Chapter 14. If Flesh Were Not Capable of Salvation, the Word Would Never Have Assumed It.
Chapter 14
1. The Apostle did not direct “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” against the very substance of flesh and blood. In fact, the same Apostle has everywhere used the words flesh and blood in reference to the Lord Jesus Christ. This he did both to prove his human nature (for he called himself the Son of Man) and to confirm the salvation of the flesh. For if flesh could not be saved, the Word of God would by no means have become flesh. And if the blood of the just could not be sought out, the Lord would by no means have had blood. But that blood cries out from the beginning, God said to Cain, when he had killed his brother, The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me. And that their blood could be sought out, he said to the people around Noah, For I will require the blood of your lives at the hand of every beast. And again, Whoever sheds the blood of man, [his own] shall be shed for that one’s blood. In like manner, the Lord said to those who would shed his blood: All the righteous blood shall be requited—[all] shed on the earth from the blood of innocent Abel to the blood of Zachariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all this will come upon this generation. Thus he pointed out the future recapitulation in himself of shedding blood from the beginning, of all the righteous and the Prophets, and requiring their blood through himself. But this would not be required if it could not be saved. Nor would the Lord have recapitulated in himself these things unless he himself had been made flesh and blood after the original handiwork, thus saving in himself at the end what had perished in Adam in the beginning.
2. Now, if the Lord became incarnate for some other economy and brought his flesh from some other substance, he did not recapitulate man in himself, and what is more, he cannot even be called flesh. For flesh truly is that which is in the lineage of the first substance made out of clay. Now if it had been necessary for him to have matter from another substance, the Father would in the beginning have worked to make man’s formation from another substance. But as the case is, the saving Word has become the very thing which man who had perished was, thus through himself he wrought the communion [of man] with himself and the seeking out of man’s salvation. But what perished did have flesh and blood; for God took clay from the earth and formed man; and the entire Economy of the Lord’s coming is for the sake of man. He himself, therefore, had flesh and blood, and he recapitulated in himself not some other kind, but the Father’s original handiwork when he sought out what had perished. With this in mind the Apostle says in his Letter to the Colossians: You who once were estranged and hostile in mind, through your evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh through his death, to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him. He says, You have been reconciled in the body of his flesh, that is the holy flesh reconciled the flesh that was held captive by sin, and brought it into friendship with God.
3. If, according to that, anyone should say that the Lord’s flesh differs from ours, since it neither sinned, nor was there any deceit in his soul, but we are sinners, he says the truth. But if he imagines another substance of flesh for the Lord, then the word about reconciliation will no longer be consistent for him. For that is reconciled which was at one time at enmity. Now, if the Lord brought flesh from some other substance, no longer is that reconciled which has been made his enemy through transgression. As the case is, the Lord reconciled man to the Father through communion with himself [Christ], by reconciling us to himself through the body of his flesh, and redeeming us through his blood, as the Apostle tells the Ephesians: In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins; and again he says to the same people: You who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ; and again: The hostility in the flesh, the law of the commandments in ordinances he abolished. And so in every letter the Apostle testifies that we have been saved through Our Lord’s flesh and through his blood.
4. So if it is flesh and blood that give us life, it was not said literally of flesh and blood that these cannot inherit the kingdom of God, but of the aforementioned carnal acts, which turn man to sin and deprive him of life. This is why he says in the Letter to the Romans, Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. Hence, with the members with which we served sin and produced fruit unto death, with these same members he wishes us to serve righteousness that we might produce fruit unto life. So, my dear friend, recall that you have been redeemed by Our Lord’s flesh and acquired by his blood. Holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body of the Church has been knit together and grows, that is, by confessing the coming of God’s Son in the flesh, and God; and by firmly accepting his human nature, also by using the proofs from Scripture, you will, as we have shown, easily overthrow all the tenets of the heretics, which have been concocted later on.