A Saint for our Times
Hello and welcome to Spend Five with Jesus for this Saturday, September 30th, 2023. I am the Friar and it is wonderful to be with you today.
Today we celebrate Saint Jerome, a great saint, but really an interesting man, really someone who I think could be a great model for us because of the ways in which he worked on his relationship with God and ultimately became a saint. Ultimately became this this holy holy person.
So who was Saint Jerome? Well, Saint Jerome lived in the fourth century and he was the saint that translated the Bible from Greek into Latin we call it the Vulgate. He knew a lot of languages which helped him in this task. He knew Hebrew. He knew Greek. He knew Latin, of course, and also of what we might call Aramaic or Assyrian or that type of language which was all very helpful for his task.
But he was also a person who got angry and not a little bit angry he got a lot angry. He had no tolerance for areas that he felt were were against the Church or evil or whatever you want to call it. He really, I think, could be said not to like Ambrose very much at all. He attacked St. Augustine.
But people who knew him would would say or speak of how much he knew. How much he was a man of tremendous knowledge. In fact, St. Augustine, the one who was attacked by Saint Jerome, was known to have said of him that “what Jerome is ignorant of, no mortal has ever known.” That’s a pretty high compliment when it comes to knowledge.
But here’s the thing that I think makes, not only makes Jerome a saint, but makes him the kind of saint that we might really appreciate in our own life. Yes, he had a problem with anger, but more importantly he went back to God for forgiveness. He went to Jesus for forgiveness again and again.
So it was that that was the most important characteristic of Jerome. He strived in what he did to be faithful to Jesus. And he was really hard on his anger. He didn’t like it. He was hard on himself. He was really, really recognizing that he did not always treat people well, but he stayed with it. And as much as he may have been a man that was angry, he was more a man that believed in the mercy and the forgiveness of God.
And that’s really what I think is important for us today. Here’s a guy that really struggled with a trait or a characteristic he really didn’t like much. He really really regretted it. He didn’t really like himself when he was was like this, when he was angry, when he was really struggling with temptation and sin.
He never let that become more powerful than the mercy that God gave him. And he stayed with it. He stayed with it. And that’s the lesson for you and me today.
So if you’re struggling with something that that sin that just seems to be always a part of your life, or if you are really really struggling with certain characteristics that you really would like God to help you to overcome, to change, if you really are struggling with sin, go to Jesus, go to the church, go to confession. Find in the person of Jesus the Lord who longs to forgive you so that someday, just like Saint Jerome, you too might become a saint.
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