Lest They Faint in the Way: The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost in the Tridentine Rite
The Mass of the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost unfolds the entire supernatural life of the Christian in one continuous movement. God implants divine life in the soul; the soul is buried with Christ and raised with Him in Baptism; the old man must then be crucified through daily mortification; and because the new life remains entirely dependent upon grace, Christ feeds His people in the wilderness, strengthens their steps upon the road and preserves them until they reach their eternal home.
Baptism, mortification, Eucharistic nourishment and perseverance are not separate subjects arbitrarily assembled. They belong to one mystery. The God who raises the sinner from spiritual death does not abandon him after his resurrection. He accompanies him through the desert of this life, provides the food without which he would faint, and guards the supernatural life which He alone could give.
The Introit establishes the necessary disposition:
Dominus fortitudo plebis suæ, et protector salutarium Christi sui est.
“The Lord is the strength of His people, and the protector of the salvation of His anointed.”
The verse which follows adds the cry of human helplessness: “To thee, O Lord, will I cry: O my God, be not thou silent to me, lest I become like them that go down into the pit.” The Christian stands between two abysses: the nothingness from which he was created and the moral ruin into which sin would cast him. His courage therefore cannot be self-confidence. It is confidence in the divine strength accompanied by knowledge of his own weakness.
Dom Prosper Guéranger identifies precisely this combination as the foundation of Christian courage: faith in the power of God, always ready to help, and the conviction of our own nothingness, which excludes presumption. The liturgy does not teach the soul to trust itself more. It teaches the soul to mistrust itself sufficiently to place its whole confidence in God.¹
This distinction is essential. Humility is not discouragement, and confidence is not presumption. The humble soul does not say that holiness is impossible; it says that holiness is impossible without grace. The presumptuous man imagines that he can stand by his own power. The discouraged man imagines that even God cannot raise him. Christian hope rejects both errors. God is strong; man is weak; therefore man must cling to God.
The Collect gathers the theology of the Mass into a few carefully ordered petitions:
O God of all power, to whom belongs whatsoever is best: implant in our hearts the love of Thy name, and grant us an increase of religion; that Thou mayest nourish what is good in us, and, by the practice of piety, preserve what Thou hast nourished.
The verbs provide the structure of the Christian life. God must implant, increase, nourish and preserve. The supernatural love of God is not produced by nature. It is infused. Once infused, it must grow. What grows must be fed. What has been fed must be protected against every force which threatens to destroy it.
Grace acts first, accompanies every subsequent act, and brings the work to perfection. Yet the Collect also speaks of the studium pietatis, the earnest practice of piety. The soul is not inert. God nourishes the good He has implanted, but He preserves it in those who correspond with His action. Catholic spirituality admits neither Pelagian self-sufficiency nor quietist passivity. Everything begins with grace, everything depends upon grace, and grace itself moves the will to cooperate freely.
Guéranger calls the Collect an admirable summary of the “strong yet sweet action of grace” throughout the Christian life. The action is strong because it transforms, uproots, crucifies and recreates. It is sweet because it acts according to the nature God Himself has made, healing freedom rather than destroying it, elevating the soul rather than suppressing it.²
The Epistle, Romans 6:3–11, reveals where this supernatural life begins:
“All we who are baptized in Christ Jesus, are baptized in his death. For we are buried together with him by baptism into death: that as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life.”
St Paul is not describing Baptism as a decorative ceremony attached to a conversion which has already taken place independently of it. Nor is he speaking of a merely external sign by which believers publicly announce their allegiance to Christ. Baptism places the recipient sacramentally within the mystery of the death and Resurrection of the Saviour. The water signifies burial and rebirth, but because it is a sacrament instituted by Christ, it also effects what it signifies.
St Thomas Aquinas draws particular attention to this sacramental causality. In the natural order, a man dies before he is buried. In the sacramental order, however, the burial represented in Baptism causes death to sin, because the sacraments of the New Law do not merely depict grace but confer it. Through the power of Christ’s Passion, Baptism removes sin, communicates sanctifying grace, incorporates the baptised into Christ and begins in him the new life of the children of God.³
Father Charles Callan explains the Apostle’s language in the same Catholic sense. Immersion represents death and burial; emergence represents resurrection. Yet the sacrament does more than reproduce these mysteries in a visible image. To be baptised into Christ is to be consecrated to Him, to become His possession and to be joined as a member to His Mystical Body. The Christian is united to Christ in His death so that he may share the life of the risen Christ.⁴
Baptism therefore creates a real division within the history of the soul. There is an old man and a new man, a former servitude and a new liberty, an existence inherited from fallen Adam and a supernatural life received from Christ. The old man is not simply an uncultivated version of the new. He belongs to a different dominion. He is “crucified with” Christ so that “the body of sin may be destroyed, and that we may serve sin no longer”.
