Only One Is Your Teacher
The feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, falls this year on the Tuesday of the Second Week in Lent. So there is a very striking coincidence in the liturgy: the Gospel of the feast speaks of the true Teachers, the salt of the earth, who "do and teach" and whose works shine before men. The Gospel for Tuesday in the Second Week of Lent speaks of the false teachers who have sat in the chair of Moses and have not done the works of Moses, that is, they have not kept the laws they talked about. Yet they have done works that have been dazzling in the eyes of men and have done them in order to shine before men, to have the first places in the synagogues and to be called Rabbi. The theme of both the feast and the ferial day is summed up in the line Unus est Magister vester, Christus: "Only one is your Teacher, Christ." It is Jesus Who teaches us in and through St. Thomas Aquinas and in St. Bonaventure and St. Augustine and in all the other doctors of the Church. We have no other Father and no other Doctor than Christ. It is Jesus Whose works shine in the lives of the saints. It is Jesus Who manifests Himself to us through the words of the Fathers and the theologians. The false doctors preach their own sanctity and Christ is not seen or heard in them. But the true teachers preach the sanctity of Christ, and He shines through them. He it is Whose Truth has made them holy.
March 7, 1950, II.416
I Corinthians 2:1-5
ReplyDeleteWhen I came to you, brothers and sisters,* I did not come proclaiming the mystery* of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. 2For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 3And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. 4My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom,* but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.