Office of Readings

  I myself was unable to speak to you as people of the Spirit: I treated you as sensual men, still infants in Christ. What I fed you with was milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it; and indeed, you are still not ready for it since you are still unspiritual. Isn’t that obvious from all the jealousy and wrangling that there is among you, from the way that you go on behaving like ordinary people? What could be more unspiritual than your slogans, ‘I am for Paul’ and ‘I am for Apollos’? After all, what is Apollos and what is Paul? They are servants who brought the faith to you. Even the different ways in which they brought it were assigned to them by the Lord. I did the planting, Apollos did the watering, but God made things grow. Neither the planter nor the waterer matters: only God, who makes things grow. It is all one who does the planting and who does the watering, and each will duly be paid according to his share in the work. We are fellow workers with God; you are God’s farm, God’s building.

  By the grace God gave me, I succeeded as an architect and laid the foundations, on which someone else is doing the building. Everyone doing the building must work carefully. For the foundation, nobody can lay any other than the one which has already been laid, that is Jesus Christ.

  Who is that master, brethren? Without a doubt it is Christ, who says to his disciples, ‘You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am.’

  What, too, is the master’s household ? Doubtless it is the one which the Lord himself ransomed from the hand of the enemy and freed for his own service. This sacred household is the holy, Catholic Church, which is spread through the whole earth with abundant fertility, and glories in the fact that she has been redeemed by the precious blood of her Master. As he himself says, ‘The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.’

  He too, is the good shepherd who laid down his life for his sheep. The flock therefore of the good shepherd is the household of the Redeemer.

  As to who the steward is who ought to be faithful as well as wise, the apostle Paul shows us, when, speaking of himself and his companions, he says, ‘This is how one should regard us, as the servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.’

  Now, lest anyone of us should think that it is only the apostles that have been made stewards, and lest anyone should neglect the duty of his spiritual military service and like a lazy servant yield unfaithfully and unwisely to sleep, the blessed Apostle shows us that the bishops also are stewards, when he says, ‘For a bishop, as God’s steward, must be blameless.’

  We therefore are the servants of the master of the household, we are the stewards of the Lord, we have received the measure of wheat to disburse to you.

  If we should ask what the measure of wheat is, the blessed apostle Paul explains it also, saying, ‘To each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him.’

  What therefore Christ calls the measure of wheat, Paul calls the measure of faith, so that we can learn that this spiritual wheat is nothing else but the revered sacrament of the Christian faith. The measure of this wheat we give you in the name of the Lord as often as we discourse according to the rule of the true faith, being enlightened by the gift of spiritual grace; and you receive this same measure of wheat by the hands of the stewards of the Lord when daily you hear the word of truth from the servants of God’s household.