Catholic Radio Dramas

Boast Only of the Lord

From a Homily by Saint Basil the Great, Bishop (329-379)

Boast Only of the Lord

Narrated by Frank Dugan, Huntington Beach, California

The wise man must not boast of his wisdom, nor the strong man of his strength, nor the rich man of his riches. What then is the right kind of boasting? What is the source of man’s greatness? Scripture says: The man who boasts must boast of this, that he knows and understands that I am the Lord. Here is man’s greatness, here is man’s glory and majesty: to know in truth what is great, to hold fast to it, and to seek glory from the Lord of glory. The Apostle tells us: The man who boasts must boast of the Lord. He has just said: Christ was appointed by God to be our wisdom, our righteousness, our sanctification, our redemption, so that, as it is written, a man who boasts must boast of the Lord.

Boasting of God is perfect and complete when we take no pride in our righteousness but acknowledge that we are utterly lacking in true righteousness and have been made righteous only by faith in Christ.

Paul boasts of the fact that he holds his own righteousness in contempt and seeks the righteousness in faith that comes through Christ and is from God. He wants only to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and to have fellowship with his sufferings by taking on the likeness of his death, in the hope that somehow he may arrive at the resurrection of the dead.

Here we see all overweening pride laid low. Humanity, there is noting left for you to boast of, for your boasting and hope lie in putting to death all that is your own and seeking the future life that is in Christ. Since we have its firstfruits we are already in its midst, living entirely in the grace and gift of God.

It is God who is active within us, giving us both the will and the achievement, in accordance with his good purpose. Through his Spirit, God also reveals his wisdom in the plan he has preordained for our glory.

God gives power and strength in our labors. I have toiled harder than all others, Paul says, but it is not I but the grace of god, which is with me.

God rescues us from dangers beyond all human expectation. We felt within ourselves that we had received the sentence of death, so that we might not trust in ourselves but in God, who raises the dead; from so great a danger did he deliver us, and does deliver us; we hope in him, for he will deliver us again.

Source: The Liturgy of the Hours – Office of Readings

Saint Basil the Great (329-379) was one of ten children of St. Basil the Elder and St. Emmelia and was born in Caesarea in Asia Minor in 329. He was educated by his father and his grandmother, St. Macrina the Elder. He took advanced studies at Constantinople and Athens, where Gregory Nazianzen and the future Emperor Julian the Apostate were classmates. Basil was well advanced in rhetoric, grammar, philosophy, astronomy, geometry, and medicine. He taught rhetoric at Caesarea, and then turned his attention to the spiritual life. Basil himself tells us how, like a man roused from deep sleep, he turned his eyes to the marvelous truth of the Gospel. He wept many tears over his miserable life, and prayed for guidance from God: “Then I read the Gospel, and saw there that a great means of reaching perfection was the selling of one’s goods, the sharing of them with the poor, the giving up of all care for this life, and the refusal to allow the soul to be turned by any sympathy towards things of earth” (Ep. ccxxiii). To learn the ways of perfection, Basil visited the monasteries of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia. He was baptized and entered the religious life. In 358 he became a hermit by the Iris River in Pontus, attracted numerous followers and organized the first monastery in Asia Minor.

Saint Basil was ordained a priest in 363 at Caesarea and joined Saint Gregory Nazianzen, his lifelongfriend and companion, in combating Arianism. After the death of Eusebius, the Archbishop of Caesarea in 370, Basil was elected archbishop in his place despite objections of the Arian Emperor Valens. Caesarea was then a powerful and wealthy city. Its bishop was Metropolitan of Cappadocia an Exarch of Pontus which embraced more than half of Asia Minor and comprised eleven provinces. Basil was active in helping the sick and the poor and built a hospice and a huge complex to minister to them. He attracted huge crowds by the eloquence of his preaching. He became the leader of the Orthodox Christians in the East in the continuing struggle against the Arian heresy which threatened to destroy the Church in the East. Basil played a major role in the victory of denouncing Arianism at the Council of Constantinople in 381-82. He fought simony, aided the victims of drought and famine, strove for a better clergy and insisted on rigid clerical discipline. He fearlessly denounced evil wherever he detected it and excommunicated those involved in the widespread prostitution traffic in Cappadocia. He was both a statesman and a man of great personal holiness and one of the great orators of Christianity. Basil became known as the father of Oriental monasticism, the forerunner of St. Benedict. His four doctrinal writings which include “On the Holy Spirit”, and four hundred other letters earned him the title Doctor of the Church and patriarch of Eastern monks. He died on January 1, 379 at age 50.