The Door of the Crucified: Saint Bonaventure and the Journey into God
MASS In medio ecclesiae
LESSON 2 Timothy 4: 1-8
GOSPEL St Matthew 5: 13-19
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
“In the midst of the Church the Lord opened his mouth, and filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding.”
The Church places these words upon the lips of the sacred liturgy today because Saint Bonaventure was more than an accomplished scholar, more than a prudent superior, and more than an eminent bishop. He was a man whose whole being had been opened by God: his intellect to divine truth, his heart to divine love, and his life to the service of the Church.
He is called the Seraphic Doctor because in him wisdom became fire. He did not study God as one studies a distant object. He sought God as the soul seeks the source of its life, as the exile seeks his homeland, and as the lover seeks the beloved.
Born Giovanni Fidanza in Tuscany in 1221, he was, according to ancient tradition, healed from a dangerous illness through the prayers of Saint Francis of Assisi. Looking upon the child whose life had been spared, Francis exclaimed: O buona ventura!—“O good fortune!” The name remained, but the good fortune granted to Bonaventure was not earthly success. It was the grace to discover that all true wisdom leads to Jesus Christ, and that Jesus Christ leads us through His Cross into the life of God.
At twenty-two, Bonaventure entered the Franciscan Order. He was sent to Paris, where he studied under Alexander of Hales and became the contemporary and friend of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Their minds travelled by different paths, but both reached towards the same eternal Truth. Saint Thomas contemplated the intelligibility of the divine order with the precision of the angelic mind. Saint Bonaventure saw the whole created universe as a ladder of light by which the soul might ascend towards its Creator.
For Bonaventure, the world is not a closed machine, nor a collection of meaningless objects. Every creature bears some trace of the hand that made it. The beauty of the heavens, the order of nature, the powers of the human soul, the desire for truth, the hunger for goodness—all these are footprints left by God upon His creation.
The tragedy of fallen man is not that God has hidden Himself completely. It is that man has lost the purity of vision necessary to recognise Him.
We look at creation and see only things to possess. We look at knowledge and see only power. We look at time and see only an opportunity to be filled with activity. We look at other people and ask what use they may be to us. The universe remains filled with signs of God, but the human heart has become too distracted to read them.
This is why Saint Bonaventure speaks so urgently to the modern world. Our age is not starved of information. It is suffocated by it. Images, voices, controversies, messages, demands, and diversions press upon the mind from morning until night. Man is connected to everything and recollected in nothing. He has acquired access to the whole world while becoming a stranger within his own soul.
We have become adept at moving rapidly from one thing to another, but we no longer know how to ascend from creatures to their Creator.
Bonaventure teaches that the soul must recover the art of attention. We must learn again to behold rather than merely to glance; to receive rather than constantly to consume; to wonder rather than immediately to classify, exploit, or dismiss. Creation is not God, but it speaks of God. Its beauty is borrowed; its goodness is participated; its order reflects the eternal Wisdom through Whom all things were made.
Yet Bonaventure does not allow the soul to remain among created things. The world is a signpost, not the destination. We must enter within ourselves, for the human soul bears the image of God in a manner surpassing the rest of visible creation. We remember, understand, and love. We possess an intellect ordered towards truth and a will made for goodness. Deep within us lies a capacity which no created thing can satisfy.
This explains so much of the restlessness of human life. We seek fulfilment in success, approval, possessions, novelty, pleasure, and influence. For a little while they distract us from our hunger, but they cannot feed it. The soul was not created for fragments of goodness. It was created for Goodness Himself.
Saint Augustine said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Saint Bonaventure takes that restlessness and maps its ascent. The soul passes from the world outside, to the image of God within, and then beyond itself into the mystery of the divine life.
But at the centre of this ascent stands the Cross.
Bonaventure insists that there is no passage into God except through the Crucified. Christ is not merely one teacher among others, nor simply an example of religious devotion. He is the Mediator between God and man, the eternal Word made flesh, the ladder joining earth to Heaven, the door through which the prodigal creature returns to the Father.
The wisdom of the world recoils from this. It seeks enlightenment without repentance, spiritual experience without sacrifice, transcendence without obedience, and glory without the wounds of love.
But the wisdom of God is Christ crucified.
Bonaventure understood that man does not rise to God by intellectual effort alone. Sin has wounded the mind, disordered the will, and divided the heart. We need more than instruction. We need healing. We need grace. We need the Precious Blood of the Redeemer.
This is why Bonaventure’s theology becomes most eloquent when he contemplates the Sacred Humanity of Christ. The wounds of Our Lord are not merely marks of suffering. They are openings through which divine charity is revealed. The pierced side of Christ is the gate of life. The Cross is the throne from which the true King reigns, the chair from which divine Wisdom teaches, and the altar upon which the world is reconciled to God.
