Augustine Ps 140 Week 4 Lent Hebrews 8

Night Office - the words of St. Augustine added jam commentary to the bread and butter of the steady Psalms recital. 

Second Reading: From a commentary on the psalms by Saint Augustine (In ps. 140,4-6: CCL40, 2028-2029)

This work,. finished around 416, contains homilies of an allegorical tendency. Augustine interprets Psalm 140 in terms of Christ's passion. Since Jesus and the Church form the whole Christ, head and members undergo the passion together. Through baptism the members have been crucified with Christ and have risen with him to a new life.

• I have called to you, Lord; make haste to help me! We are all in a position to make these words our own. Yet if I pronounce them, they will not be uttered by myself alone, but by the whole Christ. They are spoken in the name of his body; for while he was on earth, he prayed as one who shared our human nature, he besought the Father in the name of all his members, and during his prayer drops of blood were forced from every pore of his body. That is what Scripture tells us: Jesus prayed with such earnestness that his sweat became like drops of blood. This bleeding of his entire body surely signifies that the whole Church will bleed with the suffering of martyrs.
• I have called to you, Lord; make haste to help me! Hear my voice when I cry out to you.
• Did you imagine that crying was over when you said: I have called to you? You may have cried out, but do not suppose you are now safe from care. When anguish is at an end. then there will be no more crying. But if Christ's body, the Church. is liable to suffering until the end of time, then must we not only say: I have called to you; make haste to help me, but add with the psalmist: Hear my voice when I cry to you.
• Let my prayer rise up before you like incense; let the raising of my hands be like an evening sacrifice. Every Christian is aware that this passage is usually understood of Christ our head. As evening drew near, the Lord yielded up his soul upon the cross in the certainty of receiving it back again; it was not wrested from him against his will But we too were represented there. Christ had nothing to hang upon the cross except the body he had received from us. And it was surely not possible for God the Father to abandon his only Son, who shared with him the one godhead. Nevertheless, when Christ nailed our human weakness to the cross - that cross to which, as the Apostle says, our unregenerate nature has been fastened along with him - it was with the voice of our humanity that he exclaimed: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
• That, then, is the evening sacrifice: the Lord's own passion, his cross, the offering on it of the saving victim, of that holocaust which is acceptable to God. And by his rising, Christ turned that evening sacrifice into a morning oblation.
• Similarly, the pure prayer which ascends from a faithful heart will be like incense rising from a hallowed altar. No fragrance can be more pleasing to God than that of his own Son. May all the faithful breathe out the same perfume.
• Our unregenerate nature - it is the Apostle who speaks once more - has been fastened to the cross along with him, in order that our sin-stained humanity may be renewed and cleansed, and we ourselves may no longer be slaves to sin.

Responsory                                          Galatians 2: 19-20

With Christ I have been nailed to the cross, - and I live now no longer my own life, but the life of Christ who lives in me.

I live by faith in the Son of God

who loved me and gave up his life for me. - And I live ...