“What,” you will say, “[has] a harlot [to do] with the Virgin? — and the Virgin most choice, most pure, most inviolate of all?” But you might ask, what too [has] a harlot [to do] with the Church, which [is] the most chaste spouse of Christ? And yet a little before we heard the comparisons of the Fathers. Removing, therefore, far off all the turpitude and levity of a more lascivious life, why should not the Blessed Virgin be a certain “Rahab”? Certainly as to the name — by which, as [was] already often said, “breadth [latitudo]” is signified — the name of Mary, [her] virtue and glory, is spread most widely into all coasts. “For from this,” she herself said, Luke 1, “all generations shall call me blessed.”
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The Blessed Virgin bore [genuit] the true Joshua [Jesus]; and in the series of his progenitors, Rahab is [found]. Rahab received Joshua himself, hospitably, in his spies; but the Blessed Virgin [received] him in his very self. “Happy,” says St. Bernard (serm. 2 On the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin), “the woman who now merited to receive not the spies of Jericho, but rather that most valiant Despoiler of that foolish [one] who is truly changed as the moon — not the legates of Jesus son of Nun, but himself rather, the true JESUS, the Son of God.” Rahab freed them from the wrath and injury of the King of Jericho; and Mary [freed] the true Joshua from the fury and madness of King Herod. She [Rahab] let them down through the window; this one [Mary] carried him off into Egypt. She let down the scarlet sign through the window, by which she would keep her house intact and covered; but this one called the true Joshua down from heaven, and, from the window of her aged sacred [temple? sanctuary], lifted up the “sign which shall be contradicted” (Luke 2 v. 35), so as to keep the whole world unshaken.
She sent the spies to the mountains, and gave [them] the counsel of tarrying three days in them. These [mountains] — on the authority of St. Gregory (1 Kings [Reg.]), “the mountain is the house of the Lord on the summit of the mountains” — [are] the mountain on whose slopes both Joshua truly lay hidden, and all the men of Joshua can lie hidden, until at some time they make an end of pursuing these [Jerichoites], and of contriving [against] them chains of temptation and the worst [torments] of punishments — the Jerichoites, that is, the lunatics and all the madmen, the guards of the King, about whom above [in] quest. 1. For then too we shall happily cross the Jordan of this life, and return to our true Joshua. Amen. The rest about Rahab, chapter 6 will give.