Why He Did Not Hide from the Jews

But it would have been better, someone might say, for him to hide from the plots of the Jews, so as to guard his body from death altogether. Let such a person be told that this too was unfitting for the Lord. For just as it was not fitting for the Word of God, being the Life, to inflict death on his own body himself, so neither was it fitting for him to run from the death others offered him. Rather, he was to pursue it until it was destroyed. For this reason he naturally neither laid his body aside of his own accord nor, again, fled from the Jews when they plotted against him. But this did not show weakness on the Word’s part. On the contrary, it showed him to be Savior and Life, since he both waited for death in order to destroy it, and hurried to accomplish the death offered him for the salvation of all. Besides, the Savior came to accomplish not his own death, but the death of human beings. So he did not lay his body aside by a death of his own, for he was Life and had none; instead he received the death that came from men, in order to do away with it completely when it met him in his own body. [a]

Again, from the following one might also see why it was reasonable for the Lord’s body to meet this end. The Lord was especially concerned for the resurrection of the body, which he was about to accomplish. For what he was going to do was to display it as a monument of victory over death, and to assure all that he had blotted out corruption, and that from then on their bodies would be incorruptible. As a pledge of this, and a proof of the resurrection in store for all, he has kept his own body incorrupt. If, then, once more, his body had fallen sick, and the Word had been parted from it in the sight of all, it would have been unfitting for him who healed the diseases of others to let his own instrument waste away in sickness. For how could his driving out the diseases of others have been believed if his own temple fell sick in him? Either he would have been mocked as unable to drive away diseases, or, if he could but did not, he would have been thought to have no feeling for others either.