Sunday itself. I don't quite understand how he would explain the first sentence in that case. The
SERMON 228 259
NOTES
1. No scholars suggest a date, though one suggests the Sunday after Easter, rather than Easter Sunday itself. I don't quite understand how he would explain the first sentence in that case. The general tone suggests to me a middle to late date; say about 420.
2. See Mt 26:41.
3. See Acts 2:33. 4. Literally, "for the sacraments of the Infants, " But he cannot mean for giving the sacraments to the Infants, because that has already been done. Hence my longer paraphrase.
5. A sin that has rather dropped out of the official Christian list of "don'ts" in the last few centuries. And so we have the astonishing, the appalling situation of "third world debt"; and while everyone agrees it is a serious problem, nobody—at least among the creditors in the first world— seems to think there is any wickedness or moral obliquity involved. It's all a matter of finance and economics, sciences that are not considered to have anything to do with ethics, let alone with the gospel. In this matter of the sin of usury, the medieval Church, with all its blind spots, was streets ahead of our contemporary Church today.
6. It is a favorite idea of Augustine's that love (good or bad) on the moral and spiritual plane is what weight is on the material plane; it carries persons to their proper places. Commenting on one of his favorite texts, You have disposed all things in measure and number and weight (Wis 11:20), he says in the Confessions (XIII, 9, 10): Pondus meum amor meus: "my weight is my love/ my love is my weight."
7. Here I think he must mean the church building. 8. At the same service as this sermon was preached at? And does "at the altar of God" mean immediately before communion, as suggested in note 2 to Sermon 227? Again questions without answers, at least here.
9. Note the very wide use of the word "sacrament." 10. That is, if this sermon goes on any longer, there will be no time for the sermon on the sacrament of the altar, which they need for their edification.