Peter asks the blunt question today, and he asks it out loud in front of everybody. Behold we have left all things, and have followed thee: what therefore shall we have?<\/em> It is the question the pious part of us is embarrassed by, and there is no rebuke anywhere in the answer. Christ takes it, and answers it, and tells them that whoever has left a household shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today is the feast of Sylvester, an abbot, third class, kept in white, with a commemoration of Peter of Alexandria, Bishop and Martyr. It is the Wednesday after the Twenty-Fourth and last Sunday after Pentecost, and the feria is not commemorated at all. The Lesson is about a man everybody in the room would have known by name, and the Gospel is three verses of arithmetic that stop being arithmetic halfway through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One thing to settle at the outset, which is what the promise is not. It is not a rate of return, it is not a schedule, and this Gospel nowhere describes it as compensation for a life that went wrong. It says that whoever has left house and kin shall receive an hundredfold, and it says it in the same words the loss was described in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the whole day. Ask the question, and be answered in the same terms you asked it in. Whoever has left a household shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Psalm 36:30-31<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom: and his tongue shall speak judgment. The law of his God is in his heart, and his steps shall not be supplanted.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Psalm 36:1. Be not emulous of evildoers; nor envy them that work iniquity.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (This is word for word the entrance chant sung on the tenth of this month, at the Mass of a confessor. It opens today’s Mass unchanged, and everything that comes after it is different.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Most merciful God, Who when the holy Abbot Sylvester was devoutly meditating upon the vanity of this world beside an open grave, graciously willed to call him into the desert and enrich him with unusual merits, we humbly pray that, following his example, despising the things of earth, we may thoroughly enjoy Your everlasting presence. Through our Lord.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n A second name is said after the Collect today, and what is actually known about him is worth having. Peter of Alexandria<\/a> became bishop of that city in the year 300 and was martyred in November of 311, and the Catholic Encyclopedia says of the manner of it only that, according to Eusebius, his martyrdom was unexpected and therefore not preceded by a term of imprisonment. He left Alexandria during the persecution. Philip of Sidetes has him head of the catechetical school there.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n What survives of his work is a set of fourteen canons, issued in the third year of the persecution and dealing chiefly with the lapsi<\/em>, the Christians who had given way under pressure and wanted to come back. The article says the cases of different kinds of lapsi were decided upon in these canons, and that they were later ratified by the Council of Trullo, which is probably why they survived. A bishop driven out of his own city spent part of that year setting down on paper how people who had failed were to be received again, which sits well under a Gospel about whoever has left a household and shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mercifully consider our weakness, O Almighty God, and whereas by the burden of our sins we are sore, may the glorious intercession of blessed Peter, Your Martyr and Bishop, sustain us. Through our Lord.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ecclesiasticus 45:1-6<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Beloved of God and men, whose memory is in benediction. He made him like the saints in glory, and magnified him in the fear of his enemies, and with his words he made prodigies to cease. He glorified him in the sight of kings, and gave him commandments in the sight of his people, and shewed him his glory. He sanctified him in his faith, and meekness, and chose him out of all flesh. For he heard him, and his voice, and brought him into a cloud. And he gave him commandments before his face, and a law of life and instruction.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (The Douay opens the first of these verses with the name of Moses, which the Missal’s Latin does not carry, so the Lesson begins with the description and never supplies the man. It also stops before the last clause of the sixth verse, which goes on to speak of teaching Jacob and Israel. One verse of it, the one about kings, was printed here on the fourth of this month inside the long chant for a great priest, in the offering on being faithful over a few things<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (Psalm 20:4<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n O Lord, thou hast prevented him with blessings of sweetness: thou hast set on his head a crown of precious stones.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Psalm 20:5. He asked life of thee: and thou hast given him length of days for ever and ever.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Missal’s Latin opens this verse with the address O Lord, which the Douay carries earlier in the psalm rather than here. Prevented is the older English for going in front of somebody rather than stopping them.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Alleluia, alleluia. (Psalm 91:13<\/a>) The just shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow up like the cedar of Libanus. Alleluia.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Matthew 19:27-29<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n At that time, Peter answering, said to Him: Behold we have left all things, and have followed thee: what therefore shall we have?<\/p>\n\n\n\n And Jesus said to them: Amen, I say to you, that you, who have followed me, in the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit on the seat of his majesty, you also shall sit on twelve seats judging the twelve tribes of Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And every one that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall possess life everlasting.