examination of the heart 544 associated with you when you were alive will turn away terrified and disgusted from the dead body and will fear coming near it alone. Later the same body, washed with warm water, will be deposited on a bier and put into a tomb as soon as possible, so that it would no longer irritate human nostrils by its stink. For the same persons who wished you once the Nestorian years276 will remove you very quickly from their sight and will commit you to the earth, so that, being dead, you do not stink for long. Oh, what shall become of the beauty of your body then? It will be swollen, disfigured, exuding foul-smelling bloody fluid, from which shall arise an enormous multitude of worms that will gnaw away whatever flesh remains. All the rest, except the bones, will return to the dust fromwhich you were taken (cf. Gen 3:19). Since you shall be in the future nothing more than a swelling, putrefaction, bloody matter, stink, worms’ food and dust, why do you swagger now and dream that you are someone important? Why do you follow sensuality? Why do you indulge your body more than its due? And why do you not subject to the mastery of the immortal soul this insolent slave that is soon to return to dust? 5. WEDNESDAY MORNING About our Savior’s cruelest scourging. 1. Consider with greatest reverence and tender affection the reason for which the Governor; who found himself between the hammer and the anvil, wishing both to acquit Christ the Lord and calm down the angry Jewish mob, gave the sentence, which he thought discrete but that was in fact most iniquitous, condemning the Savior of the world to be tied to a pole and publicly punished by scourging (cf. Mt 27:26; Mk 15:15; Jn 19:1). 276 I.e., a great age or many years of life, because Nestor was the oldest and wisest of the Greek heroes before Troy; hence “Nestor” is proverbially any wise old man. Cf. SLL, vol. 2, Typis Seminarii apud Joannem Manfrè, Patavii 1758, p. 55 (s.v. Nestor, and Nestoreus).
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