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| (The Angel at the Tomb by Mikhail Nesterov, 1911) |
“God’s compassion for us is all the more wonderful because
Christ died, not for the righteous or the holy but for the wicked and the
sinful, and, though the divine nature could not be touched by the sting of
death, he took to himself, through his birth as one of us, something he could
offer on our behalf. The power of his death once confronted our death. In the
words of Hosea the prophet:
Death, I shall be your death; grave, I shall
swallow you up. By dying he submitted to the laws of the underworld; by
rising again he destroyed them. He did away with the everlasting character of
death so as to make death a thing of time, not of eternity. As all die in Adam,
so all will be brought to life in Christ.”
~St. Leo the Great, 400-461 A.D.
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