Tag: Crucifixion

Prayer of St. Mary of Egypt to the Theotokos

O Virgin, Mother of God, who didst give birth to God the Word, I know that it is neither fitting nor seemly that one so defiled and so covered with guilt as I should look up to thy image, O ever Virgin. It is fitting that I should be hated and shunned by thy purity. Yet as He who was born of thee became man on purpose to call sinners to repentance, help me, for I have no other succour. Let me also find an entrance. Do not refuse me a sight of the wood on which God the Word, thy Son, suffered according to the flesh, who shed His own precious blood for me. Grant, O Queen, that I may be admitted to worship the sacred Cross, and I will promise thee as surety to the God whom thou didst bring forth that I will keep myself ever undefiled, When I see the Cross of thy Son, I will at once renounce the world and the things of the world, and forthwith follow wherever thou shalt lead.”

St. Sophronius of Jerusalem
The Life of St. Mary of Egypt

The Father did not suffer

Then, again, the Father is as incapable of fellow-suffering as the Son even is of suffering under the conditions of His existence as God. Well, but how could the Son suffer, if the Father did not suffer with Him? My answer is, The Father is separate from the Son, though not from Him as God.

Tertullian
Against Praxeas
Chapter XXIX

Christ birth and death are linked. You can’t have one without the other.

When, therefore, they set forth the flesh of Christ after the pattern of the angels, declaring it to be not born, and yet flesh for all that, I should wish them to compare the causes, both in Christ’s case and that of the angels, wherefore they came in the flesh. Never did any angel descend for the purpose of being crucified, of tasting death, and of rising again from the dead. Now, since there never was such a reason for angels becoming embodied, you have the cause why they assumed flesh without undergoing birth. They had not come to die, therefore they also (came not) to be born.

…The law which makes us die is the cause of our being born. Now, since Christ died owing to the condition which undergoes death, but that undergoes death which is also born, the consequence was—nay, it was an antecedent necessity—that He must have been born also, by reason of the condition which undergoes birth; because He had to die in obedience to that very condition which, because it begins with birth, ends in death.

Tertullian
On the Flesh of Christ
Chapter VI

Was God not really crucified?

But answer me at once, you that murder truth:  Was not God really crucified?  And, having been really crucified, did He not really die? And, having indeed really died, did He not really rise again?

…O thou most infamous of men, who acquittest of all guilt the murderers of God!

Tertullian
On the Flesh of Christ
Chapter V

Tertullian describes the cross as having a cross-beam as well as a stake

Every piece of timber which is fixed in the ground in an erect position is a part of a cross, and indeed the greater portion of its mass.  But an entire cross is attributed to us, with its transverse beam, of course, and its projecting seat.

…Since the head rises upwards, and the back takes a straight direction, and the shoulders project laterally, if you simply place a man with his arms and hands outstretched, you will make the general outline of a cross.

Tertullian
Ad Nationes, Book I
Chapter XII

Christ was no less the Logos in the womb, the cradle or the cross

Christ is the inner conception ‘in the bosom of His Father;’ and that is properly the Word. And yet the Word is the intention uttered forth, as well as conceived within; for Christ was no less the Word in the womb of the Virgin, or in the cradle of the manger, or on the altar of the cross, than he was in the beginning, ‘in the bosom of his Father.’ For as the intention departs not from the mind when the word is uttered, so Christ, proceeding from the Father by eternal generation, and after here by birth and incarnation, remains still in Him and with Him in essence; as the intention, which is conceived and born in the mind, remains still with it and in it, though the word be spoken. He is therefore rightly called the Word, both by His coming from, and yet remaining still in, the Father.

William Austin
Meditation for Christmas Day

Christianity is about the death of death

Christianity is a belief, first of all and above all, in the fact that Christ did not remain in the grave, that life shone forth from death, and that in Christ’s Resurrection from the dead, the absolute, all-encompassing law of dying and death, which tolerated no exceptions, was somehow blown apart and overcome from within.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann
The Christian Concept of Death