples a new commandment, that they should love one another: I give you a new commandment: love one another.
But wasn’t this commandment already part of the ancient law of God, where it is written You shall love your neighbour as yourself? Why, then, is it called a new one by the Lord, when it is really so old? Is it new because he has divested us of our old humanity and clothed us with the new? It is true that love renews those who listen to it (or rather, those who act in obedience to it) but it is that particular love which the Lord distinguished from all carnal affection by adding love one another as I have loved you.
This is the love that renews us, making us new men, heirs of the New Testament, singers of the new song. It was this love, my beloved brethren, that renewed the patriarchs and prophets of old, and later renewed the blessed apostles. This is the love that is now renewing the nations, and from among the universal race of man, which overspreads the whole world, is making and gathering together a new people, the body of the newly-married spouse of the only-begotten Son of God. Of her the Song of Songs says, Who is she who is coming up, clothed in white? Clothed in white because she has been renewed; and how else can she have been renewed but by the new commandment?
Because of this, the members of the people of God have a mutual interest in one another; and if one member suffers then all the members suffer with it; and if one member is honoured then all the members rejoice with it. For this they hear and this they observe: I give you a new commandment: love one another: not as people who pretend to love in order to corrupt one another, nor indeed as people love one another genuinely but in a human way. Rather, they love one another as those who belong to God. All of them are children of the Most High and consequently brethren of his only Son. They share with each other the love with which he leads them to the end that will bring them fulfilment and the true satisfaction of their real desires. For when God is all in all, there is no desire that is unfulfilled.
This love is bestowed on us by him who said, Just as I have loved you, you also must love one another. He loved us so that we should love one another. By loving us he bound us to one another in mutual love, and by this gentle bond united us into the body of which he is the most noble Head.
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Other choices for today:
Saints Nereus and Achilleus, Martyrs
Flavia Domitilla with Saints Nereus and Achilleus (1608), by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), at Santa Maria in Vallicella, Rome.
A commentary on Psalm 61 by St Augustine
The sufferings of Christ are not in Christ alone
Jesus Christ is one man, head and body; the saviour of the body and the members of the body are two in one flesh and in one voice and in one suffering; and, when this sinful world shall have passed away, in one rest. So the sufferings of Christ are not in Christ alone; indeed there are no sufferings of Christ except in Christ.
If you understand Christ to be the head and the body, there are no sufferings of Christ save in Christ; but if by Christ you understand the head alone, the sufferings of Christ are not in Christ alone. For if the sufferings of Christ were in Christ alone, that is, in the head alone, why should one of his members, the apostle Paul, speak of making up in his flesh what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ?
So if you are among the members of Christ, whoever you are, whether you hear these words or not (but you do hear, if you are among the members of Christ), whatever you suffer from those who are not among the members of Christ was lacking in the sufferings of Christ.
It is being added, because it was lacking; you are filling up the measure, not causing it to overflow. You are suffering as much as was to be contributed from your sufferings to the whole suffering of Christ, who suffered as our head, and suffers in his members, that is, in ourselves.
To this common republic of ours, so to say, each of us according to his measure pays what he owes, and we contribute as it were a quota of suffering according to the powers that we possess. The storehouse of all men’s sufferings will not have been filled until the world has come to an end.
Do not think, brothers, that all just men who have suffered persecution from the wicked, even those who were sent before the Lord to foretell his coming, do not belong to the members of Christ. God forbid that he who belongs to the city that has Christ for its king should not belong to the members of Christ.
Therefore that whole city speaks, from the blood of Abel the just to the blood of Zechariah. And after that, one city speaks, from the blood of John, through the blood of the apostles and martyrs, and through the blood of the faithful people of Christ.
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Saint Pancras, Martyr
From a sermon of St Bernard of Clairvaux
I am with him in tribulation
‘I am with him in tribulation,’ says God; and should I meanwhile seek anything other than tribulation? It is good for me to cling to the Lord, and not only to cling, but to put my hope in the Lord my God, since he says: ‘I will rescue him and glorify him.’
‘I am with him in tribulation,’ he says, ‘my delight is to be with the sons of men.’ Immanuel, God with us. He came down to be near to those who are troubled in heart, to be with us in our tribulation. There will be a time when we shall be caught up in the clouds to meet Christ in the air, and thus we shall be for ever with the Lord. But we must take care to have him with us in the meantime, so that he who is to give us our homeland may be our companion on our way, or rather that he who will then be our homeland may now be our way.
