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With Quinquagesima Sunday we are at the threshold of the season of Lent. Holy Mother Church has been preparing us for spiritual combat through these preparatory Sundays. When you follow the Vetus Ordo of the Roman Rite, Lent can never take you by surprise. As part of our arming for battle, this Sunday asks us to consider the theme of charity and the power of faith.
The Epistle reading from 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 is among the most sublime and famous passages in all of Sacred Scripture. Inspired by the Holy Spirit St. Paul extols the excellence of charity (“love”, Greek agápe):
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love (agápe), I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal (v.1).
A few notes about “love”. In English we often use the one word “love” to denote different kinds of love. We can love spaghetti, baseball, our parents, and God, but in different ways. C.S. Lewis wrote a book on the four different kinds of love recognized by the ancient Greeks: storgé (στοργή), philía (φιλία), éros (ἔρως), and agápe (ἀγάπη). Storgé is the love of affection, often associated with familial love, as in the natural bond between parents and children or between close relatives. St. Augustine speaks of this love in the context of human relationships ordained by God. Philía is the love of friendship and companionship. It is based on mutual respect, shared values, and personal connection. Aristotle describes it as a deep bond between friends, while St. John Chrysostom extols it as a love that fosters virtue and unity. Éros is passionate or romantic love, often referring to physical attraction. However, in the Christian tradition St. Gregory of Nyssa writes of it as a longing for divine beauty and union with God. Finally, agápe, the highest form of love, is the selfless and sacrificial love that God has for humanity. St. Augustine defines it as the supreme virtue that orders all other loves (cf. De doctrina christiana, 1, 27-28 and De civitate Dei 15,23).
No matter how eloquent our words, how great our knowledge, or even how impressive our works, without charity, all is vain. St. Augustine, in his commentary on this passage, affirms that all the virtues derive their perfection from love. Virtue is the order of love… Virtus est ordo amoris (cf. De moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae, 15). Without charity, the greatest acts of self-denial are empty. With charity even the smallest deed is pleasing to God.
Bl. Ildefonso Schuster in The Sacramentary notes how the Church gives us this reading at Lent’s doorstep. It is a reminder that prayer, fasting, and almsgiving — though necessary — are only meritorious if they flow from agape love. Without love, almsgiving is mere philanthropy, fasting is mere hunger, and prayer is mere words. Similarly, Pius Parsch in The Church’s Year of Grace says, “Love alone makes us children of God, and love alone will be the measure of our judgment.” This Epistle pericope is not merely poetic but also practical. Charity, is at the core of Christian perfection and at the heart of our Lenten “disciplina…discipline.” St. Leo the Great in a Lenten sermon said:
Tempus quadragesimale in disciplina spiritus salutaris est … The season of Lent is for the discipline of the spirit unto salvation (s. 42).
Again, Parsch explains that
Lent is the great time of Christian training, where we learn anew the path of virtue through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
In the Gospel (Luke 18:31-43), Our Lord tells the Twelve of His coming Passion in some detail, but they do not understand what He was telling them. “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem.” The Church in this passage places the disciples on a threshold as well. From Jericho to Jerusalem it’s a hard climb, about 15 miles of steep ascent. In our own ascent to Jerusalem, which is Lent, we are invited to enter and experience something of the Lord’s Passion.
Then in the Gospel there follows the healing of the blind man near Jericho. St. Augustine comments, “The blind man represents the human race. Blindness is our ignorance; faith is our healing” (s. 88). This blind man, fallen humanity in the bond of sin’s consequences, sits waiting in darkness. In the parallel passage in Mark 10, we learn that the blind man’s name is Bartimaeus. Because we know his name, St. Augustine concluded that he was once a prosperous man who fell on hard times and that he was well known (On the Consensus of the Evangelists, 2, 65, 125). Moreover, in the very next episode at the beginning of chapter 19, we meet another wealthy man whose name we know, Zacchaeus who climbed the sycamore tree to see Jesus. Hearing about Jesus passing by, Zacchaeus and Bartimaeus seize the moment, they takes action. Jesus speaks first to Zachaeus, but Bartimaeus is the first to cry out to Jesus: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Even though they rebuked the blind man, telling him to be silent, he cries out all the more. Christ, moved by his persistence, restores his sight: “Receive thy sight; thy faith hath made thee whole.”
