Good morning.
A man tells Jesus he will follow Him anywhere. The answer he gets is about foxes.
Memorial of Saint Jerome, Priest and Doctor of the Church
Two more speak in between. One asks to bury his father first. The other asks to say farewell at home first. Christ's answer to each is short, and neither is a rebuke of family. Ambrose, in the Catena Aurea, reads the first plainly: the duty of burying a father is not forbidden, but "the observance of religious duty is preferred to the ties of relationship."
The first reading is Job 9. The psalm response is Let my prayer come before you, Lord.
bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/093026.cfm →
Wednesday belongs to Him
Three men come to Jesus, and each one wants the following to be on his own terms.
The first offers everything and is not asked what he can give. Cyril says of him that "he sought not to follow Christ simply as several others of the people, but rather caught at the honor of the Apostleship." Christ answers by naming what following costs, and the answer is a home. The foxes have one. He does not.
To the second, Christ speaks first: Follow me. The answer comes back with a delay attached. Chrysostom's comment is the one to keep: "it becomes us not to spend even the slightest portion of our time in vain."
The third is the gentlest and the most telling. He does not refuse anything. He asks only for a farewell first. And Christ's answer to him is the line that has been read on this day for centuries: the hand on the plough, and the eyes behind. Augustine puts it in one sentence of geography: "The East calls you, and you turn to the West." Bede reads the plough itself as the cross, which breaks open the hardness of the heart so that something can grow there.
There is no condemnation of the man in any of it. Christ simply says what a plough needs: a straight furrow needs a straight look ahead.
The dream, the desert, and a Bible from the Hebrew
Jerome was born at Stridon, on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia, around the year 340 or 342. He went to Rome to study and was baptized there, probably about 360. He loved the Latin classics, Cicero above all, and he found Scripture rough and ungrammatical by comparison.
Around Lent of 375, he saw himself brought before a Judge. Asked who he was, he said he was a Christian. The Judge said, "You lie. You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian," and he was struck. Jerome wrote the dream down himself, in his Letter 22 to Eustochium, and the Church has kept it because it is a rare thing: a saint describing the moment he was turned.
He spent the years 374 to 379 in the desert of Chalcis, was ordained a priest at Antioch, and went to Rome in 382 to serve Pope Damasus. There he began the work of revising the Latin Gospels and the Psalms. In 386 he settled in Bethlehem. Between 390 and 405 he translated the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew, the text that became the Latin Vulgate. He died at Bethlehem on September 30, 420.
His sentence about Scripture is the one the Second Vatican Council quoted and the Office of Readings gives him today. In the prologue to his commentary on Isaiah he wrote that anyone who does not know Scripture does not know the power and wisdom of God, "and if the man who does not know Scripture does not know the power and wisdom of God, then ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ."
The direction of the rest of his life is not in doubt: Rome, then the desert, then Bethlehem, and the Bible.
Tuesday's close · SPY $764.38, −0.1% · tape BULL, regime choppy · new longs paused by the two-loss warning · house book: AMD, CRWD, NEOG (selling at the open), seven puts, plus the sleeve (DBC/SHY)
SPY slipped 0.1% and the Nasdaq-100 fund (QQQ) rose 0.2%. The tape still reads bull and the regime still reads choppy. The two-loss warning is still on: the system takes no new long until SPY closes above $779.37, about 2% above Tuesday's close.
The day's news is Neogen. It fell 7.3% to $12.73, at the exit level of $12.74, which is its breakout pivot of $13 less 2%. The rule is a close at or below that level, and it sells at the next open, so all 6,112 shares are queued to sell this morning. The loss against the $13.67 entry is about 6.9%, roughly $5,700. Once it sells, it will be the third closed loss in this stretch, after LifeStance and Marathon Petroleum. The rule decides; the day's mood does not.
The rest of the book did what it is built to do. CrowdStrike (CRWD) rose 1.4% to $262.71, and its rules flagged a second add, tier 2 of 4, after a pullback and a fresh high. An order for 212 more shares is in for the open, with its own stop. AMD was flat at $607.68, about 7% above its exit level.
Yesterday's hedge was the other change. The XLK stock short was bought back and seven puts were bought in its place, for $18,426 in total, the most the hedge can lose. On its first day it is down about $1,300, which is the cost of insurance on a day the market did not fall. The account is slightly over-invested after the purchase, so the idle-cash funds sell a small amount of SHY and DBC at the open to bring it back in line.
Two dates matter this week: the ISM Manufacturing PMI on Thursday, October 1, and the September jobs report on Friday, October 2. No forecast figures are given; the gates do not trade on a calendar.
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The week ahead, per the USCCB General Roman Calendar for the United States:
St. Jerome, pray for us.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us.
In Christ,
Jonathan Simmons
Enoch Capital LLC
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