Thus he beholds the very Son of God coming as a Son of Man with the clouds of heaven, that he might know that Christ, unknown before to so many faithless ones, has ever been known to the faithful. If God is so often seen by men in the figure of a man, what is it that, when the Jew now sees Christ as a man, he is so enraged, unless perhaps the figure, the honour, the truth is reckoned an injury? The Evangelist has told us today that Christ said: 'If anyone keeps My word, he shall never see death forever' (John 8). To which word the Jews answered: 'Now we know that You have a demon: Abraham our father is dead, and the prophets; and You say: If anyone keeps My word, he shall not taste death forever.'
'Are You greater than our father Abraham? Whom do You make Yourself?' O how faithlessness received it all! O how envy shuts its eyes! How greatly does a wickedness prejudged confound the testimony of the heart! O how harshly does obstinacy cut off reason! The perverted human mind cannot bear to hear what it has once resolved to hate: goodness is odious to the wicked, justice is an enemy to the unjust. Hence it is that lying men cannot recognize the truth, and a mind set up as judge cannot find what is true among the messengers of falsehood. He who has determined to err always hears what he wishes, not what is. Christ had said: 'If anyone keeps My word, he shall not see death forever.' The Jew does not weigh what he has heard, nor seek to interpret for himself what has been said:
he demands that the one who promises should prove what he himself deems impossible; but presently, from the conception of his mind, he gives birth to blasphemy, sows insults, spreads abroad curses, and strives so to empty the authority of the Speaker with his revilings, that He who seems thus to lie subject to human things is not even believed able to give eternal things to mortals. 'Now we know that You have a demon.' The demon, author of evil, promises evils, not goods; he is wont to kill, not to give life; nor does he wish men to be eternal, whom he does not even permit to be temporal. Therefore Christ is no demon, but God, who gives back the life He had given, and by His word makes eternal those men whom the devil by his persuasion had made temporal. 'Abraham,' he says, 'is dead, and the prophets, and You say:'
'If anyone keeps My word, he shall not see death forever.' Let the faithful hear, that by faith's revealing he may know what the unfaithful cannot hear, what he cannot see who has plunged himself into the darkness of unbelief. Christ said: 'He shall not see death.' Your obstinacy, O Jew, deservedly seeks to speak falsehood. Abraham and the prophets, hearing the word, kept it steadfastly, yet they died; but not forever. Therefore when He says: 'He shall not see death,' and adds 'forever,' He promises resurrection; He does not deny that they are to die in time. O Jew, us whom death was making not-to-be in the present age, the resurrection restores as everlasting for the age to come. Hear Him say this more plainly:
'Everyone who believes shall not die forever, but shall pass from death to life' (John 5 and 11). How does he not die? Because he passes from death to life. He dies, then; everyone dies who is born of a mortal condition; but he lives, and lives forever, everyone who is born again of a life-giving generation. But I ask: He who could take away death, why did He will that man should pass through death? For the physician seems more welcome who forestalls diseases than he who applies to the diseases a late and painful medicine. O Jew, Christ the physician would have done even this, had not the sick man been ungrateful to the physician. He both gave life, and foretold to man that death would come; but that man, who had not felt adversity, knew not how to keep prosperity.
How good good things are, we cannot know except by the knowledge of evils. Therefore Christ shall be magnified, who both before gave the life not yet lived, and now restores the life that was lost; and man, made more knowing by comparison, will be more cautious for himself, and more grateful to his Author. 'Are You,' he says, 'greater than our father Abraham?' Plainly greater, and by as much greater as the master is above the servant, as God above man, as the maker above what is made, as He who gives life above what was dead, as He who raises above what is raised. Jesus answered: 'Abraham rejoiced that he might see My day; he saw it, and was glad.' In order to show that Abraham lives, He said that he saw His day, that is, the day on which Christ was born to the world. The Founder of days is not bound by a day; the Author of time knows no times;
but Christ, born a man for man's sake, took upon Himself both a day and a time. 'Abraham rejoiced that he might see My day.' If Moses and Elijah meet Him upon the mountain, that they might behold Christ the promised one, how would not Abraham also, most patient of watchers, be intent upon the birth from the Virgin, that he might behold the promised blessing in the nations, that is, in his own seed? 'Amen, amen, I say to you,' He says, 'that before Abraham was, I am.' If all things were made through Him, and without Him was nothing made (John 1), and this is He to whom the Father said: 'Let Us make man to Our image and likeness' (Gen. 1), how did Abraham not see Him? 'Let Us make man to Our image and likeness.' As angel and God differ in substance, so do they in image.
Therefore the Father speaks to none but the Son, when He says: 'Let Us make man to Our image and likeness,' for whom the image is the same and the substance the same. 'They took up stones to cast at Him.' And building a tower that they might fall the higher, they themselves provided stones for themselves; and these stones the wretched ones brought, not that they might kill God, but wherewith they might kill themselves. 'Jesus hid Himself.' Not through fear, but through forgiveness: when God flees the sinner, He spares him; God, when He turns aside, does not wish to destroy the rebel.