them before, pay attention to them now. He said, ‘The Father and I are
one. The Father is in me and I am in the Father. Father, all that is mine
is yours, and all that is yours is mine. Those who see me see the Father.’
What else do these words mean except that the Father is in the Son and
the Son is in the Father, and they are one like the soul and the body in
a human being, so they are one person? This has to be part of your
faith if you believe the Athanasian Creed, where statements just like
this occur.
“Of the passages I quoted, just take this saying of the Lord’s: ‘Father,
all that is mine is yours, and all that is yours is mine.’ Surely this means
that the Father’s divine nature belongs to the Son’s human nature and the
Son’s human nature belongs to the Father’s divine nature; and therefore
in Christ God is human and a human is God and they are one as the soul
and the body are one.
[ 5 ] “We can all say the same thing of our own soul and body: ‘All that
is yours is mine and all that is mine is yours. You are in me and I am in
you. Those who see me see you. We are one individual and we have one
life.’ Why? Because the soul exists throughout us and in every part of us.
Our soul’s life is the life in our body. It is something the soul and the
body share.
“Clearly then, the divine nature of the Father is the Son’s soul, and
the human nature of the Son is the Father’s body. Where does a son’s soul
come from except from his father? Where does his body come from
except from his mother? When I say ‘the divine nature of the Father’
what I mean is ‘the Father himself,’ since he is the same as his nature; his
nature is one undivided thing.
“The truth of this is clear from the angel Gabriel’s words to Mary:
‘The power of the Highest will cover you, and the Holy Spirit will
descend upon you; and the Holy One that will be born from you will be
called the Son of God’ [Luke 1 : 35 ]. Just before that the Lord is called ‘the
Son of the Highest’ [Luke 1 : 32 ], and elsewhere he is called ‘the only begot-
ten Son’ [John 3 : 16 , 18 ; 1 John 4 : 9 ].
“Those of you, however, who call him only ‘the Son of Mary’ lose
the idea of his divinity. The only people who lose that, though, are
learned clergy and scholarly laity whose only goal in lifting their
thoughts above their physical senses is to gain glory for their own reputa-
tion; but that glory does not merely overshadow, it actually extinguishes,
the light that brings the glory of God.
§112 the lord the redeemer & redemption 157