Peter Chrysologus: Let Your Heart be an Altar Tuesday, May 17 2011

Listen now to what the Apostle urges us to do: I appeal to you, he says, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.

By this exhortation of his, Paul has raised all men to priestly status.

How marvellous is the priesthood of the Christian, for he is both the victim that is offered on his own behalf, and the priest who makes the offering.

He does not need to go beyond himself to seek what he is to immolate to God: with himself and in himself he brings the sacrifice he is to offer God for himself.

The victim remains and the priest remains, always one and the same.

Immolated, the victim still lives: the priest who immolates cannot kill.

Truly it is an amazing sacrifice in which a body is offered without being slain and blood is offered without being shed.

The Apostle says: I appeal to you by the mercy of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.

Brethren, this sacrifice follows the pattern of Christ’s sacrifice by which he gave his body as a living immolation for the life of the world.

He really made his body a living sacrifice, because, though slain, he continues to live.

In such a victim death receives its ransom, but the victim remains alive.

Death itself suffers the punishment.

This is why death for the martyrs is actually a birth, and their end a beginning.

Their execution is the door to life, and those who were thought to have been blotted out from the earth shine brilliantly in heaven.

Paul says: I appeal to you by the mercy of God to present your bodies as a sacrifice, living and holy.

The prophet said the same thing: Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but you have prepared a body for me.

Each of us is called to be both a sacrifice to God and his priest.

Do not forfeit what divine authority confers on you.

Put on the garment of holiness, gird yourself with the belt of chastity.

Let Christ be your helmet, let the cross on your forehead be your unfailing protection.

Your breastplate should be the knowledge of God that he himself has given you.

Keep burning continually the sweet smelling incense of prayer.

Take up the sword of the Spirit. Let your heart be an altar.

Then, with full confidence in God, present your body for sacrifice.

God desires not death, but faith; God thirsts not for blood, but for self-surrender.

God is appeased not by slaughter, but by the offering of your free will.

Peter Chrysologus (c.380 – c.450): Sermon 108, from the Office of Readings for Tuesday of the 4th week of Easter, @ Crossroads Initiative.

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Peter Chrysologus: Turning the Other Cheek Saturday, Feb 12 2011

I say to you: Do not resist an evil man.

When Christ says this, he means that we should not repay one offence with another but overcome it by virtue, thus extinguishing the fire of anger while it is still only a spark.

For if it becomes a full raging blaze it will not be put out without blood being shed.

Anger is overcome by mild­ness, rage is extinguished by gentleness, cruelty is subverted by goodness.

Patience punishes impa­tience, the acceptance of insults halts strife, and humility over­throws pride.

Therefore, if you wish to overcome offences, take up the weapons not of rage but of religion.

[...] The sickness of sin, vice, wickedness and impiety entered the deranged souls of men and with its savage rage drove out all knowledge, sense, and reason.

It caused the nations of the world to flee from God, follow demons, and worship creatures; to spurn the creator, desire evil and bring death to the living.

Consequently, the only way of healing the race was to send men, armed with all the devotion and patience of the heavenly physi­cian.

These people would endure the insults of their frenzied fellows, put up with their curses, bear their blows, and let themselves be wounded by them.

This they would do until they could bring their fellows back to sobriety and sense and thus enable them to seek God, flee demons, realise their illnesses, desire heal­ing, reject vice, acquire virtue, cease from wounding others, abhor bloodshed, reject killing, and restore life.

[...] So et us obey Christ and with all the strength afforded by religion let us put up with the bites and blows and burdens heaped on us by frenzied brethren.

In this way we may deliver them from punishment and win an everlasting reward for our patience.

Let us not refuse to accept from our fellow servants what our Lord deigned to accept from and for his servants.

He did not withdraw his face from their blows; to those who took his tunic and his coat he gave his body as well; and when they imposed forced labour on him, he freely and gladly followed them to death.

Therefore, if the Lord thought it right that he should suffer, can a servant consider it beneath him or her?

If we think so, we are mistaken, brethren, we are mistaken; for those who will not do what the Lord commanded will wait in vain for what he promised.

Peter Chrysologus (c.380 – c.450): Sermon 38 (CCL 24:217-9);  from the Monastic Office of Vigils, Saturday of the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time, Year I.

 

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Peter Chrysologus: Christ Is Born That By His Birth He Might Restore Our Nature Wednesday, Dec 29 2010

A virgin conceived, bore a son, and yet remained a virgin.

This is no common occurrence, but a sign; no reason here, but God’s power, for he is the cause, and not nature.

It is a special event, not shared by others; it is divine, not human.

Christ’s birth was not necessity, but an expression of omnipotence, a sacrament of piety for the redemption of men.

[...] Why then, man, are you so worthless in your own eyes and yet so precious to God?

Why render yourself such dishonor when you are honored by him?

Why do you ask how you were created and do not seek to know why you were made?

Was not this entire visible universe made for your dwelling?

It was for you that the light dispelled the overshadowing gloom.

For your sake was the night regulated and the day measured, and for you were the heavens embellished with the varying brilliance of the sun, the moon and the stars.

The earth was adorned with flowers, groves and fruit; and the constant marvellous variety of lovely living things was created in the air, the fields, and the seas for you, lest sad solitude destroy the joy of God’s new creation.

And the Creator still works to devise things that can add to your glory.

He has made you in his image that you might in your person make the invisible Creator present on earth.

He has made you his legate, so that the vast empire of the world might have the Lord’s representative.

Then in his mercy God assumed what he made in you.

He wanted now to be truly manifest in man, just as he had wished to be revealed in man as in an image.

Now he would be in reality what he had submitted to be in symbol.

And so Christ is born that by his birth he might restore our nature.

He became a child, was fed, and grew that he might inaugurate the one perfect age to remain forever as he had created it.

He supports man that man might no longer fall.

And the creature he had formed of earth he now makes heavenly; and what he had endowed with a human soul he now vivifies to become a heavenly spirit.

In this way he fully raised man to God, and left in him neither sin, nor death, nor travail, nor pain, nor anything earthly, with the grace of our Lord Christ Jesus, who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, now and for ever, for all the ages of eternity.

Peter Chrysologus (c.380 – c.450): Sermon 148, PL 52, 596-598, from the Office of Readings for the memorial of St. Peter Chrysologus on July 30 @ Crossroads Initiative.

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