Office Of Readings | Friday, Lent Week 3 | Pope Saint Gregory The Great’s Reflection On Job And Christ | Christology | Ecclesiology
‘The mystery of our being made alive.’
Commentary On Pope Saint Gregory The Great’s Reflection On Job And Christ
As Pope from 590 to 604, Pope Saint Gregory the Great (c. 540–604) led the Church during a time of great upheaval, marked by political instability, the collapse of Roman infrastructure, and the threat of barbarian invasions.
Gregory’s interpretation of Job is deeply Christological and ecclesiological, meaning he sees Job as both a prefiguration of Christ and a representation of the Church. His exegesis follows the tradition of allegorical and moral interpretation that was common among the early Church Fathers, reading Scripture not only as historical narrative but as a living spiritual reality that speaks directly to the Christian experience.
Job As A Type Of Christ And The Church
A striking aspect of Gregory’s reflection is his presentation of Job as a figure of Christ. Job, though innocent, suffers greatly, just as Christ, the truly sinless one, endures suffering and death for the salvation of the world. Gregory makes a direct connection between Job’s words—’I have suffered this without sin on my hands, for my prayer to God was pure’—and Christ’s Passion. The reference to Christ’s hands being without sin recalls 1 Peter 2:22: ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’
By extension, Job is a symbol of the Church, the Body of Christ. The suffering of Job represents the trials and tribulations of Christians, who must share in the sufferings of their head, Christ. Just as Job remains faithful amid his afflictions, so too must the Church persevere through persecution, temptation, and hardship. This is an important theme in Gregory’s pastoral writings, as he often reminded his clergy and flock that suffering is not meaningless but a participation in Christ’s redemptive work.
Power Of Intercessory Prayer
A key moment in this passage is Gregory’s emphasis on the purity of Christ’s prayer: ‘His prayer to God was pure, his alone out of all mankind, for in the midst of his suffering he prayed for his persecutors: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’’ (Luke 23:34) This is the ultimate model of selfless, intercessory prayer, where Christ, instead of condemning his executioners, asks for their forgiveness.
Gregory sees in this the transformative power of prayer, which not only expresses mercy but also has the power to bring about conversion. The very people who crucified Christ—Roman soldiers, Jewish leaders, and bystanders—later came to recognize him as the Son of God. This echoes Saint Stephen’s martyrdom in Acts 7:60, where his final prayer for his persecutors precedes the conversion of Saul (who became Saint Paul).
Gregory’s pastoral theology frequently emphasized prayer as the lifeblood of the Church. In his Pastoral Rule, he stressed the necessity of prayer for bishops, priests, and all believers, urging them to intercede not only for themselves but also for their enemies. In this way, Gregory’s words remain profoundly relevant for modern Christians, calling Christians to imitate Christ’s radical forgiveness and to pray for those who oppose them.
Blood Of Christ | Atonement And Redemption
Gregory turns to the theme of Christ’s blood, drawing a powerful contrast with the blood of Abel. In Genesis 4:10, God tells Cain: ‘The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the earth.’ This cry is one of vengeance, demanding justice for Abel’s murder. However, in Hebrews 12:24, we are told that Christ’s blood ‘speaks a better word than the blood of Abel’. Unlike Abel’s blood, which calls for retribution, Christ’s blood calls for mercy and salvation.
Gregory develops this theme by saying: ‘The blood that is drunk, the blood of redemption, is itself the cry of our Redeemer.’ This directly connects to the Eucharist, in which the faithful partake of the blood of Christ as the price of their redemption. The phrase ‘Earth, do not cover over my blood’ is interpreted in an ecclesial sense—meaning that the Church must not keep silent about the mystery of salvation but proclaim it to the whole world.
The universality of this message is crucial. Gregory, as a missionary Pope, sent Saint Augustine of Canterbury to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons, believing that the message of Christ’s blood and redemption was meant for all peoples, not just those within the Roman Empire. Today, his words challenge modern believers to be unafraid in proclaiming the Gospel, ensuring that Christ’s cry of salvation is not ‘hidden’ but made known to all.