This Gospel passage complements the Epistle reading. The blind man’s faith was not vain (literally “empty”, from Latin vanus). His crying out was not just an idle noisy harangue. It was active, persistent, and filled with confident desire. In addition, in the parallel in Mark 10, when Jesus calls for the blind man to come to Him, he “cast away” (Greek apobalón) his cloak, probably his only possession, and “sprang up (anastàs from anístemi the word used for the Resurrection).” He went to Jesus, was healed, and then followed Him up that steep road to Jerusalem. Some of the first things that man would see after his resurrection into the light were the public events of the Passion beginning with Palm Sunday (Mark 11 and Luke 19) and perhaps the risen Lord (cf. 1 Cor 15:6).
There’s a beauty to the patterns in the parallel accounts which did not escape Fathers of the Church, such as St. Ambrose of Milan in his Commentary on Luke. Jesus is first called by the blind man, but Jesus calls to Zacchaeus first. The blind man is lost and homeless, but he finds his home in coming to and by following Jesus, but Zacchaeus has a home and Jesus comes to it, saying “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (v.10). The blind man was perhaps at first wealthy and is now poor, while Zacchaeus is quite wealthy. The blind man springs up, but Zacchaeus climbed down. The encounters are in Jericho, the lowest city on Earth some 400m below sea level where they start the 1000m elevation climb to high Jerusalem. The blind man is at his lowest point and Christ raises Him to the heights of joy and faith. Zacchaeus was “short of stature,” but Christ raise him up, “today salvation has come to this house” (v.9).
But of course our Gospel passage was from Luke, not Mark, so let us go back to Luke by way of another diversion.
I am struck by a phrase from the Collect of the Mass, which is similar to last week’s:
Preces nostras, quaesumus, Domine,
clementer exaudi:
atque, a peccatorum vinculis absolutos,
ab omni nos adversitate custodi.
LITERAL VERSION:
We beseech You, O Lord,
in clemency attentively hear our prayers:
and, once loosed from the fetters of sins,
guard us from every adversity.
Preces nostras… exaudi. Exaudio is often rendered in our liturgical translations as “graciously hear” as in the beginning of one of the Church’s litanies. It seems to have a more urgent force than mere audio. Exaudi is an imperative in form, but laden with confident humility. Note the other imperative: custodi. Note the parallelism of the first part, the protasis, and the last part, the apodosis, which both end in imperatives. In fact, the whole oration is summarized in the four words preces … exaudi: … absolutos… custodi. Simple, but not.
The Collect begs, as blind Bartimaeus begged. “Hear us! Hear and set us free!” That is the protasis and first colon of the apodosis. The second colon contains an implicit recognition of our dependance and, perhaps, also of our historic unreliability: shield us from every kind of adversity, those from without and those from within. That include what we will explore on the 1st Sunday of Lent, “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” Moreover, the apodosis’ first colon … “a peccatorum vinculis absolutos… having been freed from the chains of sins” aligns with the the theme of charity in Paul’s exhortation. Sin is not just doing something wrong, a transgression, it is a form of bondage.
Contrast Bartimaeus with the disciples. Just before this encounter with the blind man at Jericho is described, we see how blind the disciples are. They are in the dark about what Christ told them concerning His upcoming Passion. The disciples could physically see, but they were spiritually blind to the mystery of the Cross. Bartimaeus was physically blind but he had the light of faith and charity.
Schuster compares this miraculous healing to the opening of the soul’s eyes through baptism, which Lent will prepare us to renew. Parsch interprets this miracle as a symbol of the enlightenment that Christ brings to the soul through grace:
The blind man stands for all humanity before baptism; he is healed because of his faith and follows Christ on the road to Jerusalem—an image of the Christian following Christ to Calvary and ultimately to resurrection.
The nearness of the discipline of Lent should provoke in us an honest self-examination. As we step into Lent, we all must ask ourselves if we truly possess the charity, the agape-love of which St. Paul wrote. Do we cry out to Christ with the persistent faith of the blind man? Are our faith and charity concrete? Maybe a reality check is in order. True faith evokes works of love, acts of mercy, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice.
Lenten discipline is commonly, and rightly, characterized in part by fasting, usually from certain foods, amounts, or from some activity. To make sure that our fast isn’t vain (“empty”) hunger or doesn’t result in vanity (also from Latin vanus), St. John Chrysostom underscores the necessity of charity in fasting: “What good is it if we abstain from eating meat, but devour our brothers with hatred?” Love must govern our sacrifices, lest they become empty observances.
Pius Parsch says that the goal of Lent is the victory of Easter, and the path to this victory is love. Prepare now to go up to Jerusalem with Christ, embracing the Cross with agape-love in order to receive the light of His grace. Let us during Lent cry out our petitions to God with all our heart. Hence, we can journey from sin to grace, from blindness to sight, and from bondage to love.