March 26, 2026

0:00Welcome to the Father's Speak, a production of the Orthodox West. Each day, Father John Finton reads a selection fitted to the Western liturgical calendar from one of the fathers of the church. From a sermon by our father among the saints, Ambrose. Their gospel us inflows with a twofold grace. First we are to believe how readily the divine mercy stoops to the distress of a widow mother, especially to one who is broken by the sickness or death of an only son. And it was a funeral of considerable importance as befitted her position, for much people of the city was with her. Secondly, it would appear that this widow, surrounded by a crowd of people, stands for more than a woman who, by her tears, deservedly obtained the resurrection of her young and only son.

1:01For holy church calls her younger people back to life as they think on her tears at the time of a solemn funeral and last rites of burial. She may not weep for those who are due to rise again. And the dead man was carried to the grave in a beer by bearers representing the four elements of the material world, but he had hope of rising again. For he was carried on wood. Wood was of no avail to us in former days, but since Jesus touched it, it began to be conducive to life. It was a sign that salvation would be restored to the people through the gibbet of the cross. On hearing the word of God, those grim funeral bearers stood still, they who were carrying the human body along the deadly way of material nature. Or how else is it, but that we are lying lifeless on a kind of beer that is on the instrument of funeral rites? When the flame of an ordinate desires burns us, or cold heartenness freezes us, or when

2:02our vigorous soul is dead and by some slothful habit of our earthly body, or when our spirit blocked by sin is void of that pure light that nourishes the mind. These are the funeral bearers. But although the last rites at the moment of death banish all hope of life, and the bodies lie close in the grave, yet by the word of God those bodies rise again, speech returns, the sun is given back to his mother, he is called back from the tomb, he is delivered from the grave. What is this, your tomb, but evil habits? Your tomb is unbelief, your sepulchre is an open throat, if their throat is an open sepulchre whence deadly words are produced. From this sepulchre Christ sets you free, from this tomb you will arise if you will listen to the word of God, and if your sin is grievous so that you cannot wash yourself clean with the tears of penitence. The mother church will weep for you, for she intercedes for each of her children as

3:03a widow mother for her only son. She grieves with the spiritual sorrow that is like a mother's natural sorrow, when she sees her children being carried on to death by deadly sins.