Look
at the difference between an upright and a crooked heart. The righteous man
realizes that when afflictions or sorrow or humiliations fall on him it is by
God’s holy will, and so accepts it. The man with a twisted and perverted heart
puts up with it angrily. He agrees that he is a sinner, but says there are many
worse than he who are happy.
In
fact there are three arguments that his crooked heart puts forward: either
there is no God – the fool says that – or God is unjust, or God does not rule
the lives of men, and disinterests himself in what happens to them. The upright
heart accepts whatever happens to him, saying ‘The Lord has given, the Lord has
taken away; as it pleased him so he has done: blessed be the name of the Lord’.
Your
tribulations come from God – a punishment for the sinner, a chastisement for
the son. If you wish to be a son, don’t expect to escape pains, for ‘He
chastises every son he receives’. Every son? Without exception?
Listen.
The only begotten Son was without sin, and yet he suffered. He took to himself
our infirmity, the head bearing the members of the body in his person. As man
he went to his Passion sorrowful that you might rejoice, in anguish that you
might be consoled. He said, ‘My soul is sorrowful even unto death, but not what
I will but what you will, Father’.
Psalm 31. 25, 26 and passim