To know Christ, therefore, is not merely to know facts about Him. It is to be drawn into the pattern of His life: humility, obedience, sacrifice, and love.
Saint Paul commands Timothy in today’s Epistle: “Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine.”
Saint Bonaventure fulfilled this command not only through teaching, but through government. When he became Minister General of the Franciscan Order in 1257, the Order was afflicted by internal disputes and competing interpretations of the Franciscan vocation. Bonaventure restored peace, not by empty diplomacy, but by recovering the centre.
He understood that communities disintegrate when secondary questions eclipse the first purpose of their existence. The Franciscan Order did not exist to perpetuate factions, personalities, or theories. It existed to follow Christ poor and crucified.
The same principle applies to the whole Church. The Church does not exist to mirror the preoccupations of the age, to manage society’s religious aspirations, or to become a forum in which every passing ideology receives a sacred vocabulary. She exists to preach Jesus Christ, to offer His Sacrifice, to forgive sins by His authority, and to lead souls to eternal life.
When Christ ceases to be the recognised centre, everything else becomes disordered. Doctrine becomes negotiation. Liturgy becomes performance. Authority becomes administration. Pastoral care becomes the management of feelings. The supernatural mission of the Church is gradually reduced to a programme of human improvement.
Saint Bonaventure calls us back to the centre: Christ, the eternal Word; Christ, the wisdom of the Father; Christ, born of the Virgin; Christ, crucified for sinners; Christ, present upon the altar; Christ, leading the redeemed into the life of the Blessed Trinity.
This is the meaning of today’s Gospel.
“You are the salt of the earth.” Salt preserves. The Christian must preserve within himself the life of grace and, by his fidelity, resist the corruption of the world. But salt cannot preserve anything if it has lost its own savour. A Christian indistinguishable from the world cannot convert the world.
“You are the light of the world.” The light does not originate in us. Christ is the true Light. We shine only insofar as His truth and holiness are reflected in us. The candle is placed upon the candlestick, not so that men may admire the candle, but so that they may see by its light.
Our Lord then declares: “Do not think that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.”
Christ fulfils the law because all revelation converges upon Him. The ceremonies, prophecies, sacrifices, and promises of the Old Covenant reach their perfection in His Incarnation and saving Passion. In Him, divine truth is not abolished but completed; not contradicted but manifested in its fullness.
So also in the Christian life, grace does not destroy nature but heals and elevates it. God does not ask us to cease being human. He asks that our humanity be purified and conformed to the perfect Humanity of Christ. The mind must become luminous with faith. The will must become strong through charity. The passions must be governed by virtue. The whole man must become an offering to God.
This transformation is accomplished above all through the sacred mysteries.
At this altar, the Crucified and risen Christ is made sacramentally present. Here the wisdom of the Cross is not merely explained but enacted. Here the Church offers the spotless Victim. Here our poor lives, with all their distractions, sorrows, labours, and incompleteness, may be united to His perfect oblation.
The Communion antiphon calls the faithful pastor “a faithful and wise steward, whom the Lord set over His family; to give them their measure of wheat in due season.”
Saint Bonaventure was such a steward. He gave the household of God not the husks of novelty but the wheat of divine truth. He fed souls with Christ. His learning did not terminate in books; it led towards the altar, towards prayer, and towards the vision of God.
When papal messengers arrived to present him with the cardinal’s hat, tradition tells us that they found him washing dishes. He asked them to hang the hat upon a tree until he had completed the task. The story endures because it reveals the man. His greatness had not separated him from humility. The honours of the Church did not make him forget the towel, the basin, and the hidden service of his brethren.
He died in 1274 while assisting at the Second Council of Lyons. The Pope and the assembled Council attended his funeral. The man who had spent his life tracing the soul’s journey into God had completed the journey himself. Faith had given way to sight. Hope had yielded to possession. The fire of desire had entered the fire of eternal charity.
Dearly beloved, Saint Bonaventure asks us a searching question: are we moving towards God, or merely moving?
Our days may be full, our minds occupied, and our voices constantly engaged, while the soul itself remains stationary. We may know many things without knowing the one thing necessary. We may discuss the Church endlessly without entering more deeply into the mystery of Christ.
The remedy is not ignorance, passivity, or withdrawal from duty. It is recollection. It is the restoration of order. It is the return of all things to their proper centre.
Let creation lead us to wonder. Let wonder lead us inward. Let the knowledge of our own insufficiency lead us to Christ. Let Christ lead us through His wounds to the Father.
For the true journey of the mind into God is not a flight from the Cross. It begins beneath the Cross, passes through the open side of the Saviour, and ends in the light which no eye has seen nor human heart conceived.
May Saint Bonaventure obtain for us minds illumined by truth, hearts enkindled by charity, and lives gathered together from distraction into the unity of Christ.
Then wisdom will no longer remain merely upon our lips. It will become fire within our souls.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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