“Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost”
Our Lenten programme reflects on the Fathers of the Early Church in their reading of some of the Sunday Gospels in Lent. We have already touched upon who the Fathers are and their significance for the establishment of the Scriptures and the credal understanding of the Faith itself. I would like to offer a few brief passages from Augustine in particular that shed light on the Church’s general reading of the Scriptures in the liturgical patterns of Lent.
Here is Augustine on the powerful Gospel story for the Second Sunday in Lent about the encounter between the Canaanite Woman and Christ.
She “shows us,” he says, “an example of humility, and the way of godliness; [and] shows us how to rise from humility unto exaltation.” That is a pretty good summary of the spiritual teaching of this scene and its meaning for us in our pilgrimage. “Now she was, as it appears,” Augustine goes on to say, “not of the people of Israel, of whom came the Patriarchs, and Prophets, and the parents of the Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh; of whom the Virgin Mary herself was, who was the Mother of Christ. This woman then was not of this people; but of the Gentiles. For, as we have heard, the Lord “departed into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, and behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts,” and with the greatest earnestness begged of Him the mercy to heal her daughter, “who was grievously vexed with a devil.” Tyre and Sidon were not cities of the people of Israel, but of the Gentiles; though they bordered on that people. So then, as being eager to obtain mercy she cried out, and boldly knocked; and He made as though He heard her not, not to the end that mercy might be refused her, but that her desire might be enkindled; and not only that her desire might be enkindled, but that, as I have said before, her humility might be set forth.”
His interest is to bring out the universality of the Gospel of Christ for all peoples and yet as arising from the particularity of the people of Israel. His sermons, like many in the Patristic period, endeavour to distinguish between things Jewish and things Christian at the same time as showing their intrinsic connection. The task belongs to the larger aspect of an essential feature of philosophical religion in the idea of a necessary self-critique of religion itself, the awareness of a tendency to reduce God to the forms of human thought rather than recognizing how human thought is raised up into the divine thinking and thus redeemed from its follies.
Here is how Augustine approaches this question. “Therefore did she cry, while the Lord was as though He heard her not, but was ordering in silence what He was about to do. The disciples besought the Lord for her, and said, “Send her away; for she cries after us. And He said, I am not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” As he says, “Here arises a question out of these words; If He was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel, how came we from among the Gentiles into Christ’s fold? What is the meaning of the so deep economy of this mystery, that whereas the Lord knew the purpose of His coming — that He might have a Church in all nations, He said that ‘He was not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel’? We understand then by this that it behooved Him to manifest His Bodily presence, His Birth, the exhibition of His miracles, and the power of His Resurrection, among that people: that so it had been ordained, so set forth from the beginning, so predicted, and so fulfilled; that Christ Jesus was to come to the nation of the Jews, to be seen and slain, and to gain from among them those whom He foreknew. For that people was not wholly condemned, but sifted. There was among them a great quantity of chaff, but there was also the hidden worth of the grain; there was among them that which was to be burnt, there was among them also that wherewith the barn was to be filled. For whence came the Apostles? Whence came Peter? Whence the rest?”
Connection and differentiation. Are we not all and always being sifted, tried and tested, as it were? Do not these comments about Israel equally extend to all of us? The sermon highlights the themes of faith, humility and perseverance; the qualities necessary for the pilgrimage of Lent.
This story was followed on the Third Sunday in Lent which highlights the contradictions of evil on the one hand, calling Christ’s good evil, and the emptiness of our humanity, on the other hand, in denying the absolute and infinite goodness of God. The counter to the crisis of meaning is the blessing of hearing the Word of God and keeping it as distinct from our self-obsessions and preoccupations (as seen in the extension of the Gospel pericope). Ambrose reminded us of the critical difference between what is indivisible and what is divisible; emphasizing the indivisibility of God as Trinity and thus the power of God over all and every evil. But that requires our openness to God’s infinite mercy and grace, the finger of God, as it were, which is more than sufficient to banish every evil and in which we find blessedness.
