Archive for May 24th, 2008
Sins of the world:
1) And it is this that St. Paul explains again in another way, speaking to the Athenians, and saying “that God had appointed him the Judge of the whole world! All these expressions have the same meaning as that which the church has drawn from the Scripture, and which she usually employs to signify this mystery, saying that Jesus was “seated on the right hand of God.” But you will say to me, that as the Lord Jesus is the true and eternal God, blessed for ever with the Father, had he not this dignity and glory before and during his humiliation? If he had it not, how was he God? If otherwise, how can it be said that the Father gave it him after his resurrection only? Dear brethren, I reply, that Jesus Christ was in truth the Almighty God and the lord of glory, before his humiliation. These qualities were his before all time, as he possesses them by his nature, having received them from the Father, by his eternal and incomprehensible generation. Here, however, the question is not that of his original and essential dignity, or even of his Divinity but that of his office; of that which he had being Mediator, not of that which he possessed as being Son of God simply; of that power which the Father has given him as being Son of man, as he himself says in St. John, because he is the Christ and the Mediator of the church. And this power is nothing else than the right and authority to save the world, to found the church, and to preserve it against the gates of hell, to raise up and judge the human race, and to establish afterwards a second universe, where righteousness and immortality should dwell for ever. Jesus was only invested with this great and magnificent right after having completed the work of his humiliation; and if from time to time he has performed some of its functions, it has only been by dispensation, and in virtue of the faith that he had pledged, to satisfy exactly all the required conditions for being installed into this great and Divine office of expiating the sins of the world, by a perfect sacrifice, and to support all the trials by which he should be tempted. This is the reason why he did not till then bear in his flesh the ensigns of this glorious dignity. He only took them at him resurrection, which was as it were the day of his consecration and of his coronation. Truly do I confess, that to execute the authority that he then received an infinite wisdom and power is necessary; and had he not already had such, God, who never gives the title without the qualification, nor an office without a capacity for it, would doubtless have communicated it to him. But being the Almighty God, there was no need in this respect, but to deliver to him the name and right, with which being provided, he displayed in the sight of men and angels this power of his Divinity, which till then, as it were, had been hidden under the veil of the infirmities which were necessary for our salvation. And as to his human nature, which, that he might obtain if had been clothed at his conception with the form and weakness of our poor flesh, God then (as we have before said) filled with glory, and gave it all the excellence of which it wan susceptible, while dwelling within the limits of its true being. I add this expressly to exclude the vain imaginations of those who, under pretense of glorifying the flesh of the lord, would destroy and annihilate it, declaring that by the resurrection it received the incommunicable properties of Divinity, that is to say, omnipresence and such like. John Daille, The Epistle of Saint Paul to the Philippians (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1843), 62.