On the Seals 5–6

But we ask when at last the seal was broken, when the bond of ignorance was loosed, when what was shut was opened. The hearer demands it of us: “Besides the word,” he says, “you have told me the manner of the sealing; do you not tell me the time when what was sealed was loosed? You have shown me the gates shut; will you not show them opened?” What then? Setting aside many things, I will present what is sought from a single saying. What then? After the Savior’s resurrection, when the divine grace was unknown to the many, “two of the disciples,” it says, were going out to a village and, as friends on the road, were discussing the dispensation with one another. The Savior, changing his appearance and his manner of speech (for what the face is to those who see, the voice is to those who do not see the face), hides both his voice and his form, and he who knows all things says to them: “What are these words that you are exchanging with one another?” He who learns all things from him … to the one who knows all things: “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there?” He says: “What things?” This is the God who knows all things and yet asks, … the son … from the fountain of the law, not from the servant of the law … ; the one who said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” They say: “The things concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a man mighty in word and deed.” Still a man? After so many miracles, a man? After so many works of power, after so great a demonstration of divine power? “But we,” they say (so that the sermon may not grow long by examining everything), “but we had hoped that he was the one who would redeem Israel.” See how faith had almost been quenched in them, and the hope of the dispensation had now been pulled down. “We had hoped.” He does not say, “We hope,” but, “We had hoped.” He knew, then, that their faith was weak and their mind had sunk; and he stood by them, he who supports those who have fallen and sets upright all who are broken down. And what does the benefactor say to them? “O foolish ones, and slow of heart, do you not understand the Scriptures? Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and enter into his glory?” “And beginning from the law and the prophets, he opened the Scriptures to them.” Do you see that until Christ stood by them, the gate of truth was not opened, nor was the bond of ignorance loosed? He opened the Scriptures like shut doors. What doors? Those of which Paul speaks: “that God may open a door to the nations”; and again, in the case of Cornelius: “Then God has opened the door of repentance to the nations too.” And see what the fountain of good things arranges. When he reached the village of Emmaus, where the travellers were bound, still unknown to them, he appeared to the one who doubted. For when he reclined with them—at first treated with kindness as a stranger (“Stay with us,” it says, “for the day is far spent”)—so that ignorance might not wholly cover his dignity, “taking bread he blessed it, and breaking it he gave it to them, and their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.” Why did he first give the bread, and then their eyes were opened? Since Adam’s eating opened his eyes wrongly, an eating was now brought in instead that works a strange recovery of sight. Let the children of the heretics too recover their sight, and see the light of truth; let them see the one who was God in the beginning, being God and the Word of God; let them hear often the “was,” and stop saying “there was when he was not.” “In the beginning was the Word.” It was not proclaimed at once, for the world could not contain it. There are four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; when they began their proclamation, they did not at once speak what befitted his dignity, but what suited their hearers. Matthew, making the beginning of the Gospels, says: “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Why not “Son of God”? Why do you hide his dignity with a poor expression? Why do you cover divine things from human beings? “I am preaching,” he says, “among Jews, who do not believe that Christ was even a righteous man. They have not yet accepted him as son of Abraham; will they bear him proclaimed as Son of God?” And where do we learn this? That they did not even acknowledge him to be of the race of Abraham. Have you not heard how often, blaspheming him, they said: “Are you not a Samaritan, and do you not have a demon?” Those who cast him out of the race of the saints … the divine dignity. What then does he say? “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” First he leads them on by familiar names, joined to them by kinship, so that, caught by these, they may little by little find the truth: the generation without passion, undefiled, proclaimed by a word fitting God and handed down to all. Again Mark, … those who had been trained beforehand, says “Son of God,” but at once he drew in his word and curtailed the sense, to soften the hearer. So he immediately adds what concerns the Baptist, saying: “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet: Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you.” He showed the torch of truth and at once hid it. And he brings forward the servant first, so that the hearer, with the voice ringing round him, might then receive soundly the complete word of the divine generation. Luke follows third, and goes in the middle between these; he touches the divine Word, yet does not interpret and unfold his dignity, but says: “Since many have undertaken … of the events that have been fulfilled among us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things from the beginning, to write, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed them down to us.” He said “word,” but he did not say that the Word was also God. What then does he too do? Having touched on his being, and perceiving that he is sounding in dead ears, he hides the dignity and brings forward the dispensation: “There was a priest Zechariah,” and the rest of the Gospel. All of them, then, went on to the dispensation of the flesh, and quietly, through the miracles, made known his dignity. The rank of God the Word was proclaimed, but the arrows against the heretics were hidden, and the rampart of right belief was not yet … by the proclamation. So John, the son of thunder, came last to theology, after those three heralds; and rightly the one followed and the others went before, flashing the lesser things for a time. For just as lightning goes before thunder, so that the thunder, bursting from the clouds all at once, may not strike the hearer, so, since John was going to thunder, the three evangelists came like lightnings: they flashed the dispensation, he thunders the theology. And thunder, brothers, comes with rain; thunder is a terror to the wicked; and as though using thunder as a trumpet, heaven calls the rain, but first it summons the shower with lightnings—“for God made lightnings for the rain”—and then it moves the clouds with thunder. What then? Since so many lightnings of the word had gone before, there follows, as I said, the thunder of theology, striking many with amazement by the height of its theology, but bringing the showers of blessing; and to us it becomes a thunder of theology, but to the heretics a thunder that drives away the evil beasts by the height of its great voice: “At your rebuke they will flee, at the voice of your thunder …”

