Moralia in Job 159

You have moved me against him, that I should afflict him in vain (Job 2:3). Christ was afflicted in vain for Himself, not in vain for us. If blessed Job holds the figure of our Redeemer set in His passion, how is it said by the Lord to Satan: 'You have moved me against him?' The Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, that He might extinguish the faults of our transgression, came to endure the scourges of our mortality; but since He is of one and the same nature with the Father, how does the Father assert that He was moved against Him through Satan's instigation, when it is established that no inequality of power, no diversity of will interrupts the concord of the Father and the Son?

But nevertheless the same One, who is equal to the Father in divinity, came for our sake to scourges through the flesh. Which scourges, of course, He would not have undertaken, unless in redeeming He had assumed the form of condemned man. And unless the first man had transgressed, the second would by no means have come to the reproaches of the passion. When, therefore, the first man was moved from the Lord through Satan, then was the Lord moved in the second man. Satan, therefore, then moved the Lord to this one's affliction, when in paradise he prostrated the first man from the summit of righteousness by the fault of disobedience. For unless Adam the first had first drawn himself into the death of the soul through voluntary vice, Adam the second would not have come without vice into the voluntary death of the flesh.

Well, therefore, is it said to him concerning our Redeemer also: 'You have moved me against him, that I should afflict him in vain.' As if it were said more plainly: While this One dies not for His own, but for that other's cause, then you moved me to this One's affliction, when you drew that other away from me by cunning persuasion. Concerning which it is also well added, 'in vain.' For in vain was He afflicted who was both pressed by the vengeance of guilt, and was not stained by the contagion of guilt. In vain was He afflicted who, being incarnate, had no faults of His own committed, and yet without guilt underwent the punishment of the carnal. For hence it is that He speaks through the Prophet, saying: 'What I did not seize, then I paid back' (Ps. 68:5).

For another, created for paradise, wished proudly to seize the likeness of divine power, but yet the Mediator without guilt paid back the guilt of this pride. Hence it is that a certain wise man says to the Father: 'Since you are just, you dispose all things justly; you condemn even him who ought not to be punished' (Wisd. 12:15). Which God afflicted the innocent Christ with punishments. But it must be weighed how He is just, and disposes all things justly, if He condemns him who ought not to be punished. For our Mediator ought not to have been punished for Himself, because He perpetrated no contagion of guilt. But unless He Himself undertook the undue, He would never have freed us from the due death. The Father, therefore, since He is just, punishing the just One, disposes all things justly;

because through this He justifies all things: that He condemns Him who is without sin, on behalf of sinners; so that all the elect might rise to the summit of justice, whereby He who is above all sustained the losses of our injustice. That, therefore, which is there said to be condemned when He ought not, is here recorded to be afflicted in vain. Yet He who was afflicted in vain in respect of Himself, was not afflicted in vain in respect of our deeds. For the rust of vice could not be purged except by the fire of torment. He came, therefore, without vice, who should subject Himself willingly to torment; so that the punishments due to our iniquity might justly lose their guilty ones through Him, whom they had unjustly held free from themselves.

In vain, therefore, and not in vain was He afflicted, who indeed had in Himself no things committed, but by His own heart wiped away the stain of our guilt.