Christian Wisdom

Treasures of Our Faith with Deacon Richard Vehige

On the Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time our Church invites us to reflect on a passage from the book of the prophet Jerimiah (37: 21; 38: 14-28) entitled “Jeremiah, while in prison, encourages Zedekiah to seek peace”. Our treasure, which follows, is from a sermon on the beatitudes by Saint Leo the Great, pope.

Saint Leo became pope in the year 440. Saint Leo was a Roman aristocrat, and was the first pope to have been called “the Great”. Saint Leo is known as one of the best administrative popes of the ancient Church .His work branched into many areas of the church, indicative of his notion of the pope’s total responsibility for the flock of Christ. In the 96 sermons which have come down to us, we find Leo stressing the virtues of almsgiving, fasting, and prayer, and also expounding Catholic doctrine with clarity and conciseness, in particular, the dogma of the Incarnation. Leo is perhaps best known for having met Attila the Hun in 452 and having persuaded him to turn back from his invasion of Italy.

Saint Leo’s Sermon on the Beatitudes When our Lord Jesus, beloved, was preaching the gospel of the Kingdom, and was healing various sicknesses through the whole of Galilee, the fame of His mighty works had spread into all Syria: large crowds too from all parts of Judea were flocking to the heavenly Physician. Matthew 4:23-24 “For as human ignorance is slow in believing what it does not see, and in hoping for what it does not know, those who were to be instructed in the divine lore , needed to be aroused by bodily benefits and visible miracles: so that they might have no doubt as to the wholesomeness of His teaching when they actually experienced His benignant power. And therefore that the Lord might use outward healings as an introduction to inward remedies, and after healing bodies might work cures in the soul, He separated Himself from the surrounding crowd, ascended into the retirement of a neighboring mountain, and called His apostles to Him there, that from the height of that mystic seat He might instruct them in the loftier doctrines, signifying from the very nature of the place and act that He it was who had once honored Moses by speaking to him: then indeed with a more terrifying justice, but now with a holier mercifulness, that what had been promised might be fulfilled when the Prophet Jeremiah says: behold the days come when I will complete a new covenant for the house of Israel and for the house of Judah. After those days, says the Lord, I will put My laws in their minds , and in their heart will I write them”. He therefore who had spoken to Moses, spoke also to the apostles, and the swift hand of the Word wrote and deposited the secrets of the new covenant in the disciples’ hearts: there were no thick clouds surrounding Him as of old, nor were the people frightened off from approaching the mountain by frightful sounds and lightning , but quietly and freely His discourse reached the ears of those who stood by: that the harshness of the law might give way before the gentleness of grace, and the spirit of adoption might dispel the terrors of bondage.

The Book of Jeremiah combines history, biography, and prophecy. It portrays a nation in crisis and introduces the reader to an extraordinary person whom the Lord called to prophesy under the trying circumstances of the final days of the kingdom of Judah. Jeremiah was born, perhaps about 650 B.C., of a priestly family from the village of Anathoth, two and a half miles northeast of Jerusalem. He was called to his task in the thirteenth year of King Josiah. Josiah’s reform, begun with enthusiasm and hope, ended with his death on the battlefield of Megiddo (609 B.C.) as he attempted to stop the northward march of the Egyptian Pharaoh Neco, who was going to provide assistance to the Assyrians who were in retreat before the Babylonians. Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, fell in 612 B.C., preparing the way for the new colossus, Babylon, which was soon to put an end to the independence of Judah.