Let us run back, then, to the God who was in the beginning, let us run back to the eternal light, let us run back to the Word who became man for your sake. And when I say “became,” I do not mean a nature that was changed, but the divine dignity that took up what is ours. For “the Word became flesh” does not indicate a change of nature, but the taking up of our weakness. For if you think “became” means a change, then when you hear Paul saying, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us,” you take the expression to mean a curse in nature and a change into a curse. So just as “having become a curse” means nothing else than that he took upon himself the curse that was against us, so too “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” presents nothing else than the taking up of the flesh. You have an image in yourself: your own word will teach you about God the Word—not as bearing a complete likeness, but as having a trace and an impression of the divine dignity. Pay careful attention to me here, so that the words may not be spoken in vain and the divine meanings disappear. The word of human beings (the image is faint, not presenting the whole dignity, but teaching from what is ours the things above us)—our word is bodiless, invisible, intangible, received by hearing alone. No one knows a word by sight, no one has held it in the hand; it is invisible, intangible, held by one sense alone, hearing, and that invisibly. For the hearing does not stretch out hands to hold it, but the word itself enters and is held. The word itself is the offspring of the mind, but it is begotten not by passion, not by …, not by division; it is not parted from the mind that begot it, it is not separated, it does not move away. Lend me your hearing here, heretic: understand first what is yours, and then imagine what is above you. The mind begets, the word goes forth; it goes forth from the one who begot it, fills all who hear, and does not depart from the one who begot it. A word goes forth, distributed to all, and nowhere divided. For each receives the word whole, and it is in each; and though distributed among so many, it is poured in whole. Our word, then, shows in itself the mind that begot it; for from the word the thought is grasped. And consider this too: by this word of ours God sketched beforehand the dispensation of God the Word, taking up beforehand a wonderful image, adorned with earthly flowers but fitting for a foreshadowing of the Word. What then? Our word, which is invisible, has no body, and cannot be held, God reshaped by another wisdom, and made it both visible and capable of being held. For what does he do? Since it was not seen by sight, he clothes it with a body, the letter, and put on it, as it were, a flesh, the appearance of the letters; and the word you once heard but did not see, you see when you read; the one you could not meet, you carry by means of the book. But the word is embodied through the letter without being shut up in the letter; it is with the one who speaks and with the one who reads. And if someone, brothers, takes a book and tears it, he has torn the body of the word, but has not cut the word. And that you may learn that the word is not destroyed with the letter, God says to Jeremiah: “Sit down and write on a scroll all the words, and give it to King Jehoiakim.” And the word was full of reproof. Since, then, the powerful do not bear reproofs—for rank does not easily submit to what is just, but blunts the truth—struck by the reproofs, he tore up the scroll, and cut it with the scribe’s knife, and threw it, it says, into the brazier of fire. What then does God say to Jeremiah? “Sit down and write the same words, and give them to the king,” so that he might learn that he cut up the letter but did not cut the word. Have you seen the image? Now lift your mind to the height. God the Word himself, the only-begotten of God, puts on a body, so that the one who is not seen may appear; he puts on flesh, so that the one who cannot be held may be held. That is why John, finding that longed-for one, once held by hearing but afterwards grasped by sight, says: “That which was from the beginning, which we have seen and heard, and our hands have touched.” So he wore the flesh as a garment of his dignity, a seemly garment: “For the Lord has reigned, he has clothed himself with seemliness.” The Jews fight against what appears, not knowing the one who does not appear; and they crucify the flesh, but do not destroy the Godhead. For if my word is not destroyed together with the letter, which is the garment of the word, did God the Word, the fountain of life, die together with the flesh? The suffering concerns the body; the impassibility concerns the dignity. Why then does Paul say, “For if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory”? Because the one who put on the flesh makes the suffering of the flesh his own. If you insult a royal garment, do you not insult the one who wears it? Do you not know that if someone insults the image of a king, he carries the insult to the original of the dignity? Do you not know that if someone drags down an image of wood or a bronze statue, he is judged not as having dared something against lifeless matter, but is destroyed as having stretched out his hands against the king? Lifeless matter bearing the image of the king carries its own insult up to the king; and did the living form that God the Word put on, when insulted, not carry the insult up to the one who put it on? Understand, then, the dignity, and do not insult the dispensation. But this is enough; storing up for another sermon what remains of the contemplation of God the Word, let us honor proportion by order, and send up glory to God, to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and always, and to the ages of ages. Amen.