Sermons 33

Brethren, the deeds of the saints are not to be reckoned as mischances, but as signs: and what are thought to be their vices are to be applied to mysteries, not to lapses, as today the Lord's teaching has marked out and made plain, saying: 'When the crowds were thronging together, Jesus began to say: This generation is a wicked generation; it seeks a sign, and no sign shall be given it, but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for as Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites, so also shall the Son of Man be to this generation' (Luke 11). Behold, the flight of the prophet is turned into a figure of the Lord himself, and what is celebrated as a deadly shipwreck stands forth as the sacrament of the Lord's resurrection.

For in what manner Jonah held and fulfilled the type of the Saviour in all things, the text of the history that is written concerning him shows. 'Jonah fled,' it says, 'from the face of God' (Jonah 1). Did not the Lord, in order to bear the face and form of man, flee the face and form of his own deity? As the Apostle says: 'Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant' (Philippians 2). The Lord took the form of a servant, that he might lie hidden from the world, that he might forestall the devil, that he might make himself flee, as it were, into man. And well is the type of Christ preserved in the very words of Jonah. He did not say, 'I flee God,' but, 'I flee from the face of God.' God, who is everywhere, has nowhere whither he may flee from himself;

but Christ, so as to flee the face of the deity not in place but in appearance, took refuge wholly in the countenance of our servitude. 'Jonah went down,' it says, 'to Joppa, that he might flee to Tarshish.' Hear the one who goes down: 'No man,' he says, 'ascends into heaven, but he who descended from heaven' (John 3). The Lord descended from heaven to earth, the deity descended to human things, the sovereignty on high descended to our servitude. And yet he who had descended to the ship, about to sail, ascended it: so Christ, who descended into this world, ascended, with his powers and wonders, into the ship of his Church.

But what does the storm, confounded by the winds, signify, except the devil who, penetrating the heart of Judas, raised up kings, nations, peoples, soldiery, judges, mariners, and swelled them into billows, so that the rising and falling waves might assail their own Author, the Lord of the world, to their own quiet? Hear the waves of the world, hear the prophet saying: 'Why did the nations rage, and the peoples devise vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes came together in one against the Lord, and against his Christ' (Psalm 2). And because the lot that would betray Jonah was not lacking, it fulfills upon Christ the Davidic prophecy which says: 'And upon my garment they cast lots' (Psalm 21). But that Jonah stands forth as the author of his own submersion, when he says:

'Take me up, and cast me into the sea,' he indicates the voluntary passion of the Lord; for why do they for him endure these things to be commanded, who could of their own accord relieve themselves in such a peril? For when the safety of many demands the death of one, death is placed in the will of the one who perishes, because the will can both retard the one about to die from death, and forestall the peril of the one in danger by death: so here, where the whole matter of the Lord is enacted in figure, the authority of the dying one is awaited, so that dying may be not a necessity but a power. Hear the Lord saying: 'I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it up again; no man takes it from me' (John 10). How so?

Because Christ, although he sent forth his spirit, did not lose it; for he who receives and holds in his hand the souls of all, he himself does not appear to be able to lose his own soul in any way. Hear the prophet saying: 'My soul is always in thy hands' (Psalm 118). And elsewhere: 'Into thy hands I commend my spirit' (Psalm 30). But what need of more? It runs, it meets him, the beast is at hand from the deep, about to fulfill and betray the whole of the Lord's resurrection, nay, to conceive and bring forth the mystery; the beast is at hand, at hand the image, horrid and cruel, of hell, which, while it is borne with greedy jaws upon the prophet, felt and tasted the vigour of its Author, for by devouring it incurred a fast. But, trembling, it fits and prepares the dwelling of its heart as a lodging for its heavenly guest:

so that she who had been the whole cause of peril might herself become the unheard-of conveyance of a necessary voyage, preserving her passenger, and after three days bringing him back to the things above; and might give to the Gentiles what she had taken away from the Jews, to whom, seeking a sign, the Lord decrees that this alone is to be given as a sign, through which they might know that the glory which they had hoped for in Christ was wholly to be conferred upon the Gentiles. 'This generation,' he says, 'is a wicked one; it seeks a sign, and no sign shall be given it, but the sign of Jonah the prophet. For as Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites, so also shall the Son of Man be to this generation.' Because, while the Jewish perfidy raged like a flood, Christ was plunged into the deep of hell;

and, traversing in a three days' course all the hidden things of Tartarus, he gave, when he rose again, the token both of the Jews' cruelty and of his own majesty and of death overcome. Rightly, therefore, shall the Ninevites rise in judgment, and shall condemn that generation, because they were corrected by the preaching of a single prophet—a shipwrecked man, a foreigner, an unknown; whereas these, after such great powers, such great wonders, with the whole flashing of the resurrection, do not come to faith, are not moved to repentance. For they do not believe the very sign of the resurrection, but strive to defame it, when at the price of soldiers they close their eyes, corrupt their hearts, so that they might keep silent about what they had known, what they had seen; buying a lie, that they might take away the truth. They turned back their own crime upon the disciples of Christ, when they say:

'Say that his disciples came by night and stole him away' (Matthew 28). You err, O Jew: this the disciples did not carry off, but the Master; and he stole himself away, who seemed to have been slain. But I marvel that a Jew seeks Christ, whom he had savagely placed between two thieves: he commits wickedly, guards impiously, and yet more iniquitously seeks him. O Jew, Christ cannot perish, but you have lost him for yourself by your own crime. He will come, he will come into judgment, the queen of the south, and by that very one who was thought to have been stolen away as judge, he will condemn you:

because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and you, most wretched, slew the Wisdom of God that was coming to you. The Ninevites were then provided as a figure of the Gentiles who would believe, the queen of the south as a figure of the Church. Blessed are we, brethren, because what preceded in type, what was promised in figure, we in reality, in truth, venerate, behold, and possess.