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Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time

CHRYSOSTOM:

For what purpose does he go up into the hills on the mountain? To teach us that solitude and seclusion are good, when we are to pray to God. With this in view, you see, we find him continually withdrawing into the wilderness. There he often spends the whole night in prayer. This teaches us earnestly to seek such quietness in our prayers as the time and place may afford. For the wilderness is the mother of silence; it is a calm and a harbor, delivering us from all turmoils.

CHRYSOSTOM:

The disciples are tossed on the waves again. They are in a storm, fully as bad as the previous one. Gently and by degrees he excites and urges the disciples on toward greater responsiveness, even to the point of bearing all things nobly. Whereas in the previous storm they had him with them in the ship, now they were alone by themselves. Even when he was asleep in the boat in the previous situation, he was ready to give them relief from danger. But then he was present to them.
Now he is leading them into a greater degree of challenge. Now he is not even present to them. He has departed. In midsea he permits a storm to arise. This was all for their training, that they might not look for some easy hope of preservation from any earthly source. He then allows them to be tossed by the storm all night! This had the purpose of awakening their stony hearts in a most complete way. This is how Jesus dealt with the nature of their fear, which the rough weather and the timing had produced. He cast them directly into a situation in which they would have a greater longing for him and a continual remembrance of him. read more

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Saint John Mary Vianney – Meditation

The beheading of St. John the Baptist is horrifying not only because it is an awful way for an innocent man to die, but also because his head is given as a party favor to a young girl.  The young girl won this gift not by her virtue, but by seduction.  The Voice is silenced by the hatred of a woman.  She doesn’t hate John, she hates what he says, she hates to hear the sound of his voice because it delivers the Law.  When John goes silent, the Law itself goes silent.  We see how powerless John was to save all the individuals at this party, we see how the law did not provoke conversion, but rather frustration and rage.  The Law is simply that Word by which we were created calling to the forefront of our mind what our conscience already knows and understands.  The Law amplifies the voice of our conscience, which is why St. Paul said that the Law gives sin more power.  The Law causes the quiet voice of our conscience, that would convict us of our own wrongdoing, to become shrill and unbearable.  The Law then simply implies that if we don’t like hearing how wrong we are, we should change our ways.  The problem is, we are not convinced that we will be happy if we change our ways to conform to the Law.  We can attempt to conform ourselves to the Law and still remain far from God – that was the problem of the Pharisees: they did everything correctly according to their understanding, but could not recognize God when He came in the flesh speaking the very Word they claimed to understand. read more

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Saint John Mary Vianney

JEROME:

Jeremiah needed the help of Ahikam. How much more do we need that of God?

AGAINST THE PELAGIANS 2.27. Wenthe, D. O. (Ed.). (2009). Jeremiah, Lamentations (p. 192). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

THEODORE OF HERACLEA:

Thinking that the Baptist had risen from the dead, Herod began to be afraid of him, as though John had become all the more powerful. He was alarmed lest John should employ against him even more of his caustic freedom of speech, which was a terror to him, frustrating him by revealing his crooked deeds.

FRAGMENT 93. Simonetti, M. (Ed.). (2002). Matthew 14-28 (p. 2). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

CHRYSOSTOM:

Do you see the intensity of his fear? Herod did not dare speak of it openly, but he still speaks apprehensively to his own servants. Yet this whole opinion was absurd. It savored of the jittery soldier. Even though many were thought to have risen from the dead, no one had done anything like what was imagined of John. Herod’s words seem to me to be the language both of vanity and of fear. For such is the nature of unreasonable souls; they often accept a mixture of opposite passions. read more