Song of Solomon 1:6

"Do not look at me," it says, "because the sun has not regarded me." The prophet Ezekiel proved that the sun is Christ when he said, "upon you who fear the Lord, the sun of righteousness will rise," who is Christ. For, as I have often said, before the advent of the Son of God, the church of the Gentiles was dark because it had not yet believed in him. But when it was illuminated by Christ the true sun, it was made extremely lovely and decorous, such that the Holy Spirit would say to it through David: "the king desired your beauty."

Hence holy Church rightly says of her weakening members: They made me a keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept. For our vineyards are the deeds which we cultivate through the habit of daily labor. But placed as keepers in the vineyards, we scarcely keep our own vineyard, because while we are entangled in others' affairs, we neglect the ministry of our own action. I think, dearest brothers, that God tolerates no greater injury from others than from priests, when He sees those whom He placed for the correction of others giving examples of wickedness from themselves, when we ourselves sin, we who ought to have restrained sins.

"The sons of my mother fought against me, etc." It is the voice of the primitive Church, which receives the wars of tribulations from the Synagogue itself, from which it derives its carnal origin, as the Acts of the Apostles most fully teach. In this sentence, firstly, it must be noted that the bride of Christ rightly asserts that she has been darkened by the sun, who used to work as a subordinate laborer cultivating and guarding the vineyard. There was, however, one vineyard of Christ in Jerusalem, namely the primitive Church itself, which on the day of Pentecost, that is, on the fiftieth day after the resurrection of the Lord, was dedicated by the coming of the Holy Spirit. At that time, its guardians were the apostles themselves. But after the persecution occurred, during the time of the blessed martyr Stephen, all were dispersed throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except for the apostles, it happened that there were many vineyards, that is, many churches of Christ in various places, preaching the word to those who were dispersed here and there. Indeed, by the action of divine providence, this dispersion of the Church of Jerusalem was the occasion for establishing many churches. Hence it is well that our codices have "They were scattered;" in Greek it says diesparisan, that is, "they were disseminated throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria." And shortly after, "Those who were disseminated went about evangelizing the word of God:" because the Jewish persecutors, indeed wishing to overthrow the Church, unwillingly spread the seed of the word more widely, and by persecuting one Church in Jerusalem, unwillingly caused many Churches to exist widely. So, when the primitive Church said it was darkened by afflictions, because the sons of its mother, that is, the parricidal Synagogue, hated and attacked it, it immediately added how much it had profited from these same afflictions, adding in the person of those to whom the care of preaching was entrusted: "They made me keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept."