On the same day the whole Catholic Church gazes upon the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, a quiet Coptic monk who lived 1,600 years ago in the desert sands gives us the one human sentence that echoes that Heart most exactly. His name was Agathon. He lived in the desert of Lower Egypt. And of all the things he could have left us, the brothers remembered above all this one short saying.
Who
Abba Agathon lived in the Egyptian desert in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the great flowering of monastic life that came after Saint Anthony the Great withdrew into Mount Colzim. He was a Coptic monk in the Wadi El Natrun (the desert of Scetis, west of the Nile delta), part of the second generation of Desert Fathers who had read Saint Athanasius’s Life of Anthony and gone out to seek God in silence as he had.
The sayings of Abba Agathon were preserved by the brothers who lived around him and by those who came to him for a word. They were written down in Coptic and Greek and gathered into the great collection called the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which still survives in the alphabetical recension where each elder is given his small chapter of sayings. Abba Agathon’s chapter is one of the longest in the whole book, twenty-nine sayings, the brothers loved him very much.
What stands out about him in the Sayings is his gentleness with sinners and his severity with himself. He carried a stone in his mouth for three years to learn silence. He gave away his bread to anyone hungrier than himself. When asked what was harder than anything else, he answered, “There is no labour greater than that of praying to God. Whatever good work a man undertakes, if he perseveres in it, he will attain rest. But prayer is warfare to the last breath.” And when he was dying, the brothers were astonished to hear him say, “I have done my best to keep the commandments of God, but I am a man; how can I know whether my work is pleasing to God?” That was Agathon at the end. That was Agathon’s heart.
The saying
In the alphabetical Apophthegmata, Agathon 26, the brothers tell us he once said this:
“If I could meet a leper, give him my body and take his, I should be very happy. That indeed is perfect charity.”
Abba Agathon, Sayings of the Desert Fathers
That is the whole saying. Twenty-three words. And on this day above all days, when the Catholic Church kneels before the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and remembers that on Calvary he opened that very Heart to the lance of a soldier, the desert echoes the Gospel exactly.
What he meant
Abba Agathon did not mean a beautiful thought to be admired from a comfortable distance. He meant a real swap. A real exchange. He meant, “If you, brother, are sick, take my body and give me yours. Let me bear what you bear, so that you do not have to.”
This is the whole logic of the Sacred Heart. It is exactly what Jesus did. He saw us in our leprosy, our sins, our wounds, our slow rot of selfishness, and he came down from heaven and took our body so that he could lay it on the Cross. He gave us his Heart, his Spirit, his life. He took ours, all the way to its bitter end. “He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.” (Isaiah 53:4, Douay-Rheims.) “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21, RSV-CE.)
This is what the Sacred Heart is. Not a sentiment. A trade. The Son of God taking on a leper’s body so that the leper might take on his. And Agathon, sitting in the silence of the desert sands at the edge of the fifth century, with his stone in his mouth, understood.
Voices that came after
The Catholic Church has not forgotten this saying. Every great saint of charity in the centuries since Agathon has, in some way, lived it.
Saint Francis of Assisi (around 1182 to 1226), riding through Umbria as a young nobleman, met a leper on the road, dismounted, and kissed him. Francis later wrote in his Testament that this single moment was the beginning of his whole conversion, “what had seemed bitter to me was changed for me into sweetness of body and soul.”
Saint Catherine of Siena (1347 to 1380), as a young woman, drank the water in which she had washed the cancerous wounds of a poor woman, asking the Lord to take from her the natural revulsion. Christ appeared to her that very night and gave her, in vision, his own Sacred Heart in place of her own. That is a real Catholic story.
Saint Damien of Molokai (1840 to 1889) lived for sixteen years with the lepers of the Hawaiian colony at Kalawao. In his sermons there, he stopped saying “My brothers and sisters” and began saying “We lepers.” He had taken their body. He died of leprosy on 15 April 1889. Canonised by Pope Benedict XVI on 11 October 2009, called a model of love for the abandoned.
Saint Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa, 1910 to 1997) said it shortest of all, “Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.” That is Agathon’s exchange. The leper is Christ, and to take his body is to find Christ’s.
In each one of these saints, Abba Agathon’s twenty-three words walk again.
Why it still matters today
We are not, most of us, going to meet a leper in the modern sense. But there is a kind of leprosy God puts in our path every day. The child crying inconsolably in the supermarket queue, the leprosy of frustration that nobody wants to take. The mother in our parish carrying a grief no one will name. The father at work whose marriage is breaking and whose face is grey on a Tuesday morning. The old man at Mass who sits alone in the back pew and whose hands shake when he reaches for the missalette.
Each of them is, in some sense, the leper. Each of them carries a body the world would rather not take. And Agathon’s question, on this great Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart, is the question the Heart of Jesus puts to each of us today:
Will you take their body, child, and give them yours?
It is not a sentiment. It is not even charity, in the sense the world means that word. It is the burning of the heart, what Saint Isaac of Nineveh, more than two centuries after Agathon, would call “a heart on fire for the whole of creation.” It is the Sacred Heart, made small enough to live in your kitchen, your school run, your parish, your home this Friday evening.
A line to carry into the week
“That indeed is perfect charity.”
Pray it tonight at the foot of the crucifix. Pray it tomorrow morning when somebody crosses your path who is harder to love than you would like. Pray it on Sunday when Corpus Christi has passed and the Heart of Jesus is still burning quietly in every tabernacle in the world, waiting for somebody to be willing to swap.
“Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, make our hearts like unto thine.”