The Fourth Sunday in Lent powerfully reminds us of the blessings of faith and humility in God’s Providential care for our humanity. A taste of the paradise of God is given in the miraculous feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, a miracle in the face of our lack. Five barley loaves and two small fishes – so little among so many – and yet God makes something great out of our so little; indeed, the story shows how we are sustained in the wilderness journey by the crumbs that remain after the picnic banquet in the wilderness, twelve baskets symbolic at once of the tribes of Israel and of the Apostolic Church.
Augustine in his Tractate on John’s Gospel provides an even richer banquet about the nature of revelation and the deeper meaning of miracles thus pointing us in the way of thinking sacramentally. “The miracles performed by our Lord Jesus Christ,” he says, “are indeed divine works, and incite the human mind to rise to the apprehension of God from the things that are seen.” God uses the things of creation to make himself known to us as Creator; this is our exaltation, our being raised up to understand what is greater and prior to ourselves and in which we find the truth and meaning of our humanity.
“But inasmuch as He is not such a substance as may be seen with the eyes, and His miracles in the government of the whole world and the administration of the universal creation are, by their familiar constancy, slightly regarded, so that almost no man deigns to consider the wonderful and stupendous works of God, exhibited in every grain of seed; He has, agreeably to His mercy, reserved to Himself certain works, beyond the usual course and order of nature, which He should perform on fit occasion, that they, by whom His daily works are lightly esteemed, might be struck with astonishment at beholding, not indeed greater, but uncommon works.” In other words, the miracles of the Gospel are not so much contradictions to the order of nature as the way in which we in the dullness of our blinded sight may be awakened to the greater miracle of creation and of life itself. The miracles awaken us to the purpose of creation and of the meaning of human life. God creates but cannot be simply constrained or limited to his creation.
Augustine puts this in perspective: “For certainly the government of the whole world is a greater miracle than the satisfying of five thousand men with five loaves; and yet no man wonders at the former; but the latter men wonder at, not because it is greater, but because it is rare. For who even now feeds the whole world, but He creates the cornfield from a few grains? He therefore created as God creates.” The miracles make known the truth of God in Christ, his essential divinity.
“For, whence He multiplies the produce of the fields from a few grains, from the same source He multiplied in His hands the five loaves. The power, indeed, was in the hands of Christ: but those five loaves were as seeds, not indeed committed to the earth, but multiplied by Him who made the earth.” The miracle belongs to the blessing and wonder of revelation. “In this miracle, then, there is that brought near to the senses, whereby the mind should be roused to attention, there is exhibited to the eyes, whereon the understanding should be exercised, that we might admire the invisible God through His visible works; and being raised to faith and purged by faith, we might desire to behold Him even invisibly, whom invisible we came to know by the things that are visible.” The passage reflects and expands on Paul’s famous statement in Romans that the invisible things of God are made manifest through the visible things of creation.
Augustine builds on this insight in ways that speak to the Lenten discipline of our reading and meditation upon the Scriptures. “Yet it is not enough,” he says, “to observe these things in the miracles of Christ. Let us interrogate the miracles themselves, what they tell us about Christ: for they have a tongue of their own, if they can be understood.” To interrogate the miracles of Christ belongs to ancient wisdom such as Horace who bids us interrogate the writings of the wise. What Augustine unfolds before us is a mini treatise on the nature of revelation, on what is made known to us through God’s Word and Spirit.
“For since Christ is Himself the Word of God, even the act of the Word is a word to us. Therefore as to this miracle, since we have heard how great it is, let us also search how profound it is: let us not only be delighted with its surface, but let us also seek to know its depth.” Too much of our contemporary world and our lives is lived on the surface; all our metaphors about reading in the digital age are about what is on the surface and as such superficial: surfing, browsing, scanning. These are poor substitutes for deep reading. As Augustine puts it, “this miracle, which we admire on the outside, has something within.”