Preaching And Witnessing To Christ
Gregory concludes by emphasizing the duty of all Christians to bear witness to their faith: ‘If the sacrament of the Lord’s passion is to work its effect in us, we must imitate what we receive and proclaim to mankind what we revere.’ This highlights the deep link between faith and action. It is not enough to believe in Christ’s sacrifice; one must also live it out and proclaim it.
For Gregory, this was not merely theoretical. As Pope, he was deeply engaged in the care of the poor, the reform of the clergy, and the protection of Rome from invading forces. He saw preaching and charity as inseparable—faith must be demonstrated through works. His Homilies on the Gospels show his pastoral concern, as he frequently urged his listeners to live according to what they professed in the Creed.
This remains an urgent message today. In a world where Christianity is increasingly marginalized in many societies, believers are called to proclaim their faith not just in words but through acts of charity, forgiveness, and moral integrity.
Lenten Call To Holiness
Gregory’s reflection, set within the penitential season of Lent, offers profound insights into the Christian journey. Through Job, he presents suffering as a means of union with Christ. Through Christ’s prayer, he calls us to intercede for others, even our enemies. Through the shedding of Christ’s blood, he reminds us of the power of redemption. And through his exhortation to proclaim the faith, he challenges modern Christians to live authentically as witnesses of the Gospel.
Pope Saint Gregory The Great’s Reflection On Job And Christ
Holy Job is a type of the Church. At one time he speaks for the body, at another for the head. As he speaks of its members he is suddenly caught up to speak in the name of their head. So it is here, where he says: I have suffered this without sin on my hands, for my prayer to God was pure.
Christ suffered without sin on his hands, for he committed no sin and deceit was not found on his lips. Yet he suffered the pain of the cross for our redemption. His prayer to God was pure, his alone out of all mankind, for in the midst of his suffering he prayed for his persecutors: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.
Is it possible to offer, or even to imagine, a purer kind of prayer than that which shows mercy to one’s torturers by making intercession for them? It was thanks to this kind of prayer that the frenzied persecutors who shed the blood of our Redeemer drank it afterwards in faith and proclaimed him to be the Son of God.
The text goes on fittingly to speak of Christ’s blood: Earth, do not cover over my blood, do not let my cry find a hiding place in you. When man sinned, God had said: Earth you are, and to earth you will return. Earth does not cover over the blood of our Redeemer, for every sinner, as he drinks the blood that is the price of his redemption, offers praise and thanksgiving, and to the best of his power makes that blood known to all around him.
Earth has not hidden away his blood, for holy Church has preached in every corner of the world the mystery of its redemption.
Notice what follows: Do not let my cry find a hiding place in you. The blood that is drunk, the blood of redemption, is itself the cry of our Redeemer. Paul speaks of the sprinkled blood that calls out more eloquently than Abel’s. Of Abel’s blood Scripture had written: The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the earth. The blood of Jesus calls out more eloquently than Abel’s, for the blood of Abel asked for the death of Cain, the fratricide, while the blood of the Lord has asked for, and obtained, life for his persecutors.
If the sacrament of the Lord’s passion is to work its effect in us, we must imitate what we receive and proclaim to mankind what we revere. The cry of the Lord finds a hiding place in us if our lips fail to speak of this, though our hearts believe in it. So that his cry may not lie concealed in us it remains for us all, each in his own measure, to make known to those around us the mystery of our new life in Christ.
