約伯倫理 第 898 章

50. The Jews being forsaken, it flowed down to the Gentiles. — Who in this place is understood by the needy man, save He of whom it is said by Paul: 'Who for our sakes became needy, when He was rich' (2 Corinthians VIII, 9)? Of which needy man the feet were the holy preachers, by whose presence indeed, going about the Gentile world, He traversed the whole earth. Of whom it is said by the prophet: 'And I will walk in them' (Leviticus XXVI, 12; 2 Corinthians VI, 16). Was not he His foot, who, held in fetters, said: 'For which I am an ambassador in a chain' (Ephesians VI, 20)?

But of those who existed as the shadow of death and the stone of darkness, the foot of the needy man was forgetful, because in the very beginning of the nascent Church, when the holy apostles wished to preach the kingdom of heaven to Judea, seeing that they profited nothing at all with her, they flowed down to preach to the Gentiles, as they themselves say in their Acts: 'To you it behoved us first to speak the word of God; but because you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles' (Acts XIII, 46). Of whom it is also said by the Psalmist: 'We shall be carried over, mountains, into the heart of the sea' (Psalm XLV, 3), because the apostles, repelled from Judea, were carried over into this world of the Gentiles.

Who then are they who, by immense hardness on account of the obscurity of their heart, are, like a certain stone of darkness and shadow of death, divided from the sojourning people of the saints, save those whom the foot of the needy man has forgotten — that is, whom the preachers of the Lord, namely of the poor One through His humanity, forsook because of the swelling of their pride, and forgot them altogether, when they transferred the seeds of their preaching to the fruit-bearing of the Gentiles alone? Whom he also rightly calls 'trackless,' because, while they were hardened in their unbelief, they refused to grant a way to the heart for the words of life. But let us hear of this Judea, which thus grew hard — both what she once was, and what she afterward endured. There follows: