sense: for certainly He did not suffer at a time answering literally to the third day after the
present occasion; nay, He immediately goes on to say, “Nevertheless, I must walk to-day,
and to-morrow, and the day following”), we are indeed constrained also to put a mystical
interpretation upon the sentence, “Ye shall not see me henceforth, until the time come when
ye shall say, Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord,” and to understand it to
refer to that advent of His in which He is to come in His effulgent brightness;1184 it being
thereby also implied, that what He expressed in the declaration, “I cast out devils, and I do
cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I am perfected,” bears upon His body, which
is the Church. For devils are cast out when the nations abandon their ancestral superstitions
and believe on Him; and cures are wrought when men renounce the devil and this world,
and live in accordance with His commandments, even unto the consummation of the resur-
rection, in which there shall, as it were, be realized that perfecting on the third day; that is
to say, the Church shall be perfected up to the measure of the angelic fulness through the
realized immortality of the body as well as the soul. Therefore the order followed by Matthew
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is by no means to be understood to involve a digression to another connection. But we are
rather to suppose, either that Luke has antedated the events which took place in Jerusalem,
and has introduced them at this point simply as they were here suggested to his recollection,
before his narrative really brings the Lord to Jerusalem; or that the Lord, when drawing near
the same city on that occasion, did actually reply to the persons who counselled Him to be
on His guard against Herod, in terms resembling those in which Matthew represents Him
to have spoken also to the multitudes at a period when He had already arrived in Jerusalem,
and when all these events had taken place which have been detailed above.
1184 In claritate.
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Of the Pharisees Who Sit in the Seat of Moses, and Enjoin Things Which They…