The God the Shepherds Glorified

Luke too, the follower and disciple of the apostles, speaks of Zechariah and Elizabeth, from whom John was born according to the promise, and says: “They were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commands and requirements of the Lord.” And again, of Zechariah: “While he was serving as priest before God in the order of his division, according to the custom of the priesthood, the lot fell to him to burn the incense” — and he came to make the offering, “entering the temple of the Lord.” Now Gabriel, this Lord’s angel, who stands in his own presence, acknowledged in his own words, plainly and without qualification or hesitation, that the one who had chosen Jerusalem and set up the priesthood is God and Lord. He knew of no one above him. If he had known some other God and Lord more perfect than this one, he would never — as I have already shown — have acknowledged as God and Lord, altogether and absolutely, a being he knew to be the fruit of a defect. [a]

And then, speaking of John, he says: “For he will be great in the Lord’s sight, and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God. And he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” For whom, then, did he prepare the people, and in whose sight was he made great? Truly in the sight of the one who said that John had something “more than a prophet,” and that “among those born of women none is greater than John the Baptist” — the one for whose coming John made the people ready, warning his fellow servants and preaching repentance to them, so that when the Lord was present they might receive forgiveness, having turned back to the one from whom their sins and offenses had estranged them. As David also says: “Sinners are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they are born.” That is why John, turning them back to their Lord, prepared a perfect people for the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah.

And again, speaking of the angel, Luke says: “At that time the angel Gabriel was sent from God” — the angel who also said to the virgin, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.” And of the Lord he says: “He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” For who else can reign without a break over the house of Jacob forever, except Jesus Christ our Lord, the Son of the Most High God — the one who promised through the law and the prophets that he would make his salvation visible to all flesh, and who became the Son of Man for this very purpose, so that man too might become a son of God? And Mary, overjoyed at this, cried out, prophesying on behalf of the church: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior… He has taken up his child Israel, remembering his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and his descendants forever.”

By passages like these the Gospel points out that it was God who spoke to the fathers; it was he who through Moses set up the ordering of the law, and by that giving of the law we know that he spoke to the fathers. This same God, out of his great goodness, poured his compassion upon us, and through that compassion “the dawn from on high has looked upon us, and has appeared to those sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, and has guided our feet into the way of peace.” So it was that Zechariah too, recovering from the muteness he had suffered for his unbelief, and filled with a new spirit, blessed God in a new way. For everything had entered a new phase, the Word arranging in a new way his coming in the flesh, so that he might make over to God the man who had departed from God. And that is why people were taught to worship God in a new fashion, but not a different God — since in truth there is only “one God, who counts the circumcised righteous by faith and the uncircumcised through faith.”

Zechariah, prophesying, exclaimed: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people, and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets who have been from of old: salvation from our enemies, and from the hand of all who hate us; to show the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham — to grant us that we, delivered out of the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him, all our days.” Then he says to John: “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways, to give his people the knowledge of salvation, for the forgiveness of their sins.”

This was the knowledge of salvation that they were missing: the knowledge of the Son of God, which John made known when he said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. This is he of whom I said: after me comes a man who was made before me, because he existed before me; and of his fullness we have all received.” This, then, was the knowledge of salvation. It was not the knowledge of another God, or another Father, or of Bythus, or of the Pleroma of thirty Aeons, or of the Mother of the lower Ogdoad. The knowledge of salvation was the knowledge of the Son of God, who both is called and actually is Salvation, and Savior, and Saving.

Salvation, as here: “I have waited for your salvation, Lord.” And again, Savior: “Look, my God, my Savior; I will put my trust in him.” And as bringing salvation, thus: “God has made his salvation known in the sight of the nations.” For he is Savior as being the Son and Word of God; he is saving, since he is Spirit, for it says, “The Spirit of our face, Christ the Lord”; and he is salvation, as being flesh, for “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” This is the knowledge of salvation, then, that John gave to those who were repenting and believing in the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.