‘Death,’ says His Grace, ‘throws it all apart. For we are not as we should be. Faith requires our adjustment to God’s truth. God’s triumph in a very real sense requires in us the loss of our everything. Which, as with Mary at the other end of Jesus’s life, is God’s truth.’ The Gospel reading is of John 11: 1-45, which is a long passage, and His Grace’s homiletic theme commences in textual wilderness. Our brokenness – in this place – a family home. Our faith, our doubt, our death… The irruption – death, doubt, fear – within our precious scenes and our most intimate places. Our domesticity. His Grace speaks from the chair, as is a bishop’s prerogative, and says: ‘So much is obscure in the Gospels. We’re always reaching through them. We’re never there. Really, we never are. Our knowledge, our understanding, of the Gospels is never complete, and with each reading comes a new revelation. There are always new riches there. Just as there are between all of us, between myself and you. The Gospels are living texts. This is a part of the conversation we have with our own Christianity. It is a part of who we are in our relationship with Jesus. We are in this sense always on the brink. ‘So yes, there is plenty that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one of the order of bishops, we would be lying if we said that weren’t the case. They are not easy texts to encounter, if by that word we may signify something more than a superficial glancing off against, but rather a profound search for the word of God. The Gospels are written by people who had their own ideas, and often didn’t know what had really happened. Luke is quite explicit on this point. His is an investigation, from the explicitly claimed point of view of an historian, rather than that of a first-hand witness, who attempts, so he says, to set out an orderly account, out of the chaos, the sheer muddle, that has been handed down to him. It is possible to imagine Luke researching and composing his account after many years, when there has arisen a desire to know what exactly happened, and this implies a certain call to faith and certain demands of historicity, to historical exactitude. So in these different ways, the people of the first years of Christian faith are in the dark. There is also a decisive need to define the life of Jesus. And people didn’t get Jesus. The whole meaning of Christianity is only now beginning to take root throughout the composition. So much needs to be evangelized. The light shines almost in tentative fashion like that first star, which drew the wise men from the east to our Lord’s cradle. ‘John’s is widely held to be a very late Gospel. There are others who say that John’s Gospel might have been the first to acquire its true shape, because it most fully expresses Jesus, as we know him to be, as members of the Catholic Church. We don’t really know when any of this is being written, but we get a feel in John of a Gospel refined over many years, through a community. So there’s a lot going on there that I’d like you to think about. ‘What I would like to suggest to you is that, while within the Gospels we are often confronted with clues, guesswork, stories that have been handed down through so many people, and so in this sense we might find ourselves to be in the wilderness, this is the very desolate space itself to which we must give ourselves in order to experience Christ’s full redemption in our lives. I suggest it is for God’s glory that we do so. ‘As we become aware of ourselves, in this seminary, we find ourselves in a very secure, comfortable setting, and there are signs of Easter everywhere. Within the very fabric of these buildings, our Lord is risen; our Lord lives. But now this is our Lenten journey, where death enters, where death breaks us. We are to ride into Jerusalem in triumph, and then we are to be utterly broken, all hope gone, our hope extinguished. And really, I suggest to you, it is only by inhabiting this thought, as if we don’t know Easter is there, that our new life can follow, just when we have given up all hope, when every promise that Jesus made to us seems to have been cancelled. ‘And here now we have the story of Lazarus. I should like to suggest to you that we have a very powerful call now. In our very comfortable space, our domesticity, with all this comfort, where so very little might seem to happen each day, so it might seem to you, there is a disturbance within all of this comfort, and that is a disturbance within ourselves, and that is our call to Jesus. I think it is correct to say that our most comfortable places break in the light of Jesus from the inside, in order that we may take the necessary steps to be with Jesus. ‘Faith is not comfortable. I think that we can all receive the message of the rolling away of the rock from the tomb of Lazarus to say something of vital importance to ourselves concerning our openness to God’s love. The rock we roll away can come in all sorts of guises, but we know when we are blocked, and I firmly believe if we are truthful then we know where those blocks might be. ‘Next Sunday, which will be Palm Sunday, we process as it were to Jerusalem, to begin our Holy Week. Now as I speak to you we are on the brink. Even now, I suggest it might be very good for all of us to lay aside what we think we know, to fall apart a little, and so […]
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