The Christian life cannot consequently be reduced to self-improvement. The Gospel does not teach fallen man to become a more polished servant of the same passions. It demands a death. Pride, sensuality, resentment, vanity, avarice, self-will and disordered attachment must not merely be managed more respectably. Their sovereignty must be broken.
Father Leonard Goffine draws the direct moral conclusion. As Christ allowed His Body to be nailed to the Cross, so the Christian must crucify corrupt nature through self-denial. As Christ, risen from the dead, dies now no more, so the soul raised from the death of sin must not return voluntarily to its former slavery.⁵
This death does not imply hatred of the body, contempt for creation or the destruction of personality. Sin is not the essence of man. It is a disorder within him. Grace does not annihilate nature but heals and elevates it. Mortification removes what prevents man from becoming what God intended him to be.
The spiritual life therefore contains both a completed reality and an unfinished work. Sacramentally, the baptised have died and risen with Christ. Morally and ascetically, they must bring their conduct into conformity with what the sacrament has made them. They must become in daily life what they have already become in principle.
St John Chrysostom distinguishes these two aspects. The remission of past sin is God’s gift in Baptism; continued death to sin requires the baptised person’s perseverance. The sacramental death must be expressed in a moral death renewed whenever temptation attempts to restore the old tyranny.
Father Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen makes this the decisive point of his meditation for the Sunday. If we possess new life in Christ, why do we continue to fall so frequently? Because the old man has not yet been crucified completely. The weakness of the supernatural life within us often corresponds to the incompleteness of our death to self. Hence the necessity of St Paul’s other saying: Quotidie morior—“I die daily.”⁶
This is neither morbid nor pessimistic. The Christian dies only to what is hostile to life. He renounces sin because sin kills; he renounces disordered attachment because it prevents freedom; he renounces self-will because it resists divine wisdom. The mortification of the old man is inseparable from the expansion of the new.
Pius Parsch gives this doctrine a striking concreteness. By Baptism, he says, the Christian becomes as it were a hand of Christ. The hand shares what belongs to the person whose member it is. Christ’s hand blessed, healed and worked miracles; it was pierced upon the Cross, rested in the tomb, shone with the wounds of the Resurrection and was raised into heavenly glory. If the baptised person is a member of Christ, he must share the pattern of Christ’s action, suffering, death and triumph.⁷
This incorporation is not metaphorical absorption into the divine essence, nor does it abolish the distinction between Christ and the Christian. It is the supernatural union of Head and members within the Mystical Body. The life remains Christ’s and is communicated to us by grace. As Pope Pius XII teaches, the Redeemer sustains His Body and nourishes each member in a manner analogous to the vine communicating life and fruitfulness to its branches.⁸
Having taught us in the Epistle that supernatural life begins through incorporation into Christ, the liturgy places upon our lips the Gradual and Alleluia:
“Turn to us a little, O Lord, and be appeased with Thy servants. O Lord, Thou hast been our refuge from generation to generation.”
“In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped, let me never be confounded: save me by Thy justice, and rescue me: bend Thine ear unto me; make haste to save me.”
The baptised man has received grace, but he has not ceased to be dependent. Indeed, grace makes him more conscious of his dependence. The more fully he lives in Christ, the more clearly he recognises that apart from Christ he can do nothing.
The Gradual does not contradict the certainty of the Epistle. The Church does not pass from sacramental confidence to theological doubt. Rather, she teaches that the grace received in Baptism must be preserved by continual recourse to its source. The man raised from the pit must still pray not to fall into it. The member living from Christ must remain united to the Head. The branch must abide in the vine.
The Gospel, Mark 8:1–9, then reveals the Heart of the Saviour towards those who have followed Him into the wilderness:
“I have compassion on the multitude; for behold they have now been with me three days, and have nothing to eat: and if I shall send them away fasting to their home, they will faint in the way.”
The initiative belongs entirely to Christ. The multitude makes no demand. No representative comes forward to complain that the provisions have failed. Christ sees their need before they voice it. He knows the weakness of their bodies, the length of the road and the danger that they will collapse before reaching home.
