Vigils Reading

NO ONE CAN SERVE

TWO MASTERS

From a sermon by St Leo the Great

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During Lent our aim was to experience some share in the sufferings of the

cross and to enter into the mystery of the Lord’s passion by taking up our cross

and following him along the way of his humiliation and endurance. Now, during

Eastertide, the accent is on sharing his resurrection. Not for any merit of our

own, but through the blood of Christ and the free gift of God’s grace, we have

been healed and set free. What the Lord asks of us now is not to try to earn this

freedom, but to hold fast to what he has already given us and to guard it from the

devil’s envy.

In the Lord Jesus we have passed over from death to life, but while we are

still on earth his Passover must be continually renewed in us. We have to be

dead to Satan and alive to God; we have to abandon sin in order to rise to

holiness. Jesus himself said: “No one can serve two masters”. Our business is to

make sure that the master we serve is the Lord who has raised up the fallen to

glory, not the one who brought the upright to ruin….

It was his will to die for us, but death could not keep him. The body that

was laid in the tomb and the soul that descended to the world of the departed

were the body and soul of the Son of God. Through his own will they were

separated when he bowed his head on the cross and gave up his spirit; through

his divine power they were reunited on the third day. The gospels tell us of the

rolling away of the stone, the empty tomb, the linen cloths, the angel witnesses,

and the Lord’s appearances to the women and to the apostles. All this evidence

formed the basis for the preaching of the faith throughout the whole world.

Not only did Jesus speak with his disciples, but he ate with them, allowing

them to touch him and to probe his wounds. He entered the upper room when

the doors were shut and greeted them with the words “Peace be with you”—

peace to quiet their troubled hearts and to assure them of the unfailing

constancy of his love and forgiveness. To bring God’s love and forgiveness to the

world had been his mission from the Father; now he passed on that mission to

his apostles. “As the Father sent me,” he told them, “so I send you. Receive the

Holy spirit. If you forgive men’s sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive

them, they are not forgiven”.

Patiently he went through the scriptures with them to show them

everything that had been written about him in the Old Testament, how it had

been ordained from the beginning that the Messiah should suffer and so enter

into his glory. After this he showed them the wound in his side and the marks of

the nails. By his own choice he had retained these scars in his body in order to

heal the wounds of their unbelieving minds. Now they knew with absolute

certainty that the risen body, radiantly alive in their midst, was the same body

that had been born in Bethlehem and had suffered on the cross. From now on it

would be seated with God the Father on his heavenly throne.