Selected Sermons, Volume 3

72a A First on the Lord’s Passion

SERMON 72A A First on the Lord’s Passion1 fter the heavenly miracle of the Virgin birth shone throughout the whole world, the joyful festivities marking the Lord’s birth were completed, and the venerable feast of Epiphany also has been celebrated, the Lord foretells the sequence of the events surrounding his Passion to his disciples when he speaks as follows: Behold, we are now going up to Jerusalem, he says, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests, and they will condemn him to death, and they will hand him over to the gentiles, and they will mock him and spit at him, and after three days he will rise (Mt 20.18–19). He who was able to announce what would happen was also able to avoid it. Adversities overtake the ignorant, not those who have knowledge . He willed to suffer since of his own accord he went up to the place where he would suffer. Death has sway over the unwilling , but is the servant of those who are willing. Therefore, since he is willing to die, it is not a mishap, but an act of power. “I have power,” he says, “to lay down my own life, and I have 1 1. On the authenticity of this sermon, see A. Olivar, Los sermones de San Pedro Crisólogo: Estudio critico (Montserrat: Abadía de Montserrat, 1962), 357–65. F. Sottocornola, L’anno liturgico nei sermoni di Pietro Crisologo (Cesena: Centro studi e ricerche sulla antica provincia ecclesiastica Ravennate, 1973), 132–36, is of the opinion that this and the following sermon were preached after the feasts of Christmas and Epiphany had ended, and prior to the beginning of Lent. He bases his contention on the first sentence of this sermon and on the fact that this Sermon 72a is not about Christ’s Passion per se but about his prediction of the Passion. A. Olivar, by contrast, in Los sermones, 264, indicates that although Chrysologus was not in the habit of preaching at Passiontide, he did make an exception with Sermons 72a and 72b. The only bit of support for Olivar’s contention of a late Lenten setting for this sermon is the collection of allusions to the Creed in section 4, and the Creed was the focus of much of Chrysologus’s preaching during Lent (see Sermons 56–62a). However, Sottocornola’s placement of this and the following sermon in the period between Epiphany and the beginning of Lent seems far more likely. power,” he says, “to take it up; no one takes it from me.”2 Where there is the power to lay down life and to take it up, dying in this case is not something inevitable, but something that is willed.3 “No one,” he says, “takes it from me.” If no one, then certainly not even death. Indeed, death was not able to take his life away, nor was the underworld able to hold onto it, since, as it trembled at his4 bidding, it lost even those souls that it was holding in captivity: “And the tombs were split open,” it says, “and many of the bodies of the saints rose up.”5 Just as, when Christ was being born, conception did not follow its usual order, birth did not proceed according to custom, nature did not observe its own laws,6 so too at his death Tartarus lost those he was keeping under his sway, hell forfeited the prerogative of its age-old power, and death relinquished what had been guaranteed under the ancient law by decree of the new order.7 2. But let us return to what we have begun. We are now going up to Jerusalem, he says, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests, and they will condemn him to death, and they will hand him over to the gentiles (vv.18–19). But God, who knows all that is to be known, knew, because he had foreseen what was going to happen, that at the scandal of the cross, at the violence of the Passion, at the injustice done to the Creator, the earth would quake, the sky would tremble, light would flee, the sun would hide, hell would shudder, and all creation would be disturbed and thrown into confusion.8 For the world, which could not endure divinity covered with our body, foresaw that it would be stripped of flesh, a thing it...