Bread, the Law, and Hades

This is why we are told to ask for what is enough to keep the body’s substance in being: not luxury, but food — the kind that replaces what the body uses up and keeps hunger from killing us. Not laid tables that inflame us and drive us on to pleasures, and not the sort of fare that makes the body run wild against the soul, but bread; and not bread for years ahead, only as much as is enough for us today.

And if you like, we say this: the Word was the firstborn of God, who came down from heaven to the blessed Mary and was made a firstborn man in her womb, so that the firstborn of God might be shown united with a firstborn man. [d]

When they brought him to the temple to present him to the Lord, they made the offerings for purification. If the law’s gifts of purification were offered for him, then in that respect he was indeed made subject to the law. But the Word was not under the law in the way his accusers imagine, since he is himself the law; nor did God have any need of purification sacrifices, since he cleanses and makes holy all things at once, in a moment. He did take to himself the human frame he received from the virgin, and was made subject to the law, and was purified in the way laid down for a firstborn — but he did not go through those rites because he needed them. He did it for one purpose only: to buy back out of the law’s slavery those who had been sold under the sentence of the curse.

This is why the guards of Hades shook when they saw him, and the bronze gates and the iron bars were broken. For look — the only Son went in, a soul among souls, God the Word with a human soul. His body lay in the tomb, and it was not emptied of divinity; but just as he was in his essential being with his Father while he was in Hades, so he was also in the body and in Hades. For the Son is not held inside a place, any more than the Father is, and he contains all things in himself. Yet of his own will he lived in a body that had a soul, so that he might enter Hades with his soul, and not with his pure divinity.