A READING FROM A HOMILY BY PHILOXENUS OF MABBUG
This saying of our Master obliges us to be diligent not only in hearing God’s word, but also in obeying it. We do well to listen to the law, because it moves us to good works; it is a good thing to read and meditate on Scripture, because our inmost thoughts are thus purified from all evil; what to be assiduous in reading, listening to and meditating on the law of God without doing what it sees is a wickedness that the Spirit of God has already condemned, forbidding those guilty of it even to pick up the holy book in their unclean hands. God is said to the sinner: Do not touch the book of my commandments, because you have taken my covenant on your lips, but have hated correction and cast my words behind you.
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| Bell Rock Lighthouse, Illustration by Miss Stevenson |
Assiduous readers who do no good works are accused of their very reading, and merit a more severe condemnation because each day they scorn and despise what they have heard that day. They are like dead people, corpses without souls. The dead will not hear thousands of trumpets and horns sounding in their ears; in the same way souls dead in sin, minds that have forgotten
God’s disciples need to have firmly anchored in their souls the remembrance of their Master, Jesus Christ, and to think of him date and night. They must learn where to begin, and how and where to construct the rooms in their buildings, and how to bring those buildings to completion. Otherwise all the passers-by will mock them, as our Lord said about the man who set out to build a tower and could not finish it.
The foundation is already laid, as St Paul said: it is Jesus Christ our God. If anyone builds on this foundation with gold or silver or precious stones, or with wood or straw or stubble, his work will be brought to light, because fire will reveal it and test the quality of each one’s work.
Good habits and righteousness in all its beauty are what Paul compared to gold, silver, and precious stones. Faith is like gold; temperance, fasting, abstinence, and the other good works are like silver; while the precious stones are peace, hope, pure and holy thoughts, and spiritual understanding that contemplates God and the grandeur of his being, and keeps silence, trembling before the inexplicable, uncommunicable mysteries of the Godhead.
Philoxenus of Mabbug, Hom. 1: SC 44, 27-31 (from Christ our Light 2)