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Begin with what does not happen. Peter asks what they are going to get out of it, in the plainest words available, and nobody tells him off. There is no reproof in the reply, no sigh, no correction of his motives, and no suggestion that a better disciple would not have asked. The answer opens with Amen, I say to you<\/em>, which is the formula of a guarantee, and it ends by telling him that whoever has left a household shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That absence is the first thing to hold, because the teaching most of us were handed says the opposite. It says the question itself is the flaw. It says that if you are still asking what you get, you have not understood the arrangement, and that a person who wants something back has spoiled the thing by wanting it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the question stands, and so does the plain answer given to it, which is that whoever has left a household shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Christ does not appear to have been told this. He hears an accounting question and answers with figures: seats, a hundredfold, a life. Whoever has left a household shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now take the shape of the answer, because it moves. The first half of it is addressed to a closed group, you, who have followed me<\/em>, twelve men and twelve seats, an answer exactly the size of the question. Then the sentence turns and the addressee opens: and every one that hath left<\/em>. The reply outgrows the people who asked it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That widening is the hinge of the whole passage. A question about what the twelve get is answered for the twelve, and then answered again for anybody at all, and the second answer is the larger of the two. Every one that hath left shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the second answer is paid in the coin the question was asked in. Peter counts up a house, the people in it, and the ground it stood on. The reply does not offer him something else instead. It says that what was left in that kind will come back in that kind, a hundred times over, and that whoever has left a household shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The alternative reading is everywhere and it is a swindle, and it is worth being exact about. It says the losses are traded upward for something better than a household: a spiritual consolation, a peace that makes the loss stop mattering, a compensation in a currency you cannot spend. That is not what the sentence does. It answers a loss of people and a place with people and a place, and says you shall receive an hundredfold of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A household for a household. That is the whole content of the words shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note also what the promise does not do to the losses themselves. It does not call them small. It does not say they were a good idea, or that they were freely chosen, or that a person who is still grieving them has misunderstood the deal. The losses stand in the sentence at full size, and then the sentence says that whoever left them shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The two verbs at the end are worth hearing on their own. Shall receive<\/em>, and shall possess<\/em>. Both are verbs of coming into a thing, and neither is a verb of earning or of making, so no work at all is described between the leaving and the having.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The promise runs toward the person and not out of them, which is what it means to say they shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the teaching this cuts against, and the people it gets aimed at. There are gay, lesbian and bisexual people who lost the house they grew up in, some of them told to go and some of them quietly frozen out until going was the only sensible thing left, and who live now in households made of people they are not related to. The teaching says that what they have is a substitute. It does not usually say so out loud. It says so by keeping the word family for one arrangement and finding some other word for theirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the harm, and it is done in the vocabulary rather than in the doctrine. A household of friends becomes a situation<\/em>. The people in it become housemates<\/em>, or support<\/em>, or the people they live with<\/em>, and the ones who threw them out keep the noun. Underneath the vocabulary is the claim that blood is the real thing and everything else is making do, so that a person who lost the first one has lost the category itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Against all of which the Church sets one flat sentence every year, which is that whoever has left a household shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matthew 19:29 will not carry that. The verse takes a lost household and answers it with an hundredfold, and it uses the same nouns on both sides of the sentence. Whatever is coming is not a different kind of thing from what went. It is that thing, multiplied, and whoever has left it shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put the fruit-test on our own record here, because that is where it belongs. What has the substitute reading grown? It has grown people who will not call the person who has kept them alive for nine years a relative in front of a priest, and funerals where the ones who did the caring sit in the fourth row. It has grown a quiet, permanent second-classing of the only household somebody has, done by people who mean nothing by it and do it every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of that is required by the text. The text says whoever left a house and kin shall receive an hundredfold, and it does not add that the hundredfold is a lesser grade of the thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the eighteenth of this month we sat with a sentence about a place that this place was made by God<\/a>, and the claim there was about residence, about