He goes on to unpack this by way of the miracle of reading and writing. “We have seen, we have looked at something great, something glorious, and altogether divine which could be performed only by God: we have praised the doer for the deed. But just as, if we were to inspect a beautiful writing somewhere, it would not suffice for us to praise the hand of the writer, because he formed the letters even, equal and elegant, if we did not also read the information he conveyed to us by those letters; so, he who merely inspects his deed may be delighted with its beauty to admire the doer: but he who understands does, as it were, read it.” Don’t just look but “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest,” we might say with Cranmer who is himself building on the teaching of Augustine and Paul.
Augustine contrasts painting and writing. “For a picture is looked at in a different way from that in which a writing is looked at. When you have seen a picture, to have seen and praised it is the whole thing; when you see a writing, this is not the whole, since you are reminded also to read it.” It is a different kind of activity, he suggests. “Moreover, when you see a writing, if it chance that you can’t read, thou sayest, ’What do we think that to be which is here written?’ You ask what it is, when already you see it to be something.” You see but you do not understand what it means. You see the letters, he says, “but yet you do not alike understand the signs.” One sees and praises, but one who reads “sees, praises, reads and understands. Therefore, since we have seen and praised, let us also read and understand.”
This provides the theological basis for his interpretation of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness. The Lord on the mount is the Word on high who not only knows the human predicament but addresses it. “He saw the multitude, knew them to be hungering, mercifully fed them: not only in virtue of His goodness, but also of His power.” His power not ours. But it all turns as well on our reading of what is written, by our interrogation of the story.
“By the five loaves,” he suggests, “are understood the five books of Moses,” the Torah or the Pentateuch, a commonplace Patristic trope. They are, Augustine says, “not wheaten but barley loaves, because they belong to the Old Testament. And you know that barley is so formed that we get at its pith with difficulty; for the pith is covered in a coating of husk, and the husk itself is tenacious and closely adhering, so as to be stripped off with labor. Such is the letter of the Old Testament, invested in a covering of carnal sacraments [meaning something outward]: but yet, if we get at its pith, it feeds and satisfies us.” He goes on to suggest that the lad with five barley loaves and two fishes, symbolizes “perhaps,” as he puts it, “the people Israel, which, in a childish sense, carried, not ate.” The two fishes, he says, “appear to us to signify those who sublime persons, in the Old Testament, of priest and of ruler, [Priest and King], who were anointed for the sanctifying and governing of the people.”
Augustine hints at what will become a celebrated phrase for the later Mediaeval period, “quod Moyses velat; Christus revelat;” what Moses concealed, Christ revealed. The breaking of the loaves, which being broken are multiplied, applies to the expounding or breaking open of the five books of Moses. “Because in that barley the ignorance of the first people was veiled, of whom it is said [quoting Paul] ‘while Moses is read, the veil is upon their hearts;’ for the veil was not yet removed, because Christ had not yet come; nor yet was the veil of the temple rent” – a reference to the Passion and Crucifixion – “while Christ is hanging on the cross: because, I say, the ignorance of the people was in the law.”
The rest of this chapter of the Tractate unpacks carefully, thoughtfully and speculatively all the details of the miracle and its meaning within the larger context of God’s revelation of himself. The point is really about interrogating the miracle and digging into its deeper meaning. For as Augustine says, “Nothing is without meaning; everything is significant [albeit in different degrees], but requires one who understands.” In the context of the story he points to the differing degrees of knowing and thus to the task of interrogating and understanding. “What the eyes were able to do in their case [meaning those who saw and marvelled], that faith does in our case. We perceive, namely, with the mind, what we could not with the eyes.” For as he puts it, “we have been fed in reality, in that we have been able to get at the pith of the barley.” Christ has come himself to exhort us “to faith and to laying hold of eternal life.” Such are the blessings of faith and humility opened out to us by reading with the Fathers and interrogating the Scriptures.
“Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost”
Fr. David Curry
Lenten Programme II, 2024