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| Prophecies of the Death of Christ.
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Chapter XIX.—Prophecies of the Death of Christ.
Come now, when you read in the words of David, how
that “the Lord reigneth from the tree,”3356
I want to know what you understand by
it. Perhaps you think some wooden3357
| 3357 Lignarium aliquem
regem. |
king of the Jews is meant!—and not Christ, who overcame death by
His suffering on the cross, and thence reigned! Now, although death
reigned from Adam even to Christ, why may not Christ be said to have
reigned from the tree, from His having shut up the kingdom of death by
dying upon the tree of His cross? Likewise Isaiah also says:
“For unto us a child is born.”3358
But what is there unusual in this, unless he speaks of the Son of God?
“To us is given He whose government is upon His
shoulder.”3359
Now, what king is
there who bears the ensign of his dominion upon his shoulder, and not
rather upon his head as a diadem, or in his hand as a sceptre, or else
as a mark in some royal apparel? But the one new King of the new ages,
Jesus Christ, carried on His shoulder both the power and the excellence
of His new glory, even His cross; so that, according to our former
prophecy, He might thenceforth reign from the tree as Lord. This
tree it is which Jeremiah likewise gives you intimation of, when he
prophesies to the Jews, who should say, “Come, let us destroy the
tree with the fruit, (the bread) thereof,”3360
that is, His body. For so did God in your
own gospel even reveal the sense, when He called His body bread;
so that, for the time to come, you may understand that He has given to
His body the figure of bread, whose body the prophet of old
figuratively turned into bread, the Lord Himself designing to give by
and by an interpretation of the mystery. If you require still further
prediction of the Lord’s cross, the twenty-first Psalm3361
| 3361 The
twenty-second Psalm. A.V. | is sufficiently able to afford it to you,
containing as it does the entire passion of Christ, who was even then
prophetically declaring3362
His glory.
“They pierced,” says He, “my hands and my
feet,”3363
which is the
special cruelty of the cross. And again, when He implores His
Father’s help, He says, “Save me from the lion’s
mouth,” that is, the jaws of death, “and my humiliation
from the horns of the unicorns;” in other words, from the
extremities of the cross, as we have shown above. Now, David himself
did not suffer this cross, nor did any other king of the Jews; so that
you cannot suppose that this is the prophecy of any other’s
passion than His who alone was so notably crucified by the
nation. Now should the heretics, in their obstinacy,3364
reject and despise all these
interpretations, I will grant to them that the Creator has given us no
signs of the cross of His Christ; but they will not prove from this
concession that He who was crucified was another (Christ), unless they
could somehow show that this death was predicted as His by their own
god, so that from the diversity of predictions there might be
maintained to be a diversity of sufferers,3365
| 3365 Passionum,
literally sufferings, which would hardly give the
sense. |
and thereby also a diversity of persons. But since there is no
prophecy of even Marcion’s Christ, much less of his cross, it is
enough for my Christ that there is a prophecy merely of death. For,
from the fact that the kind of death is not declared, it was
possible for the death of the cross to have been still intended, which
would then have to be assigned to another (Christ), if the prophecy had
had reference to another. Besides,3366
if he should
be unwilling to allow that the death of my Christ was predicted, his
confusion must be the
greater3367
| 3367 Quo magis
erubescat. | if he announces
that his own Christ indeed died, whom he denies to have had a nativity,
whilst denying that my Christ is mortal, though he allows Him to be
capable of birth. However, I will show him the death, and burial, and
resurrection of my Christ all3368
indicated in a
single sentence of Isaiah, who says, “His sepulture was removed
from the midst of them.” Now there could have been no sepulture
without death, and no removal of sepulture except by resurrection.
Then, finally, he added: “Therefore He shall have many for his
inheritance, and He shall divide the spoil of the many, because He
poured out His soul unto death.”3369
For there is here set forth the cause of this favour to Him, even that
it was to recompense Him for His suffering of death. It was equally
shown that He was to obtain this recompense for His death, was
certainly to obtain it after His death by means of the
resurrection.3370
| 3370 Both His own and His
people’s. | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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