whether you have to arrive from somewhere in order to belong in a room. Today’s claim is next door to it and it is not the same. That one asked where you came from. This one asks whether what you have now counts as a somewhere, and the answer is that whoever left the first one shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If none of the theology is yours, the ethical shape holds by itself. A household is constituted by what the people in it actually do for each other, and no word applied from outside can make that arrangement provisional. You are allowed to call the people who feed you and sit up with you your people, in those words, in public. The sentence about the hundredfold is the oldest version of that permission I know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And in the Church’s own words it runs like this: whoever has left a household shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story sometimes told of a woman of forty-four who had been assaulted in her twenties by a man in the trade she was training in, and who left the trade rather than the town. She retrained as a bookkeeper and worked from a back room at home for eleven years, and she was good at it, and she took no work that would have put her in a room with a firm. She was not hiding from anything. She had simply arranged the whole of her working life so that nobody would ever have to be told anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then a man who ran a two-van tiling firm rang her up, because his quarterly returns were three weeks late and a woman at the builders’ merchant had given him a number. He asked her nothing about herself. He asked whether she would come in on Tuesdays, because the paperwork lived in a box in an office over a barber’s on the high street, with four people working out of it and a kettle. She said she would try one Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She did the same work she had been doing at home. That is the part worth holding on to. Nothing about her changed, nothing was mended, and nobody suggested she become anything other than the bookkeeper she already was. What changed was that she was sent for, and that the job was there because they needed it done and not because she needed doing good to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nobody offered her a different life. They offered her Tuesdays, and a promise that whoever has left a household shall receive an hundredfold has to be able to look like that or it is of no use to anybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am not going to tell you it worked out. She was still taking the long way round one street four years later, and I do not know that she ever stopped. Nothing in this story gets fixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What she got was a chair beside somebody else’s desk on a Tuesday, and four people who said her name when she came up the stairs. Set that beside a Gospel in which the answer to a lost place is a hundred more of the same, and the shape is the same one. Whoever has left a household shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Church puts today’s Lesson underneath all this, and it is a strange choice until you hear where it happens. Every clause in it is public. He is glorified in the sight of kings<\/em>, and given commandments in the sight of his people<\/em>, and the memory of him is in benediction, which means people are saying it out loud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of it is done where people can see it, and so is the hundredfold that whoever has left a household shall receive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the day is not private, and neither is the promise. Nothing here is arranged to be felt quietly by one person and mentioned to nobody. The hundredfold is a household, and a household is not a private object at all, which is why the person who shall receive an hundredfold is not being offered a consolation to keep to themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the Collect turns the direction round. Sylvester went out of a settled life and into a desert, and the prayer says God willed the calling. The men in the Gospel went the other way, out of all things and after a person. Neither leaving is recommended anywhere in today’s texts as a thing to go and do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two directions of travel, then, and one promise laid over both, that whoever has left a household shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Gospel is descriptive, not an instruction. It does not tell anybody to leave a house, and it says nothing at all about whether the people who left were right to. It tells you what follows for the ones who did, which is that they shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No command, then, and no verdict on anybody’s leaving. Only the report that they shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Sunday we were told that heaven and earth would go and my words shall not pass<\/a>. This is that same durability pointed at furniture and relatives. The world that took the house is not the last word about the house, and the sentence outlasting it says whoever left one shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Alleluia gives the timing and is honest about it. A palm and a cedar of Libanus are both slow, and the psalm says the just shall flourish and grow up, which are not words for anything that happens this week. That was the pace on Thursday too, when the offering stood on the line fear not little flock<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So there is no date on it and I will not invent one. The verse guarantees the kind of thing and not the hour, and the Missal declines to say when whoever has left a household shall receive an hundredfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
The Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
The Commemoration of St. Peter of Alexandria, Bishop and Martyr<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
The Lesson<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
The Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
The Alleluia<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
The Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n