His compassion is neither vague emotion nor impotent sympathy. It becomes effective action. The mercy of Christ sees, wills and provides. He does not merely feel the distress of the multitude; He possesses the power to remedy it.
Theophylact observes that Christ did not ordinarily multiply bread whenever crowds gathered, lest men follow Him merely for material food. Here He acts because the people are genuinely in danger. They have remained with Him for three days, putting the word of God before ordinary provision, and Christ will not permit those who have sought first His kingdom to be abandoned in their necessity.⁹
The multitude has entered the desert because it desires Christ. The desert therefore has more than a geographical meaning. It signifies detachment from the apparent sufficiency of the world. The soul which seeks Christ must discover that creatures cannot satisfy its deepest hunger. Created goods are good, but they are not God. When they are expected to provide the final rest of the heart, they cease to be received as gifts and become idols.
St Ambrose, whose commentary was appointed in the traditional Office for this Sunday, contrasts the food of the Gospel with the insufficiency of the Old Law to satisfy the hungry hearts of the nations. Humanity, weakened by sin and misled by false teachers, is brought at last to Christ, the heavenly Physician. Having healed it, He gives it the nourishment of grace.¹⁰
Ambrose also gives the three days a mystical significance. The followers of Christ must remain with Him through the Paschal pattern of suffering, burial and resurrection. Heavenly nourishment is given to those who seek Christ in the desert, not because geographical isolation is itself holy, but because spiritual detachment creates within the soul the hunger which God alone can satisfy.
Guéranger develops this mystical doctrine with particular force. God sometimes creates a desert within the soul by removing consolations, frustrating merely human supports and exposing hidden attachments. This purification may appear severe, but its purpose is nuptial. Christ empties the soul of lesser dependencies because He intends to fill it with Himself.
The wilderness is therefore not evidence that God has abandoned the soul. It may be the place in which His action is most intimate. The soul thinks it is being deprived; God is enlarging its capacity. It thinks it is dying; the old man is being crucified. It thinks it has been left without food; Christ is preparing a nourishment which no creature could provide.
Yet the disciples see only the impossibility:
“From whence can any one fill them here with bread in the wilderness?”
They have already witnessed a multiplication of loaves, but the new difficulty appears to erase the memory of former mercy. This is one of the Gospel’s most exact descriptions of human weakness. We believe in Providence retrospectively. We recognise what God has done after deliverance has come, but when a different trial arises, we reason as though His power had expired with the previous miracle.
Theophylact notes the disciples’ slowness but also Christ’s patience. He does not cast them off for failing to understand. He bears with their ignorance and gradually leads them to recognise both their poverty and His power.¹¹
Father Gabriel applies this directly to the interior life. We may have experienced many victories of grace, yet when an old temptation returns or a new obstacle appears, we behave as though the resources of God had been exhausted. Christ’s “I have compassion” is not sterile pity. It is an announcement that actual grace is being offered in the present difficulty. The proper response is neither self-confidence nor surrender, but trustful cooperation.¹²
Christ asks: “How many loaves have ye?” The answer is seven.
He who created all things from nothing does not need the loaves. He could have created an abundance without them. Yet He chooses to employ what His disciples possess. The miracle therefore illuminates the Catholic doctrine of cooperation with grace. Human action is not the adequate cause of the supernatural result, but Christ deigns to take it into His hands, bless it and make it fruitful beyond its natural proportion.
The disciples cannot feed the multitude by their own resources. Nevertheless, they must surrender those resources. What they retain remains seven loaves. What they place in the hands of Christ becomes food for four thousand.
The same principle governs the spiritual life. Our prayer may be poor, our strength small, our understanding limited and our virtue immature. Christ does not command us to wait until we possess something adequate to divine work. He commands us to place what we possess at His disposal. Grace does not require natural sufficiency. It requires humility, fidelity and consent.
St Mark describes the actions of Christ with solemn precision: He takes the bread, gives thanks, breaks it and gives it to the disciples to distribute. The language points unmistakably towards the Eucharistic mystery, even though the miracle is not itself the institution of the Eucharist.
