The likeness of Your Church, O Lord, is that woman who went behind and touched the hem of Your garment, saying within herself: 'If I do but touch His garment I shall be whole' (Mt. 9:21). So the Church confesses her wounds, but desires to be healed.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the Church's longing for healing through faith in God.
Ambrose likens the Church's struggles and wounds to the woman who sought healing by merely touching Jesus' garment, highlighting the belief that faith can lead to wholeness and restoration. The quote emphasizes the Church's role in acknowledging its flaws while simultaneously yearning for renewal and spiritual healing through a connection with the divine.
In practice
In a sermon about healing and faith, you might quote Ambrose to illustrate the Church's need for restoration.
The world has been created for everyone's use, but you few rich are trying to keep it up for yourselves. For not merely the possession of the earth, but the very sky, the air, and the sea are claimed for the use of the rich few... The earth belongs to all, not just to the rich.
Dice have their laws, which the courts of justice cannot undo.
Do not desert a friend in time of need, nor forsake him nor fail him, for friendship is the support of life. Let us then bear our burdens as the Apostle has taught (cf. Gal. 6:2): for he spoke to those whom the charity of the same one body had embraced together. If friends in prosperity help friends, why do they not also in times of adversity offer their support? Let us aid by giving counsel, let us offer our best endeavors, let us sympathize with them with all our heart.
We ask for what reason our Lord was unwilling to state the time of His coming (cf. Mk. 13:31-32). If we ask it, we shall not find it is owing to ignorance, but to wisdom. For it was not to our advantage to know; in order that we being ignorant of the actual moments of judgment to come, might ever be as it were on guard, and set on the watch-tower of virtue, and so avoid the habits of sin; lest the day of the Lord should come upon us in the midst of our wickedness.
... the Apostle Paul says that we are sealed in the Spirit (cf. Eph. 1:13); since we have in the Son the image of the Father, and in the Spirit the seal of the Son. Let us, then, sealed by this Trinity, take more diligent heed, lest either levity of character or the deceit of any unfaithfulness unseal the pledge which we have received in our hearts.
Except a man fear the Lord, he is unable to renounce sin.
The true man of God is heartsick, grieved at the worldliness of the Church, grieved at the toleration of sin in the Church, grieved at the prayerlessness in the Church. He is disturbed that the corporate prayer of the Church no longer pulls down the strongholds of the devil.
To keep me from sin and straying from Him, God has used devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. My life vows destined to be spent in the light irradiating from the tabernacle, and it is to the Heart of Jesus that I dare go for the solution of all my problems
Those who know God the best are the richest and most powerful in prayer. Little acquaintance with God, and strangeness and coldness to Him, make prayer a rare and feeble thing.
To be prayerless is to be without God, without Christ, without grace, without hope, and without heaven.
[...]there is no injustice in God. The injustice lies in Christians who possess the gospel and refuse to give their lives to making it known among those who haven't heard.
The Rosary is the most beautiful and the most rich in graces of all prayers; it is the prayer that touches most the Heart of the Mother of God...and if you wish peace to reign in your homes, recite the family Rosary.
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