we should even have maximum trust in it, and maximum pride in it; because in
SERMON 218C 195
But insofar as it is his creation, which he made as God, then he did die from what is his; since he himself also made the flesh in which he died.
To take pride in the cross of Christ
2. So not only should we not be ashamed of the death of the Lord our God, we should even have maximum trust in it, and maximum pride in it; because in fact, by catching from us and undergoing the death he found in us, he most faithfully engaged himself to give us life in himself, which we are quite unable to get from ourselves. I mean, seeing that he loved us so much, that without sin himself he suffered for us sinners what we deserved for our sins, how can he, who thereby justifies us, possibly not give us what we have earned by that justice? How can he not pay the saints their reward, which he promised in truth, seeing that without wickedness himself he endured their punishment for the wicked?
Let us then, brothers and sisters, unhesitatingly confess Christ crucified for us, and indeed publicly and boldly proclaim him. Let us declare it, not fearfully but joyfully, not ashamed of it but proud of it. The apostle Paul saw him thus, and claimed it as a title of pride. He had so many great and divine things to remind us of about Christ; and yet he did not say he took pride or gloried in Christ's miracles, or in his creating the world as God with the Father, or in his giving orders to the world even as a man like us;3 but,/ar be it from me, he says, to take pride in anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ (Gal 6:14). He could see who had hung on what for whom; and it was on that humility of God, that abasement of the divine majesty,4 that the apostle had the presumption to rely.
Christ's divinity didn't die in the man
3. These people, though, taunt us with worshiping a crucified Lord, and the cleverer they appear to be in their own eyes, the more incurably and desperately stupid they really are, failing totally to understand what we believe or what we say. I mean, we don't say that what died in Christ is what was God, but what was man. After all, when any man dies, that which is supremely human in him, which distinguishes him from an animal, that is, which has understanding, which can tell the difference between divine and human, temporal and eternal, true and false, that is to say the rational soul, doesn't suffer death with its body, but when the body dies, it withdraws still alive; and yet one still says, "The man has died." So why may we not say in the same way "God has died," not meaning that that which is God can have died, but that mortal element which God had assumed for the sake of mortals? Because just as when a man dies, his soul doesn't die in the flesh, so too when Christ died, his divinity didn't die in the man.
"But God," they say, "couldn't be mixed with a man, and with him become one Christ." Well, according to that crass and empty way of thinking, and such human opinions, we would suppose it to be much more difficult for spirit to be