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| On the Lord's Resurrection, II.
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Sermon LXXII.
(On the Lord’s Resurrection,
II.)
I. The Cross is not only the mystery of
salvation, but an example to follow.
The whole of the Easter mystery, dearly-beloved,
has been brought before us in the Gospel narrative, and the ears of the
mind have been so reached through the ear of flesh that none of you can
fail to have a picture of the events: for the text of the
Divinely-inspired story has clearly shown the treachery of the
Lord Jesus Christ’s betrayal, the
judgment by which He was condemned, the barbarity of His crucifixion,
and glory of His resurrection. But a sermon is still required of
us, that the priests’ exhortation may be added to the solemn
reading of Holy Writ, as I am sure you are with pious expectation
demanding of us as your accustomed due. Because therefore there
is no place for ignorance in faithful ears, the seed of the Word which
consists of the preaching of the Gospel, ought to grow in the soil of
your heart, so that, when choking thorns and thistles have been
removed, the plants of holy thoughts and the buds of right desires may
spring up freely into fruit. For the cross of Christ, which was
set up for the salvation of mortals, is both a mystery and an
example1108
| 1108 Cf. Serm. LXIII. 4,
above: Salvator noster—et sacramentum condidit et
exemplum: ut unum apprehenderent renascendo, alterum sequerentur
imitando. | : a
sacrament where by the Divine power takes effect, an example whereby
man’s devotion is excited: for to those who are rescued
from the prisoner’s yoke Redemption further procures the power of
following the way of the cross by imitation. For if the
world’s wisdom so prides itself in its error that every one
follows the opinions and habits and whole manner of life of him whom he
has chosen as his leader, how shall we share in the name of Christ save
by being inseparably united to Him, Who is, as He Himself asserted,
“the Way, the Truth, and the Life1109
?” the Way that is of holy living, the
Truth of Divine doctrine, and the Life of eternal happiness.
II. Christ took our nature upon Him for
our salvation.
For when the whole body of mankind had fallen in
our first parents, the merciful God purposed
so to succour, through His only-begotten Jesus Christ, His creatures
made after His image, that the restoration of our nature should not be
effected apart from it, and that our new estate should be an advance
upon our original position. Happy, if we had not fallen from that
which God made us; but happier, if we remain
that which He has re-made us. It was much to have received form
from Christ; it is more to have a substance in Christ1110
| 1110 i.e. that both of the
two natures in Christ should be ours, as he goes on to show. | . For we were taken up into its own
proper self by that Nature (which condescended to those limitations
which loving-kindness dictated and which yet incurred no sort of
change. We were taken up by that Nature1111
| 1111 The words in brackets
are of doubtful genuineness, and seem in themselves a mediæval
imitation of Leo’s style. | ), which destroyed not what was
His in what was ours, nor what was ours in what was His; which made the
person of the Godhead and of the Manhood so one in Itself that by
co-ordination of weakness and power, the flesh could not be rendered
inviolable through the Godhead, nor the Godhead passible through the
flesh. We were taken up by that Nature, which did not break off
the Branch from the common stock of our race, and yet excluded all
taint of the sin which has passed upon all men. That is to say,
weakness and mortality, which were not sin, but the penalty of sin,
were undergone by the Redeemer of the World in the way of punishment,
that they might be reckoned as the price of redemption. What
therefore in all of us is the heritage of condemnation, is in Christ
“the mystery of godliness1112
.”
For being free from debt, He gave Himself up to that most cruel
creditor, and suffered the hands of Jews to be the devil’s agents
in torturing His spotless flesh. Which flesh He willed to be
subject to death, even up to His (speedy)1113
| 1113
Celerrimam. The epithet spoils the argument, and is
probably an interpolation. Cf. however Serm. LXXI. chap. 2,
above. |
resurrection, to this end, that believers in Him might find neither
persecution
intolerable, nor
death terrible, by the remembrance that there was no more doubt about
their sharing His glory than there was about His sharing their
nature.
III. The presence of the risen and
ascended Lord is still with us.
And so, dearly-beloved, if we unhesitatingly
believe with the heart what we profess with the mouth, in Christ we are
crucified, we are dead, we are buried; on the very third day, too, we
are raised. Hence the Apostle says, “If ye have risen with
Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting on
God’s right hand: set your
affections on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye
are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. For when Christ, your life, shall have
appeared, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory1114
.” But that the hearts of the
faithful may know that they have that whereby to spurn the lusts of the
world and be lifted to the wisdom that is above, the Lord promises us His presence, saying, “Lo! I
am with you all the days, even till the end of the age1115
.” For not in vain had the Holy
Ghost said by Isaiah: “Behold! a virgin shall conceive and
shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel, which is,
being interpreted, God with us1116
.” Jesus, therefore, fulfils the
proper meaning of His name, and in ascending into the heavens does not
forsake His adopted brethren, though “He sitteth at the right
hand of the Father,” yet dwells in the whole body, and Himself
from above strengthens them for patient waiting while He summons them
upwards to His glory.
IV. We must have the same mind as was in
Christ Jesus.
We must not, therefore, indulge in folly amid vain
pursuits, nor give way to fear in the midst of adversities. On
the one side, no doubt, we are flattered by deceits, and on the other
weighed down by troubles; but because “the earth is full of the
mercy of the Lord1117
,” Christ’s victory is
assuredly ours, that what He says may be fulfilled, “Fear not,
for I have overcome the world1118
.”
