Vigils Reading – 12th Sunday

A reading from

ST AUGUSTINE

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Thanks be to that grain of wheat who freely chose to die and so be

multiplied! Thanks be to God’s only Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, for

whom the enduring of our human death was not a thing to be scorned if it would

make us worthy of his life! Mark how alone he was before his passing: his is the

voice of the psalmist who said, I am all alone until I depart from this place – a

solitary grain that nevertheless contained an immense fruitfulness, a capacity to

be multiplied beyond measure.

How many other grains of wheat imitating the Lord’s passion do we find

to gladden our hearts when we celebrate the anniversaries of the martyrs! Many

members has that one grain, all united by bonds of peace and charity under

their one head, our Savior himself, and, as you know from having heard it so

often, all of them form one single body. Their many voices can often be heard

praying in the psalms through the voice of a single speaker calling on God as if

all were calling together, because all are one in him.

Let us listen to their cry. In it we can hear the words of the martyrs who

found themselves hard pressed, beset by danger from violent storms of hatred

in this world, a danger not so much to their bodies which, after all, they would

have to part with sometime, but rather to their faith. If they were to give way, if

they should succumb either to the harsh tortures of their persecutors or to love

of this present life, they would forfeit the reward promised them by the God who

had taken away all ground for fear.

Not only had he said: Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but are

unable to kill the soul; he had also left them his own example. The precept he

had enjoined on them he personally carried out, without attempting to evade

the hands of those who scourged him, the blows of those who struck him, or the

spittle of those who spat on him. Neither the crown of thorns pressed into his h

ead nor the cross to which the soldiers nailed him encountered any resistance

from him. None of these torments did he try to avoid. Though he himself was

under no obligation to suffer them, he endured them for those who were,

making his own person a remedy for the sick. And so the martyrs suffered, but

they would certainly have failed the test without the presence of him who said:

Know that I am with you always, until the end of time.