Bede interprets the breaking of the bread as the opening of the mysteries and its distribution through the disciples as the communication of spiritual knowledge and the food of life through the apostolic ministry. The bread originates in Christ, is blessed by Christ and is multiplied by Christ, but He wills that it reach the multitude through the hands of those whom He has called.¹³
Here the Gospel discloses the nature of the Church’s ministry. The Apostles and their successors do not manufacture the bread of salvation. They receive and distribute it. The doctrine is Christ’s doctrine; the sacraments are Christ’s sacraments; the grace is Christ’s grace; the power belongs to Christ. Ecclesiastical office is stewardship, not ownership.
Whenever the Church’s ministers imagine that the multitude can be retained only by inventing different food, they misunderstand both the hunger of man and the nature of their commission. Activism, novelty, entertainment, political conformity and moral accommodation cannot nourish supernatural life. The world may applaud them and still remain starving.
The Church feeds only when she faithfully distributes what she has received: the revealed truth, the moral law, the sacraments, the Holy Sacrifice and the Bread of Life. She possesses no authority to replace Christ’s bread with something more congenial to contemporary appetite. Her abundance consists not in creating another Gospel, but in drawing inexhaustibly from the one deposit entrusted to her.
The seven loaves and seven baskets were interpreted by the Fathers according to the traditional spiritual sense of Scripture. Such interpretations do not replace the literal historical meaning of the miracle, but disclose correspondences within the economy of salvation.
Ambrose connects the number seven with the fullness of the Holy Ghost and the sacred rest in which the passions are brought into order beneath the rule of God. Bede sees in the fragments gathered by the Apostles the higher counsels and mysteries entrusted particularly to those charged with guiding the Church. Pseudo-Jerome sees the seven baskets as an image of the universal Church. Theophylact associates the four thousand with those who have advanced in the four cardinal virtues.¹⁴
These interpretations vary, but they converge upon abundance, perfection and universality. Christ feeds the whole man, perfects the soul by grace and provides for a people gathered from the four quarters of the world. The fragments remain because divine truth is not exhausted by being communicated. Thousands receive, yet the treasury is not diminished.
The gathering of the fragments also teaches reverence for what has proceeded from Christ. The disciples do not permit the remains of the miracle to be treated as refuse. The Church likewise gathers and guards what she has received. Her dogmas, liturgical rites, sacred chants, inherited prayers, ascetical disciplines and the wisdom of the saints are not the debris of superseded centuries. They are part of the abundance placed in apostolic custody.
The miracle reaches its fulfilment in the Holy Eucharist. Baptism gives supernatural life; the Eucharist nourishes that life. The Epistle and Gospel therefore form a sacramental unity. The man who is buried and raised with Christ at the font is sustained by Christ at the altar.
St Thomas teaches that the Eucharist performs for the spiritual life what material food performs for bodily life: it sustains, increases, restores and delights. It does not ordinarily give first life to one spiritually dead through mortal sin; it is food for those already living by grace. But in the living soul it increases charity, repairs the effects of daily weakness, strengthens against temptation and gives a foretaste of the sweetness of eternal union.¹⁵
Father Gabriel therefore identifies the Eucharist as the supreme answer to Christ’s compassion. The people in Galilee received multiplied bread; the Christian receives the Saviour Himself. Christ does not merely give something which preserves life. He gives the very Author of life beneath the appearances of food.
Pius XII teaches that in the Eucharistic banquet the faithful are nourished and strengthened, united more closely to one another and to Christ the Head. In the Sacrifice of the Mass, Christ offers Himself to the Father and includes within His oblation the members of His Mystical Body. The Eucharist is consequently both food and sacrifice, communion and oblation, nourishment received and self-offering made in union with the Victim.¹⁶
This explains the Offertory:
“Perfect Thou my goings in Thy paths, that my footsteps be not moved: incline Thine ear unto me, and hear my words: show forth Thy wonderful mercies, O Thou that savest them who trust in Thee, O Lord.”
The Gospel speaks of those who may faint upon the road; the Offertory asks that our steps be established. The Christian does not ask merely for bread while remaining stationary. He asks for food in order to continue walking.
The interior life is a road because grace must be lived through time. Baptism begins the journey; glory completes it. Between them lie temptation, effort, failure, repentance, purification, growth and repeated recourse to divine mercy. The soul requires not only an initial direction but stability of step.
The Secret asks that the offerings of the people be received and that no faithful petition remain ineffective. Prayer bears fruit when animated by faith and ordered towards the good which God wills to give. The loaves must be surrendered before they are multiplied; the Christian must place himself upon the altar with the offering.
