He was clothed in a vesture dipped in blood. And his name is called the Word of God.^[1] See then, my brothers, how the vesture sprinkled with blood denoted in symbol the flesh, through which the impassible Word of God underwent suffering, as the prophets testify. For thus speaks the blessed Micah: Should this be said, O house of Jacob? Is the Spirit of the Lord impatient? Are these his doings? Do not my words do well to him who walks uprightly? But you rise against my people as an enemy; you strip the robe from the peaceful. This refers to Christ’s suffering in the flesh.

Let him who cannot fly like an eagle fly like a sparrow. Let him who cannot fly to heaven fly to the mountains. Let him flee before the valleys that are quickly destroyed by water. Let him pass over the mountains. Abraham’s nephew passed over the mountain of Segor and was saved.^[1] But Lot’s wife could not climb it, for she looked back in womanly fashion and lost her salvation.^[2] Draw near the everlasting mountains, the Lord says through the prophet Micah, arise from here, for this is not a rest for you by reason of uncleanness. You have been corrupted with corruption, you have suffered pursuit.

And the Lord says, Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.^[3] Mount Zion is there, and so is the city of peace, Jerusalem, built not of earthly stones but of living stones, with ten thousand angels and the church of the firstborn and the spirits of those made perfect and the God of the just, who spoke better with his blood than Abel.^[4] For the one cried out for vengeance^[5] but the other for pardon. The one was a reproach to his brother’s sin; the other forgave the world’s sin. The one was the revelation of a crime; the other covered a crime according to what is written, Blessed are they whose sins are covered.^[6]

In the Lord I take refuge; how can you say to me, ‘Flee to the mountains like a sparrow!’^[1] Shrewd adversary; he tempted the Lord Savior in the desert, and now he wants the faithful, every one of them, to depart from the land of Judea and to dwell in a wilderness barren of virtues, that there he might crush them more easily. Even the counsel itself is crafty. It is not an exhortation to assume the wings of a dove, a gentle, simple and domestic bird—one, they say, entirely lacking in gall—which was offered in the temple in behalf of the Lord. [Instead it is an exhortation to take] the wings of a sparrow, a chattering, roving bird, one that is a stranger to its mate after hatching its young—notwithstanding that Aquila and Symmachus have usually translated bird in the place of sparrow. . . . The mountains, moreover, we may identify as those to which Scripture refers in another place: Draw you near to the everlasting mountains, and in the second of the gradual psalms: I lift up my eyes toward the mountains, whence help shall come to me.^[2] They are the mountains too in which we must take refuge after the abomination of desolation shall stand in the holy place.^[3]

St. Paul wished that he could be accursed if the people of Israel be saved to God’s glory.^[1] The man who knows that death is not the end is confident in his readiness to die for Christ. Again, We rejoice when we are weak, but you are strong.^[2] It is no wonder if St. Paul, for the glory of Christ and the conversion of his brother Jews and of the Gentiles, should be ready to be accursed of Christ. Even the prophet Micah wanted to be a liar and to lose the inspiration of the Holy Spirit if the Jews could escape the punishment and the destruction which he had prophesied: Would that I were not man that had the Spirit, and that I rather spoke a lie. And there was the case of the lawgiver, Moses, who did not refuse to perish with his brothers who were doomed to die but said, I beseech you, O Lord, this people have sinned a heinous sin; either forgive them this trespass, or, if you do not, blot me out of the book which you have written.^[3]

Whoever has entered in must not remain in the state wherein he entered but must go forth into the pasture so that entering in should be the beginning, going forth and finding pasture,^[1] the perfecting of graces. The one who enters in is contained within the bounds of the world. The one who goes forth goes, as it were, beyond all created things and, counting as nothing all things seen, shall find pasture above the heavens, and shall feed upon the Word of God and say, The Lord is my shepherd (and feeds me); I can lack nothing.^[2] But this going forth can be only through Christ; as it follows, and the Lord at the head of them.