5. See Jn 6:35; Lk 4:2.
SERMON 207 111 what greed, not love, is looking for; or calling down some evil on our enemies; or showing a savagery in prayer against people which we are unable to vent on them in actual harm or revenge. Undoubtedly, just as we are made fitter for praying by almsgiving and fasting, so too our very prayer gives alms when it is directed to God and poured forth, not only for friends but also for enemies, and when it fasts from anger and hatred and all other such destructive vices. If we, after all, are fasting from food, how much more should our prayer be fasting from poison? Then again, we are sustained at the proper and convenient times by taking nourishment; let us never entice our prayer with such dishes as those. Let it undertake, rather, a perpetual fast; because it does have its proper food, which it is instructed to take without ceasing. So then, let it always fast from hatred, always feed on love.
NOTES
1. In style a somewhat more elaborate sermon than the previous two; so I would be inclined to date it ten to fifteen years earlier, say between 400 and 405. As he lingers in section 2 on the reprehensible habit some people had of making Lent a time for more fancy cookery than the rest of the year, we may perhaps infer that he was facing a mainly well-to-do congregation; what I heard one preacher many years ago call a fur coat congregation. But again, there is no reference to the ascetics or religious. So it was probably not preached in the main basilica of Hippo Regius, but perhaps in one of the more fashionable suburbs.
2. As he has just mentioned Easter, it is probable that the fasting and praying of Jesus, which he is referring to here, is the prayer of John 17, and the fasting alluded to in Lk 22:16-18, rather than the fast of forty days at the beginning of his ministry, Lk 4:2, which we have come to associate with the beginning of Lent.
3. Misericordia super miseros. 4. See Phil 2:7. 5. See Jn 6:35; Lk 4:2. 6. See Jn 19:28; 4:7. 7. See 2 Cor 12:9; 11:29; Lk 22:41-44.
8. See Jn 14:6. 9. See Jn 13:13-14.
10. See Mt 26:14-15; 27:9.
11. See Lk 18:14.
12. See Jn 6:54. 13. See Is 58:7.
14. See Jn 1:11.
15. Crapula et ebrietas; see Sermon 205, note 7. 16. Pingui vitulo vel volatilibus saginatis.
17. See Gn 25:29-34. 18. See 1 Chr 11:17-19.