Wednesday, August 20, 2025
Memorial of Saint Bernard, Abbot and Doctor of the Church
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Four trees, four workers, four loves
The word of God is living and effective, able to discern the reflections and thoughts of the heart.
Yesterday’s hero Gideon, lover and loved by God, had seventy sons (Judges 8), many wives and at least one concubine. Gideon refused to rule over Israel and refused to allow his sons to rule. God must be the one who ruled.
But afer Gideon died one of those seventy sons, Abimelech, killed 68 of his brothers and took power as ruler. Jotham, the 69th and youngest of Gideon’s sons, escaped.
Jotham knew of Abimelech’s cruelty and sadism, and during a gathering of the people he climbed Mount Gerizim and shouted out a parable of four trees.
Once the trees went to anoint a king over themselves.
So they said to the olive tree, ‘Reign over us.’
But the olive tree answered them, ‘Must I give up my rich oil,
whereby men and gods are honored,
and go to wave over the trees?’
Then the trees said to the fig tree, ‘Come; you reign over us!’
But the fig tree answered them,
‘Must I give up my sweetness and my good fruit,
and go to wave over the trees?’
Then the trees said to the vine, ‘Come you, and reign over us.’
But the vine answered them,
‘Must I give up my wine that cheers gods and men,
and go to wave over the trees?’
Then all the trees said to the brambly thornbush, ‘Come; you reign over us!’
But the buckthorn replied to the trees,
“If you wish to anoint me king over you in good faith,
come and take refuge in my shadow.
The thornbush is Abimelech, of course, who is power hungry and dangerous. He offers nothing of value and only seeks to dominate others, warning them of potential destruction if he is disobeyed. The people stood up to him after hearing this parable, and Abimelech destroyed their city. But soon after he himself was killed when a woman dropped a stone down on his head. Thus the flowing life-blood of God-loving Gideon ended in catastrophe.
These stories continue through a century or more before Eli becomes judge and priest, followed by Samuel, who first anoints a king.
I’m fascinated by this sequence of events, and those who peopled them. God’s presence within and without the places and the people never fades, although rarely is there a character in this history depicted as loving God with all his or her heart.
What if I wish to give this last one the same as you?
Or am I not free to do as I wish with my own money?
Are you envious because I am generous?’
Thus, the last will be first, and the first will be last.
Jesus tells the story of workers in the vineyard, and I think he might be talking about our love as well as our work. We love God differently depending on our circumstances and our personalities and perhaps most of all depending on what has happened in our lives. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux wrote about his in the twelfth century. His own strong personality allowed him both to rekindle monastic faith and inspire the first Crusade. In The Last of the Fathers, Thomas Merton says of this love:
The treatise “On the Love of God”) shows the unity of Saint Bernard’s great conception of man in his relations with God. The love of God is not merely something that can somehow profitably be fitted into man’s life. It is man’s whole reason for existing, and until he loves God man does not really begin to live.
The four degrees of love which are the heart of the treatise show that it is man’s very nature to love. By reason of the fall, he who should love unselfishly now loves himself first of all. But divine grace re-educates man’s natural love, reinstates it in its natural purity, extends it to all men, then purifies it and raises it to God.
We begin by loving ourselves, pass on to the love of other men and of God for our own sakes, then begin to love God for His own sake.
But the fourth degree of love is that in which we love ourselves for God’s sake. This is the high point of Bernard’s Christian humanism. It shows that the fulfillment of our destiny is not merely to be lost in God, as the traditional figures of speech would have it, like “a drop of water in a barrel of wine or like iron in the fire,” but found in God in all our individual and personal reality, tasting our eternal happiness not only in the fact that we have attained to the possession of His infinite goodness, but above all in the fact that we see His will is done in us.
Ultimately this perfection demands the resurrection of the bodies of all the saints, for the consummation Saint Bernard looks forward to is no mere philosophical union with the Absolute. It is the term proposed to us by Christian revelation itself: the resurrection, the general judgment, the summing up of all in Christ so that “God will be all in all.”
Richard Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline, reflects on Bernard’s four loves and like Merton, wonders how we can get to the “fourth love,” that place we were originally created to live:
I am not certain that the fourth degree of love in which we love ourselves only for the sake of God may be perfectly attained in this life. But, when it does happen, we will experience the joy of the Lord and be forgetful of ourselves in a wonderful way. We are, for those moments, one mind and one spirit with God.
Still, I do not know if we can attain this degree in this life. We live in a world of sorrow and tears and we experience the mercy and comfort of God only in that context.
Bible stories, especially those beyond the flannel boards of Sunday School, do not shirk from sharing the “sorrow and tears.” I for one am deeply thankful for this, since these stories throw into stark contrast God’s “mercy and comfort,” so when I fall into despair for my own failures and catastrophes, God’s nearness sings that song, and I know how much I’m loved.
 (Judges 9, Psalm 21, Hebrews 4, Matthew 20)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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