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Office Of Readings | Friday, Lent Week 5 | A Reading From The Treatise Of Saint Fulgentius Of Ruspe To Peter On Faith
‘Jesus Christ offered himself for us.’
Commentary | ‘Christ Offered Himself For Us’ By Saint Fulgentius Of Ruspe
This powerful reading from Saint Fulgentius offers a rich meditation on the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice, drawing us deeply into the mystery at the heart of the Christian faith. It’s a fitting reflection for the final days of Lent, as we prepare to enter into Holy Week and contemplate Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection.
From The Shadows To The Reality
Fulgentius begins by looking backward — to the long history of sacrifice in the Old Testament. These animal offerings, commanded by God, were never meant to be ends in themselves. Instead, they were signs, foreshadowings of something much greater to come. They pointed toward the perfect and final offering: the self-giving of Jesus Christ.
For centuries, God’s people had performed ritual sacrifices — bulls, goats, lambs — to express repentance, thanksgiving, and the desire for reconciliation with God. But these sacrifices, while important in their time, could never fully heal the rift between humanity and God. They were symbolic gestures awaiting their fulfilment in Christ. As the Letter to the Hebrews says, ‘It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins’ (Hebrews 10:4). Fulgentius echoes this, emphasizing that these earlier sacrifices were given meaning only because they pointed to Christ.
Christ Who Is Everything
In one of the most striking and beautiful passages of the reading, Fulgentius presents Christ as not only the priest who offers, but also the sacrifice, the temple, and the God to whom the offering is made. This is a profound theological insight.
Christ is the priest because he offers himself to the Father on our behalf. He is the sacrifice because it is his own body and blood that are given. He is the temple because in him, divinity and humanity meet — the place where God dwells among his people. And he is also God, the recipient of the offering, one with the Father and the Spirit.
This unity of roles is unique to Christ. In the Old Testament, the priest, the sacrifice, and the temple were all separate. In Jesus, they are brought together — he is everything needed for our salvation. This completeness shows the depth of God’s love: nothing is left to chance or to us; Christ himself has accomplished it all.
Sacrifice Continues In The Eucharist
But Fulgentius doesn’t stop with Christ’s death on the cross. He goes on to show how this sacrifice continues to shape the life of the Church. In the Old Testament, God’s people offered animal sacrifices; now, in the New Covenant, the Church offers the Eucharist — the bread and wine that become the body and blood of Christ.
This sacrifice is not a new or separate offering. It is the same sacrifice of Christ, made present sacramentally at every Mass. What once happened in time — on the cross — is now made present to us in mystery. In every Eucharist, we join in Christ’s offering to the Father, giving thanks and being drawn into communion with him.
A Sacrifice For Sinners
Fulgentius ends with a powerful reminder of who this sacrifice is for: not for the righteous, but for sinners. Christ died, he says, ‘for the wicked’ — for us, in all our weakness and failure. While we were still enemies, Christ reconciled us to God through his death. This is the heart of the Gospel. God does not wait for us to become worthy; rather, he meets us in our unworthiness and offers us mercy.
This reminder is especially important during Lent. As we examine our hearts and turn back to God, we are not trying to earn his love. We are responding to a love that has already been given, a grace that has already been poured out. Christ’s death is not the end of the story — it is the doorway into new life.
A Reading From The Treatise Of Saint Fulgentius Of Ruspe To Peter On Faith
The sacrifices of animal victims which our forefathers were commanded to offer to God by the holy Trinity itself, the one God of the old and the new testaments, foreshadowed the most acceptable gift of all. This was the offering which in his compassion the only Son of God would make of himself in his human nature for our sake.
The Apostle teaches that Christ offered himself for us to God as a fragrant offering and sacrifice. He is the true God and the true high priest who for our sake entered once for all into the holy of holies, taking with him not the blood of bulls and goats but his own blood. This was foreshadowed by the high priest of old when each year he took blood and entered the holy of holies.
Christ is therefore the one who in himself alone embodied all that he knew to be necessary to achieve our redemption. He is at once priest and sacrifice, God and temple. He is the priest through whom we have been reconciled, the sacrifice by which we have been reconciled, the temple in which we have been reconciled, the God with whom we have been reconciled. He alone is priest, sacrifice and temple because he is all these things as God in the form of a servant; but he is not alone as God, for he is this with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the form of God.
Hold fast to this and never doubt it: the only-begotten Son, God the Word, becoming man offered himself for us to God as a fragrant offering and sacrifice. In the time of the old testament, patriarchs, prophets and priests sacrificed animals in his honour, and in honour of the Father and the Holy Spirit as well.
Now in the time of the new testament the holy catholic Church throughout the world never ceases to offer the sacrifice of bread and wine, in faith and love, to him and to the Father and the Holy Spirit, with whom he shares one godhead.
Those animal sacrifices foreshadowed the flesh of Christ which he would offer for our sins, though himself without sin, and the blood which he would pour out for the forgiveness of our sins. In this sacrifice there is thanksgiving for, and commemoration of, the flesh of Christ that he offered for us, and the blood that the same God poured out for us. On this Saint Paul says in the Acts of the Apostles: Keep watch over yourselves and over the whole flock, in which the Holy Spirit has appointed you as bishops to rule the Church of God, which he won for himself by his blood.
Those sacrifices of old pointed in sign to what was to be given to us. In this sacrifice we see plainly what has already been given to us. Those sacrifices foretold the death of the Son of God for sinners. In this sacrifice he is proclaimed as already slain for sinners, as the Apostle testifies: Christ died for the wicked at a time when we were still powerless, and when we were enemies we were reconciled with God through the death of his Son.
Jesus has told his disciples about the Passion to come for the third time, as they journey to Jerusalem, and still this grizzly series of events, of mockery, scourging and death, is quite beyond the disciples’ comprehension. It is a great testimony to the apostles’ honesty and humility that, in recounting the Gospel, they do not seek to conceal their early weaknesses; these men chosen by Jesus have yet to be transformed through grace, to become the great pillars of the Church. Now further weakness is recalled, as the disciples reveal their ambition to have a powerful and prestigious position when the Kingdom comes [ … ]
Psalm 38 is a heartfelt expression of repentance and a plea for divine assistance in the face of suffering and affliction. Attributed to King David, this psalm vividly portrays the anguish of a soul burdened by sin and illness, seeking God’s mercy and restoration [ … ]
‘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 […]
