NUNTIATORIA

When the Sword Fell Before the Cross

MASS Os justi
LESSON  Ecclesiasticus 45:1-6
GOSPEL St Matthew 5: 43-48
PROPER LAST GOSPEL St Matthew 7:15-21
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Today the Church places before us two divine commands which the modern mind imagines cannot be reconciled.

In the Gospel of Saint John Gualbert, Our Lord commands: “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you.”

Yet in the proper Last Gospel of this Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, the same divine Teacher warns us: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly are ravening wolves. By their fruits you shall know them.”

Love your enemies.

Beware of wolves.

Forgive those who injure you.

Judge the tree by its fruit.

To the sentimental Christian, these sayings appear contradictory. To the saint, they are one truth. Saint John Gualbert shows us that Catholic charity does not require blindness, and Catholic discernment does not permit hatred. We must forgive the sinner without making peace with sin. We must love the enemy without following the false prophet. We must lay down the sword of vengeance while taking up the sword of truth.

John was born into Florentine nobility around the year 993, in an age of violent family loyalties and blood vengeance. His elder brother Hugh was murdered, and John resolved to avenge him. The murderer’s death became, in his mind, not merely a personal desire, but a duty of honour.

Then, on a Good Friday, while riding through a narrow passage near Florence, John encountered the man he had sworn to kill. There was no escape. John drew his sword. The murderer fell upon his knees, stretched out his arms in the form of a cross, and begged for mercy in the name of Jesus Christ, Who upon that very day had forgiven His executioners.

Everything in fallen nature urged John to strike. His grief demanded it. His honour demanded it. His family expected it. The world would have understood it.

But the Cross entered between the sword and its victim.

John looked upon the man kneeling before him in the form of the Crucified, and suddenly the question was no longer whether the murderer deserved punishment. The question was whether John himself believed the Gospel.

Did he believe that the Blood shed upon Calvary was sufficient even for his enemy?

Did he believe that the mercy by which he hoped to be saved must also pass through him towards another?

John lowered his sword.

He raised the murderer from the ground.

He embraced him.

He forgave him.

He then entered the church of San Miniato al Monte and knelt before the crucifix. According to the ancient tradition, the head of the crucified Christ bowed towards him, as though Heaven had accepted the sacrifice he had made. John had indeed offered a victim that day. He had not shed the blood of his enemy; he had shed the poison of his own hatred.

That was his true conversion.

He had set out to conquer another man, but Christ conquered him.

And this is why the Introit of today’s Mass explains him so perfectly:

“The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom, and his tongue shall speak judgement: the law of his God is in his heart.”

Lex Dei ejus in corde ipsius.

The law of his God is in his heart.

The saint is not merely the man who knows the commandments. He is the man in whom the law of God has descended from the page into the soul; from memory into will; from profession into action. John did not merely admire the mercy of Christ. At the decisive moment, he allowed that mercy to govern his hand.

This is where all true reform begins.

Not in denunciation.

Not in strategy.

Not in identifying the failures of other men.

The reform of the Church begins when the Cross passes judgement upon the reformer.

It is easy to see what is wrong with the Church and the world. It is easy to name the false prophets, the compromised shepherds, the fashionable heresies and the corruption of our age. But unless Christ has first conquered our bitterness, we are not yet reformers. We are merely angry men who have learned the vocabulary of orthodoxy.

Yet John’s forgiveness did not make him weak.

The man who spared his brother’s murderer became an uncompromising opponent of corruption within the Church. He entered the Benedictine life, but soon encountered the ecclesiastical vice of simony: the buying and selling of sacred offices, and the subjection of spiritual authority to money, family influence and worldly power.

John could have told himself that obedience required silence.

He could have called cowardice humility and complicity peace.

Instead, he sought a stricter observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict and founded the monastery of Vallombrosa, east of Florence, where the monks embraced prayer, austerity, care of the poor and reform of religious life.

The man who had laid down the sword of vengeance now took up the sword of spiritual warfare.

There is no contradiction.

He forgave the murderer because he loved Christ.

He resisted simony because he loved Christ.

He spared the sinner because he desired his salvation.

He opposed corruption because corruption was destroying souls.

True mercy and true militancy met in the same heart because both proceeded from charity.

This is precisely what our age has forgotten.

The modern world has manufactured a counterfeit mercy. It calls correction cruelty, condemnation hatred, discipline exclusion, and every refusal to bless sin a failure of compassion. It speaks endlessly of welcome, but rarely of conversion; of dignity, but not judgement; of mercy, but not the Cross by which mercy was purchased.

Such mercy is not Christian charity. It is spiritual abandonment.

Our Lord did not say: Pretend that your enemy is right.

He did not say: Call poison medicine.

He did not say: Permit the wolf to enter the fold lest the wolf feel excluded.

