Even Your Novelties Are Old

He sends his disciples out to preach the kingdom of God. Does he say here which God? He forbids them to take anything along for the journey, either food or clothing. Who would ever have given a command like that except the one who feeds the ravens and clothes the flowers of the field? Who was it who long ago ordered that the ox at the threshing be left with its mouth free, so that it could take its feed out of its own labor — on the principle that the worker deserves his pay? Marcion may strike such passages out; it makes no difference, so long as their sense survives. And when Christ tells them to shake the dust off their feet against anyone who refuses to receive them, he tells them to do it as a witness. Now nobody gives witness except where a case is being decided in court; and a man who orders inhuman treatment to be put into the form of testimony is threatening as a judge. [a]

Again, that the God whom Christ was commending was no new god is plainly attested by what everybody was saying about him. Some maintained to Herod that Jesus was the Christ, others that he was John, some that he was Elijah, and others that he was one of the old prophets. Now whichever of them he may have been, he was certainly not raised up in order to announce a different god after his resurrection.

He feeds the crowd in a lonely place — and this, you should know, was done in the old manner. Or else, if the grandeur is not the same, it follows that he is now inferior to the Creator. For the Creator kept people going not for one day but for forty years, not on the poorer diet of bread and fish but on manna out of heaven, and not five thousand of them but six hundred thousand. Still, the greatness of Christ’s miracle was this, that he meant the thin supply of food not merely to be enough but to run over; and in that too he was following an ancient precedent. In the same way, during the famine in Elijah’s time, the last scanty meal of the widow at Zarephath was multiplied by the prophet’s blessing all through the famine. You have it in the third book of Kings. And if you will turn to the fourth book as well, you will find this whole procedure of Christ’s already carried out by that man of God who ordered ten barley loaves that had been given him to be handed round among the people. His attendant weighed the large number of people against the small supply of food and answered:

“What, am I to set this in front of a hundred men?” And he said again: “Give it to them, and they will eat; for this is what the Lord says: They will eat, and they will have some left over, according to the word of the Lord.” O Christ, even in your novelties you are old!

Peter had watched the miracle with his own eyes, had set it beside the ancient precedents, and had found in those precedents the prophetic hints of what was one day to happen. So when the Lord asked, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter answered for them all, “You are the Christ,” he could not have failed to see that this was that Christ beside whom he knew of no other in the Scriptures, and whom he was now going over point by point in the wonderful things he did. Christ himself confirms that conclusion — first by letting it stand, and then by actually ordering silence about it. For if Peter could not have acknowledged him to be anyone but the Creator’s Christ, then in telling them “to tell no one that saying” Christ plainly did not want the conclusion Peter had drawn spread about.

“On the contrary,” you say. “Peter’s conclusion was a wrong one, and that is why he did not want a lie put into circulation.” But the reason he actually gave for the silence was a different one: “The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and scribes and priests, and be killed, and be raised on the third day.” Now these sufferings were in fact foretold of the Creator’s Christ, as we shall show fully in the proper place; and by applying them to his own case in this way he proves that he is the one they were predicted of. In any case, even if they had never been predicted, the reason he gave for imposing silence made it clear enough that Peter had made no mistake — the reason being that he had to undergo these sufferings.

“Whoever wants to save his life,” he says, “will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” Surely it is the Son of man who said this. Then look hard, along with the king of Babylon, into his blazing furnace, and there you will find one “like the Son of man” — he was not yet really Son of man, because not yet born of a man — settling outcomes of exactly this kind as early as that. He saved the lives of the three brothers, who had agreed to lose them for God’s sake; and he destroyed the lives of the Chaldeans, who had preferred to save theirs by way of idolatry. Where is that novelty you claim, in a teaching that has ancient proofs like these behind it?

And all the predictions have run their course about the martyrdoms that were to happen, and that were to receive the payment of their reward from God. “See,” says Isaiah, “how the righteous man perishes, and no one takes it to heart; and just men are taken away, and nobody gives it a thought.” When does that happen more often than in the persecution of his holy ones? This is nothing ordinary, no common accident of the law of nature. It is that famous devotion, that fighting for the faith, in which whoever loses his life for God saves it — so that here again you may recognize the Judge, who repays the evil gain of a life with the loss of it, and the good loss of a life with its salvation. What he sets before me here, though, is a jealous God, one who returns evil for evil: “Whoever is ashamed of me,” he says, “of him I too will be ashamed.”

Now there is nobody but my Christ in whose case such a shame could have any material to work on. His whole course was so exposed to shame that it opened a way even for the taunts of heretics, who declaim with all the bitterness they can muster against the sheer squalor of his birth and upbringing, and against the unworthiness of his very flesh. But how can that Christ of yours be liable to a shame he has no way of undergoing? He was never curdled into human flesh inside a woman’s womb, virgin though she was; never grew out of human seed — nor even, by the bare law of bodily substance, out of a woman’s fluid; was never reckoned flesh before being shaped in the womb, nor called an unborn creature after the shaping; was never released from ten months of cramped writhing there; was never spilled out on the ground amid the sudden pangs of labor, along with the unclean discharge that runs at such a time through the body’s drains, to open his first daylight straight away with tears and with that first wound which cuts a child loose from the woman who bears him; never got the thorough washing, or the dressing of salt and honey; was never broken in to the wrappings of the grave by swaddling bands; and never afterwards rolled about in his own filth on his mother’s lap, nibbling at her breast, an infant a long while, a boy by degrees, a man only slowly. No: he was disclosed from heaven, full grown all at once, complete all at once — Christ immediately; sheer spirit and power and god.

But since he was not real, not being so much as visible, there was nothing about him to be ashamed of in the curse of the cross either — the actual enduring of which he escaped for want of a body. So he could never have said, “Whoever is ashamed of me.” Our Christ, on the other hand, could not have said anything else. He was “made” by the Father “a little lower than the angels,” “a worm and no man, a reproach among men and despised by the people,” since it was his will that “by his wounds we should be healed,” and that our salvation should be built on his humiliation. And he had every right to set himself down so low for his own creature, man — for the image and likeness of himself and of nobody else — so that man, who had felt no shame in bowing down to a stone or a log, might make it up to God for the shamelessness of his idolatry with an equal nerve, showing the same shamelessness in his faith by not being ashamed of Christ. Now which of these two courses, Marcion, suits your Christ better when it comes to deserving shame? Plainly it is you yourself who ought to blush, for having made him up.