But I say to Simon of Cana, ‘Have you now seen how good it is to be able to keep silent at the right time!? Where others speak and act for us, we can always keep silent to good effect. Do you understand that!?’
Simon of Cana says, ‘Yes, Lord, I understand that and now see clearly how much better it is to keep silent than to speak. On such occasions one sometimes feels positively dragged by the hair into setting one’s own tongue in the strongest motion; but here it has been so truly and actually demonstrated that silence at the right time is far better than the most substantial speech. Besides, we could well keep silent here, for in that one man who presented himself to the priests as a Roman we had an exceedingly courageous representative, skilled in words and knowledgeable in the matter.
‘Laughter would almost have come upon me when the three temple men began to withdraw and have now thereby lost almost all their standing in this country! Their faces grew longer and longer, and at the ever more forceful speech of the Roman from Capernaum their feet have begun to become noticeably restless and immediately made the preparations most suited to running away. When I noticed this quite peculiar restlessness in the feet of the three temple men, my spirit said to me, “Now they will at once become invisible!” And sure enough, they became invisible!
‘Truly, Lord, when such thoroughly wicked and wholly incorrigible scoundrels sometimes have a very thick line drawn through their reckoning, as happened just now, it cannot be a sin to feel an almost unavoidable pleasure in one’s heart! For my part, I could have taken every word out of the Roman’s mouth!’
I say, ‘At every counteraction that occurs at the right time, through which evil, however well concealed, is uncovered and destroyed, an honest breast may rejoice with the fullest right and feel a cheerfulness that strengthens the inner disposition. But mark this well: only at the successful thwarting of what is in itself evil, false and bad, never at the person who, mostly in his blindness, had served such sin as a servant!
‘You have surely seen the two Gadarenes, and how evil they were!? But when I have driven the legion of devils out of them, how good and gentle they then became, and they praised and glorified God for having given such power to a man! Would it have been right there to feel joy only because the two wicked men, who were a terror to the whole region, had been stopped in their evil trade, and because, on top of that, some swine profiteers had had their means of profiteering hurled into the sea!? O, such joy would have been most unworthy of every true human being! But if one felt a proper joy because two sorely tormented people had their torment taken from them, and because the evil tormenting devils then finally had to serve heaven’s good cause through the destruction of their own evil spirit of profiteering, so carefully cultivated among the Gadarenes, then such joy and cheerfulness was of a heavenly kind and thus entirely good.
‘I tell you all from the wholly living depth of truth: whoever laughs at a foolish person shows that he has the best disposition for foolishness. For the one fool acts out of his foolishness, and one foolishness finds its pleasure in the other in such a way that in the end it is not at all pleased when the first gives up his foolishness and begins to act sensibly.
‘But it is quite different when you correct someone acting foolishly in a brotherly way, and then laugh with a joyful and cheerful heart when the fool begins to act wisely. Then your joy and cheerfulness is in the order of the heavens and is thus good, right and just!
‘But considered wisely, what joy and cheerfulness can it give anyone at all when a blind man walks along the road and says to a sighted man going the same way, “Friend, I have lost my way and do not know whether I am going forwards or backwards. My house should be up ahead? By the steps I have counted I should already be very close to the house; but if, in the confusion I so easily fall into as a completely blind man, I have turned backwards instead of forwards, I would now be farther from the house than at the point from which I meant to go home. So be so kind as to bring me to my house by the right way!”
‘If the sighted man then laughs at the blind man and, although he is with him very close to the house, with only ten paces left to the entrance hall, says to the blind man, “O, you have gone very far astray! Give me your hand; at your request I shall nevertheless lead you into your house, even though it is somewhat far.” The blind man, full of joy at this, thanks the sighted guide in advance. The latter, laughing all the while, leads the blind man twenty times around his house and says to him, full of laughter in his breast, “Now, friend, here we are; there is your house!” The blind man thanks him beyond all measure; but the sighted man is full of laughter because his prank has succeeded!
‘I ask here: who is blinder in this case, the blind man himself or his sighted guide!? I tell you: the heartless guide, for he is blind in the heart, and that is worse than a thousandfold blindness in the head!
‘In the same way people also laugh at all manner of cutting speeches, and most of all when such speeches contain a great many coarse and filthy allusions and bring various weaknesses and sins of their brothers before the eyes and ears of the world.
‘I tell you: whoever can laugh at such things, or becomes exceedingly merry as a witness when some joker tells monstrous lies to a weak person and sells him something empty and dimly silvered as a genuine pearl—into that person’s heart the devil has scattered a rich abundance of all manner of evil seed, from which no fruit of life would ever come forth.
‘Therefore it is better to turn away from all this and rather mourn where the blind world is compelled to impudent laughter; for the comedy of the world is always a tragedy for the true children of God, and only too often the angels of God in heaven weep when worldly people laugh in their evil nonsense.
‘Therefore let us leave the three temple men too. They are indeed full of evil, but nevertheless human beings, and only through Satan’s influence and out of sheer love of the world and of the neighbor, which is their own possession, are they wayward children of the same Father who is also your Father. Therefore only their evil is to be despised; they as human beings and brothers are only to be wept over.
‘It is better to cover the drunken Noah than to uncover him and expose him to the laughter of the world!
‘If you have now understood this in your hearts, then let us too go home from the synagogue, which has become empty; for the midday meal will be ready. And so let us go!’