He said: “Love your enemies.”

To love a man is to will his true good. No man’s good is served by confirming him in the error or vice from which Christ died to redeem him.

But there is an opposite danger, and those who love Tradition must attend to it.

We live through an ecclesiastical crisis of extraordinary gravity. Ancient doctrine is treated as negotiable. The inherited liturgy of the Roman Church is regarded in many places not as a treasure to be received, but as a problem to be managed. Catholics who wish only to believe and worship as generations before them believed and worshipped are treated as troublesome, divisive or diseased.

In such circumstances, resistance may become a duty.

Silence may become complicity.

Obedience cannot require us to deny what the Church has always taught or to despise what she has always sanctified.

Saint John understood this. He did not abandon the Church because churchmen were corrupt. He did not invent a new religion. He sought to live the inherited Rule more faithfully.

He did not resist because he loved rebellion.

He resisted because he loved what had been betrayed.

So too, Catholics cling to Tradition not because they reject the Church, but because they recognise in Tradition the voice, worship and doctrine of the Church they love.

There is no Church without the Faith.

There is no Faith detached from Tradition.

And there is no true authority which can place itself above the truth it was instituted to guard.

Yet we must hear again the first Gospel.

We must resist falsehood without hating those who propagate it.

We may oppose an unjust command without desiring the damnation of the superior who gives it.

We may expose bad fruit without presuming to judge the final state of the soul that produced it.

We may suffer penalties, suspicion and calumny without allowing persecution to make us persecutors in spirit.

The moment we begin to enjoy hatred, the wolf has entered not merely the fold but our own heart.

Saint John therefore stands between two counterfeits.

To the sentimentalist he says: Mercy does not require the denial of truth.

To the embittered traditionalist he says: Truth does not permit the abandonment of charity.

And the liturgy confirms him.

The proper Last Gospel warns: “Beware of false prophets.”

The wolf does not usually announce himself as a wolf. He speaks gently. He adopts the vocabulary of compassion, unity, inclusion, accompaniment, dialogue and pastoral sensitivity. The words may be soft while the fruits are bitter.

Therefore Our Lord says: “By their fruits you shall know them.”

Does the teaching produce faith or doubt?

Reverence or desacralisation?

Vocations or sterility?

Repentance or self-affirmation?

Love of the Blessed Sacrament or indifference before the tabernacle?

The fruit reveals the tree.

But this judgement must first be turned upon ourselves.

What fruit has the traditional Faith produced in us?

Has the ancient Mass made us more reverent?

Has sound doctrine made us more humble?

Has knowledge of the crisis made us more prayerful?

Has persecution made us more like the persecuted Christ?

Has our defence of Tradition made us more charitable?

If not, we may possess correct opinions without yet possessing Catholic sanctity.

Saint John did not become a saint merely because he recognised corruption. Many men recognised it. He became a saint because he allowed the remedy to begin in himself.

Today we also commemorate Saints Nabor and Felix, who suffered martyrdom at Milan around the year 304. They too united courage and charity. They would not obey commands contrary to God, but they did not die hating those who killed them.

Their blood teaches the same doctrine as John’s lowered sword.

Christian meekness is not surrender.

Christian courage is not hatred.

And now the whole mystery is gathered into the altar.

The Communion antiphon declares:

“The faithful and wise servant whom his lord setteth over his family, to give them their measure of wheat in due season.”

The measure of wheat is Christ.

The true shepherd feeds the household not with novelty, ideology or himself, but with the Bread that came down from Heaven, with the doctrine once delivered to the saints, and with the sacrifice of Calvary made present upon the altar.

In a few moments, the same Sacrifice before which John laid down his sword will be offered here.

Upon Calvary, Our Lord condemned sin without ceasing to love sinners.

He exposed falsehood without hatred.

He forgave His executioners without declaring their crime innocent.

His mercy was not weakness, for it cost Him His Blood.

His judgement was not cruelty, for it opened Paradise to the penitent thief.

Therefore let us ask, through Saint John Gualbert, for the grace of the lowered sword and the steadfast heart.

May we forgive without surrendering truth.

May we resist without hatred.

May we obey without cowardice.

May we suffer without bitterness.

May the law of God be not merely upon our lips, but written within our hearts.

The world believes forgiveness is weakness.

It believes fidelity is rigidity.

It believes Tradition is nostalgia.

But one Florentine knight laid down his sword before the Cross, and in doing so became stronger than every warrior who ever captured a city.

The murderer departed alive.

John’s hatred died.

The Church received a reformer.

And Heaven received the sacrifice of a heart conquered by Christ.

May the same Cross conquer us.

And when every controversy has passed, every false prophet has been exposed and every earthly authority has been judged, may we hear from the lips of the Eternal Master:

“Well done, good and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

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