And the angel of the Lord, Luke says, appeared to the shepherds and announced joy to them: “For there is born in the house of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” Then a multitude of the heavenly army appeared, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, to people of good will.” Those who falsely call themselves Gnostics say that these angels came from the Ogdoad and were making known the descent of the Christ from above. But here again they go wrong, since they hold that the Christ and Savior from above was never born at all, and that only after the baptism of the Jesus of the arrangement did he come down on him as a dove.

So on their account the angels of the Ogdoad were lying when they said, “Today a Savior is born to you, who is Christ the Lord, in the city of David.” For by their reckoning neither Christ nor the Savior was born then. It was the Jesus of the arrangement who was born, the one belonging to the framer of the world, the Demiurge, and on whom, after his baptism — that is, after thirty years had gone by — they claim the Savior from above came down. But why did the angels add “in the city of David,” if they were not announcing the good news that God’s promise to David had been fulfilled, that from the fruit of his body there would be an eternal King?

For it was the Framer of the whole universe who made that promise to David, as David himself declares: “My help is from God, who made heaven and earth.” And again: “In his hand are the ends of the earth, and the heights of the mountains are his. The sea is his, and he made it himself, and his hands founded the dry land. Come, let us worship and fall down before him, and weep in the presence of the Lord who made us; for he is the Lord our God.” By David the Holy Spirit is plainly telling those who hear him that there will be people who despise the one who formed us and who alone is God. That is why he spoke the words above, meaning: See that you do not go wrong; besides him, or above him, there is no other God to whom you should rather stretch out your hands — and so he makes us reverent and grateful toward the one who made us, established us, and still feeds us. What, then, will happen to those who have been the authors of so much blasphemy against their Creator?

This same truth is what the angels proclaimed. When they cry, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace,” they are glorifying with those words the Creator of the highest — that is, of the things above the heavens — and the Founder of everything on earth, who has sent down from heaven the blessing of his salvation to his own handiwork, to human beings. That is why Luke adds: “The shepherds returned, glorifying God for everything they had heard and seen, just as it had been told to them.” For the shepherds of Israel did not glorify some other god, but the one announced by the law and the prophets, the Maker of all things, whom the angels glorified as well. But if the angels from the Ogdoad were in the habit of glorifying someone else, different from the one the shepherds worshiped, then those angels from the Ogdoad brought them error and not truth.

Luke says something further about the Lord: “When the days of their purification were completed, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him before the Lord, as it is written in the law of the Lord, that every male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord; and to offer a sacrifice, as it is said in the law of the Lord, a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.” In his own words, then, he calls the one who appointed the ordering of the law most plainly Lord. But “Simeon,” he also says, “blessed God and said: Lord, now you are letting your servant go in peace; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared before the face of all peoples — a light for the unveiling of the nations, and the glory of your people Israel.” And “Anna the prophetess,” he says, glorified God in the same way when she saw Christ, “and spoke of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.” By all of these, one God is shown, revealing to people the new arrangement of freedom — the covenant — through the new coming of his Son.

That is also why Mark, the interpreter and follower of Peter, begins his Gospel account this way: “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in the prophets: Look, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way. The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight the paths before our God.” Plainly the opening of the Gospel quotes the words of the holy prophets and points at once to the one they acknowledged as God and Lord: him, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who also promised him that he would send his messenger before his face. That messenger was John, crying in the wilderness in “the spirit and power of Elijah”: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight paths before our God.”

For the prophets did not announce one God and then another, but one and the same — though seen from various sides and named by many titles. The Father is varied and rich in what may be said of him, as I have already shown in the book before this one, and as I will show from the prophets themselves further on in this work.

Toward the end of his Gospel, too, Mark says: “So then, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and sits at the right hand of God” — confirming what the prophet had said: “The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.” So God and the Father are truly one and the same: the one announced by the prophets and handed down by the true Gospel, whom we Christians worship and love with our whole heart as the Maker of heaven and earth and of everything in them.