Vigils Reading

A DELUGE OF MERCY

From a sermon by St Maximus the Confessor

◊◊◊

We must accept with all reverence, brethren, the sacred days of Lent, and

not recoil because of the length of the season; for the longer the days of our

fasting, the greater the grounds of our forgiveness; the longer the time of our

self-denial, the grater the price paid for our soul’s salvation; the severer the

treatment of our wounds, the more sure the healing of our offenses. For God

who is the Physician of our souls has instituted an appropriate time; sufficient

for the just to make reparation and for sinners to ask for mercy; the one praying

for peace, the other imploring pardon.

For the days of Lent are suited to our purposes; not short, so that we may

plead in prayer; not long, for our need to gain merit. For in this fast of forty days

any offense may be wiped out, and the severity of any judge softened. The time

may be long and tedious for the one who neither pleads for his sins, nor hopes

for forgiveness. For he who despairs will neither confess his sins, nor hope in the

mercy of the Judge.

Holy and salutary therefore is the time of Lent, in which the Judge is

moved to mercy, the sinner to repentance, and the just to peace. For in these

days the Divinity is inclined to be more merciful, the sinner to repent, and grace

to be obtained. All things are now prepared: the heavens to pardon, the sinner to

confess, the tongue to plead.

Mystical and salutary is this number forty. For when in the beginning the

iniquity of mortals covered the earth, God, dissolving the clouds of heaven for

the space of this number of days, covered the whole earth with a flood. You see

then already that in this time the Mystery is put before us in Figure. For as it

then rained for forty days, to cleanse the world, so now it also happens. Yet the

deluge of those days must be called a mercy; in that through it iniquity was

crushed, and justice upheld. For it took place out of mercy, to deliver the just,

and that the wicked might no longer sin. We see clearly it was through mercy it

came, as a sort of baptism, in which the face of the earth was renewed; that is, so

that mortals who wallowed in the dreadful sin of those abandoned might come

to grace in the dwelling of Noah, and so that he who was then an abode of

iniquity, might become a dwelling of holiness.

Holy and dedicated is this time of forty days, which immediately from the

beginning began to divide the just from the unjust; and by a kind of judgment

separate the good from the bad. And this takes place even in our time of forty

days. For in these forty days the good are divided from the bad, that is, the

chaste from the unchaste, the temperate from the intemperate, the Christian

from the heathen. The wicked…are separated from the good, that is, the sinner

from the just, the devil from the saint, the heretic from the faithful. For those

others are lost, as in the Flood, in the disaster of this world, while the Church

alone, with all its virtues, is like the Ark sustained above the deep.