The Communion antiphon then proclaims:
“I will go round, and offer in His tabernacle a sacrifice of jubilation: I will sing, and recite a psalm to the Lord.”
The multitude has been fed, but the final response is sacrifice and praise. Eucharistic communion is not spiritual consumption. The communicant receives Christ in order to be conformed to Christ. The Victim enters the soul so that the soul may become sacrificial.
St Augustine expresses this ecclesial and moral demand when he tells the faithful that they receive their own mystery from the altar. Those who receive the Body of Christ must consent to be members of that Body. The Eucharistic “Amen” is not merely an assertion concerning the Real Presence; it is also a pledge to live according to the reality received.¹⁷
The Christian who receives the crucified and risen Lord cannot reserve his life entirely for himself. He must become bread broken in charity, patience, sacrifice and service. This does not mean that human works supplement an insufficiency in Christ’s redemption. It means that the life of the Head becomes visible in the members.
The Postcommunion completes the Mass:
“We have been filled, O Lord, with Thy gifts: grant, we beseech Thee, that we may be cleansed by their efficacy and strengthened by their aid.”
The two requested effects are purification and fortification. We need purification because remnants of the old man remain. We need fortification because the road continues. The Eucharist is not given as a reward for those who no longer need help, but as supernatural sustenance for those who know that without Christ they will faint.
Yet reception must be fruitful. The sacrament acts by the power of Christ, but its fuller effects can be obstructed by tepidity, distraction, attachment to venial sin and lack of preparation. The Church therefore asks not merely that the gifts be received but that their efficacy cleanse and their aid strengthen.
The whole Mass has now returned to the Collect. God has implanted supernatural life in Baptism. He has nourished it with the Bread of Heaven. He cleanses what impedes its growth and strengthens it against collapse. He preserves what He has nourished.
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost thus rejects two opposite distortions of Christianity. It rejects a religion of moral effort without grace, as though man could climb from the pit by his own strength. It also rejects a religion of passive assurance without mortification, as though Baptism and Communion dispensed the Christian from dying daily to sin.
The liturgy teaches instead the Catholic harmony of grace and cooperation. God raises; man must walk. God feeds; man must eat. God strengthens; man must struggle. God preserves; man must remain united to Him. Even our cooperation is made possible by grace, yet grace does not cooperate in our place.
The Christian soul is the multitude in the wilderness. It has come from afar, for sin has carried humanity far from its first innocence. It is weak, for fallen nature cannot support the supernatural journey. It is hungry, because nothing created can satisfy the heart made for God. It is forgetful, like the disciples who have seen former miracles and still fear present impossibility.
But Christ sees the whole truth of its condition. He knows the distance already travelled, the trials still to come and the exact measure of its strength. His judgement is not contempt but compassion:
“If I shall send them away fasting to their home, they will faint in the way.”
He therefore does not send His people unfed. He gives doctrine to the mind, grace to the soul, pardon to the penitent, strength to the tempted and His own Body to those living in His friendship. He takes the little they possess, blesses it and makes it fruitful. He does not promise a road without desert, but He provides food sufficient for the road.
The final doctrine of the Sunday is therefore contained in the first words of its Mass: Dominus fortitudo plebis suæ. The Lord is the strength of His people.
Our loaves are few. The multitude is great. The wilderness is barren. The journey is long. The old man resists crucifixion, the new life remains fragile, and human prudence repeatedly asks how anyone can be fed in such a place.
Yet Christ has compassion. He takes, blesses, breaks and gives. Those who remain with Him eat and are filled; those who feed upon Him receive strength to continue; and those whom He has buried and raised in Baptism He will not abandon upon the road to their eternal home.
- Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year, Sixth Sunday after Pentecost.
- The Roman Missal, propers for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost.
- St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Romans 6 and Summa Theologiæ, III, q. 69.
- Charles J. Callan OP, Commentary on Romans 6:3–11.
- Leonard Goffine, Instruction for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost.
- Father Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen OCD, Divine Intimacy, meditation for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost.
- Pius Parsch, The Church’s Year of Grace, Sixth Sunday after Pentecost.
- Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi.
- St Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea on Mark 8, including Bede, St Ambrose, Theophylact, Remigius and Pseudo-Jerome.
- Dom Prosper Guéranger’s exposition of St Ambrose and the mystical meaning of the Gospel.
- St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, III, q. 79, on the effects of the Holy Eucharist.
- St Augustine, Sermon 272, on the Eucharist and the Mystical Body.
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