Wherefore then murmur? Because you are poor? Yet think of Job. Or because sickness is your lot? What then if, with the consciousness of as many excellencies and as high attainments as that holy man, you had been so afflicted? Again reflect on him, how that for a long time he never ceased to breed worms, sitting upon a dunghill and scraping his sores; for the account says that “(after a long time had passed,) then said his wife unto him, How long will you persist, saying, Yet a little while I bide in expectation?
Speak some word against the Lord, and die.” But your child is dead? What then if you had lost all your children, and that by an evil fate, as he did? For you know, you know well, that it is no slight alleviation to take our place beside the sick man, to close the mouth, to shut the eyes, to stroke the beard, to hear the last accents; but that just man was vouchsafed none of these consolations, they all being overwhelmed at once. And what do I say? Had you, your own self, been bidden to slay and offer up your own son, and to see the body consumed, like that blessed Patriarch, what then would you have felt while erecting the altar, laying on the wood, binding the child?
But there are some who revile you? What then would be your feelings did your friends, come to administer consolation to you, speak like Job's? For, as it is, innumerable are our sins, and we deserve to be reproached; but in that case he who was true, just, godly, who kept himself from every evil deed, heard the contrary of those laid to his charge by his friends. What then, tell me, if you had heard your wife exclaiming in accents of reproach; “I am a vagabond and a servant, wandering from place to place, and from house to house, waiting until the sun goes down, that I may rest from the woes that encompass me.” Why do you speak so, O foolish woman?
For is your husband to blame for these things? Nay, but the devil. “Speak a word against God,” she says, “and die”;— and if thereupon the stricken man had cursed and died, how would you be the better?— No disease you can name is worse than that of his, though you name ten thousand. It was so grievous, that he could no longer be in the house and under cover; such, that all men gave him up. For if he had not been irrecoverably gone, he would never have taken his seat without the city, a more pitiable object than those afflicted with leprosy; for these are both admitted into houses, and they do herd together; but he passing the night in the open air, was naked upon a dunghill, and could not even bear a garment upon his body.
How so? Perhaps there would only have been an addition to his pangs. For “I melt the clods of the earth,” he says, “while I scrape off my sore.” His flesh bred sores and worms in him, and that continually. Do you see how each one of us sickens at the hearing of these things? But if they are intolerable to hear, is the sight of them more tolerable? And if the sight of them is intolerable, how much more intolerable to undergo them? And yet that righteous man did undergo them, not for two or three days, but for a long while, and he did not sin, not even with his lips.
What disease can you describe to me like this, so exquisitely painful? For was not this worse than blindness? “I look on my food,” he says, “as a fetid mass.” And not only this, but that which affords cessation to others, night and sleep, brought no alleviation to him, nay, were worse than any torture. Hear his words: “Why do you scare me with dreams, and terrify me through visions? If it be morning, I say, When will it be evening?”, and he murmured not. And there was not only this; but reputation in the eyes of the world was added; for they immediately concluded him to be guilty of endless crimes, judging from all that he suffered.
And accordingly this is the consideration, which his friends urged upon him; “Know therefore that God exacts less of you than your iniquities deserve.” Wherefore he himself said, “But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I disdained to set with the dogs of my flock.” And was not this worse than many deaths? Yet though assaulted on all sides by a flood like this, when there raged around him a fearful storm, clouds, rain, lightnings, whirling winds, and waterspouts, he remained himself unmoved, seated as it were in the midst of this surge, thus awful and overwhelming, as in a perfect calm, and no murmur escaped him; and this before the gift of grace, before that anything was declared concerning a resurrection, before anything concerning hell and punishment and vengeance.
Yet we, who hear both Prophets and Apostles and Evangelists speaking to us, and have innumerable examples set before us, and have been taught the tidings of a Resurrection, yet harbor discontent, though no man can say that such a fate as this has been his own. For if one has lost money, yet not all that great number of sons and daughters, or if he has, perchance it was that he had sinned; but for him, he lost them suddenly, in the midst of his sacrifices, in the midst of the service which he was rendering to God.
And if any man has at one blow lost property to the same amount, which can never be, yet he has not had the further affliction of a sore all over his body, he has not scraped the humors that covered him; or if this likewise has been his fate, yet he has not had men to upbraid and reproach him, which is above all things calculated to wound the feelings, more than the calamities we suffer. For if when we have persons to cheer and console us in our misfortunes, and to hold out to us fair prospects, we yet despond, consider what it was to have men upbraiding him.
If the words, “I looked for some to have pity, but there was no man, and for comforters, but I found none”, describe intolerable misery, how great an aggravation to find revilers instead of comforters! “Miserable comforters are you all”, he says. If we did but revolve these subjects continually in our minds, if we well weighed them, no ills of this present time could ever have force to disturb our peace, when we turned our eyes to that athlete, that soul of adamant, that spirit impenetrable as brass. For as though he had borne about him a body of brass or stone, he met all events with a noble and constant spirit.
Source: Homilies on Philippians (New Advent)