Whether, then, we fight against the ambition of the world, or against
the lusts of the flesh, or against the darts of heresy, let us arm
ourselves always with the Lord’s
Cross. For our Paschal feast will never end, if we abstain from
the leaven of the old wickedness (in the sincerity of truth1119
). For amid all the
changes of this life which is full of various afflictions, we ought to
remember the Apostle’s exhortation; whereby he instructs us,
saying, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ
Jesus: Who being in the form of God
counted it not robbery to be equal with God,
but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, being made in
the likeness of men and found in fashion as a man. Wherefore
God also exalted Him, and gave Him a name
which is above every name, that in the name of Jesus every knee should
bow of things in heaven, of things on earth, and of things below, and
that every tongue should confess that the Lord
Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the
Father1120
.” If,
he says, you understand “the mystery of great godliness,”
and remember what the Only-begotten Son of God
did for the salvation of mankind, “have that mind in you which
was also in Christ Jesus,” Whose humility is not to be scorned by
any of the rich, not to be thought shame of by any of the
high-born. For no human happiness whatever can reach so great a
height as to reckon it a source of shame to himself that God, abiding in the form of God,
thought it not unworthy of Himself to take the form of a
slave.
V. Only he who holds the truth on the
Incarnation can keep Easter properly.
Imitate what He wrought: love what He loved,
and finding in you the Grace of God, love in
Him your nature in return, since as He was not dispossessed of riches
in poverty, lessened not glory in humility, lost not eternity in death,
so do ye, too, treading in His footsteps, despise earthly things that
ye may gain heavenly: for the taking up of the cross means the
slaying of lusts, the killing of vices, the turning away from vanity,
and the renunciation of all error. For, though the Lord’s Passover can be kept by no immodest,
self-indulgent, proud, or miserly person, yet none are held so far
aloof from this festival as heretics, and especially those who have
wrong views on the Incarnation of the Word, either disparaging what
belongs to the Godhead or treating what is of the flesh as
unreal. For the Son of God is true
God, having from the Father all that the
Father is, with no beginning in time, subject to no sort of change,
undivided from the One God, not different from
the Almighty, the eternal Only-begotten of the eternal Father; so that
the faithful intellect believing in the Father and the Son and the Holy
Ghost in the same essence of the one Godhead, neither divides the Unity
by suggesting degrees of dignity, nor confounds the Trinity by merging
the Persons in one. But it is not enough to know the Son of
God in the Father’s nature
only, unless we acknowledge
Him in what is ours without withdrawal of what is His own. For
that self-emptying, which He underwent for man’s restoration, was
the dispensation of compassion, not the loss of power1121
| 1121 Much the same
language is used in Lett. XXVIII. (Tome) 3 and Serm. XXIII. 2. | . For, though by the eternal purpose
of God there was “no other name under
heaven given to men whereby they must be saved1122
,” the Invisible made His substance
visible, the Intemporal temporal, the Impassible passible: not
that power might sink into weakness, but that weakness might pass into
indestructible power.
VI. A mystical application of the term
“Passover” is given.
For which reason the very feast which by us is
named Pascha, among the Hebrews is called Phase, that is
Pass-over1123
| 1123 Phase id
transitus dicitur, cf. the Vulgate, Exod. xii. 11, est enim Phase (id est
transitus) Domini. The form of the word is due to
defective transliteration, the correct Hebrew form being Pesach,
which “is derived from a root which means to step over or
to overleap, and thus points back to the historical origin of the
festival (Exod. xii.).”—Edersheim’s Temple, p.
179. | , as the
evangelist attests, saying, “Before the feast of Pascha, Jesus
knowing that His hour was come that He should pass out of this world
unto the Father1124
| 1124 S. John xiii. 1; the word for “pass” here in
the Gk. is μεταβῇ, in the Lat.
transeat. | .” But
what was the nature in which He thus passed out unless it was ours,
since the Father was in the Son and the Son in the Father
inseparably? But because the Word and the Flesh is one Person,
the Assumed is not separated from the Assuming nature, and the honour
of being promoted is spoken of as accruing to Him that promotes, as the
Apostle says in a passage we have already quoted, “Wherefore also
God exalted Him and gave Him a name which is
above every name.” Where the exaltation of His assumed
Manhood is no doubt spoken of, so that He in Whose sufferings the
Godhead remains indivisible is likewise coeternal in the glory of the
Godhead. And to share in this unspeakable gift the Lord Himself was preparing a blessed “passing
over” for His faithful ones, when on the very threshhold of His
Passion he interceded not only for His Apostles and disciples but also
for the whole Church, saying, “But not for these only I pray, but
for those also who shall believe on Me through their word, that they
all may be one, as Thou also, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that
they also may be one in us1125
.”
VII. Only true believers can keep the
Easter Festival.
In this union they can have no share who deny that
in the Son of God, Himself true God, man’s nature abides, assailing the
health-giving mystery and shutting themselves out from the Easter
festival. For, as they dissent from the Gospel and gainsay the
creed, they cannot keep it with us, because although they dare to take
to themselves the Christian name, yet they are repelled by every
creature who has Christ for his Head: for you rightly exult and
devoutly rejoice in this sacred season as those who, admitting no
falsehood into the Truth, have no doubt about Christ’s Birth
according to the flesh, His Passion and Death, and the Resurrection of
His body: inasmuch as without any separation of the Godhead you
acknowledge a Christ, Who was truly born of a Virgin’s womb,
truly hung on the wood of the cross, truly laid in an earthly tomb,
truly raised in glory, truly set on the right hand of the
Father’s majesty; “whence also,” as the Apostle says,
“we look for a Saviour our Lord Jesus
Christ. Who shall refashion the body of our humility to become
conformed to the body of His glory1126
.” Who liveth and reigneth,
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