Lord, it is good for me to suffer, so long as you are with me, better than to reign without you, to feast without you, to boast without you. Lord, it is better for me to embrace you in tribulation, to have you with me in the furnace, than to be without you, even in heaven. What is there for me in heaven, and what have I desired save you on the earth? Gold is tried in the furnace, and just men in the test of tribulation. Lord, there are you, there with them: there you stand in the midst of those who are gathered in your name, as you stood once with the three young men.
Why are we afraid, why do we delay, why do we flee from this furnace? The fire rages, but the Lord is with us in tribulation. If God is with us, who can be against us? Furthermore, if he rescues us, who can snatch us out of his hand? Who can take us from his grasp? Finally, if he glorifies us, who can make us inglorious? If he glorifies us, who can humiliate us?
‘I will satisfy him with length of days.’ It is as if he were saying: I know what he desires, what he thirsts for, what pleases him. He takes no delight in gold or silver, in pleasure, the acquisition of knowledge, or any worldly dignity. He counts all these things as loss, he spurns them and values them as dirt. He has entirely emptied himself, and does not let himself be taken up with things which he knows cannot satisfy him. He knows in whose image he is made, of whose greatness he is capable, and he will not snatch at a small thing which would mean missing the greatest.
Therefore ‘I will satisfy him with length of days,’ for he can be refreshed only by the true light, and can be filled only by the eternal light. This length has no end, this brightness knows no setting, this is a satisfaction that will never grow wearisome.
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In other parts of the world and other calendars:
The Carthusian Martyrs
Martyrdom of the English Carthusians, painting c.1630 by VIncenzo Carducci (1576-1638), Museo del Prado, Madrid.
From the History of the Sufferings of Eighteen Carthusians in England, by Dom Chauncey
“Let us not be found unprepared”
In the beginning of the year 1535, it was settled by the King, and enacted by the celebrated Act of his Parliament, that all should renounce the authority and obedience they owned to our Lord the Pope, or any other superior in other countries, and should acknowledge under an oath, the King himself as Supreme Head of the Church, as well as in spirituals as in temporals; under penalty of being held guilty of high treason, and punished with death. On this being promulgated through the whole kingdom, our venerable Father Prior convened the Chapter, and explained to us what things were impending. He added at this meeting, “Being ignorant, brethren, of what may happen, let us not be found unprepared. When the Lord shall knock at the gate, let us dispose ourselves as if we were immediately to die”. Then he exhorted them to prepare their hearts by a general confession to God, and gave leave that every one should choose any confessor in the convent whom he liked, and he gave to all power of plenary absolution, – and having done this, on the following day he said: “Because in many things we offend all, and every one is debtor to his brother, and because without charity neither death nor life profit anything, let us be reconciled to one another, and on the third day, we will celebrate a Mass of the Holy Ghost, to obtain this grace whereby we may fulfil His will and good pleasure.”
When the first day had passed and the day of reconciliation being at hand, our Father concluded his sermon thus: “It is better for us to receive a short punishment here for sin, than to be kept for eternal torments.” Then he said: “My dearest Fathers and Brothers, what you see me do, I beseech you to do likewise.” Then rising, he went towards the senior of the house, sitting next to him, and kneeling before him, humbly begged pardon and forgiveness for all his excesses and sins at any time committed against him in thought, word or deed. And in the same manner the other did to him, begging pardon for his. And so the Father, going first through his choir and then to the other, made the same request to each separately, down to the last Lay-brother, weeping bitterly over each. In like manner all followed him one after another, each from each begging pardon.
The third day having come, in which the Mass of the Holy Ghost was to be celebrated, it pleased the Almighty and merciful God to work wonderful and ineffable things. In that conventual Mass, after the Elevation, a whisper as of light air, faintly sounding outwardly to the senses, but operating much within, was observed and heard by many with their bodily ears, and felt and drawn in by all with the ears of their heart. The Lay-brothers who were in chapels near the choir participated with wonderful sweetness, as well as the monks, in the grace poured out at the time of this Mass.
Copyright © 1996-2022 Universalis Publishing Limited: see www.universalis.com. Scripture readings from the Jerusalem Bible are published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. Text of the Psalms: Copyright © 1963, The Grail (England). Used with permission of A.P. Watt Ltd. All rights reserved.