understanding! “I am jealous over you with a godly jealousy.” What means this? “I am jeal-
ous,” he says: art thou jealous seeing thou art a spiritual man? I am jealous he says as God
is. And hath God jealousy? yea the jealousy not of passion, but of love, and earnest zeal. I
am jealous over you with the jealousy of God. Shall I tell thee how He manifests His jealousy?
He saw the world corrupted by devils, and He delivered His own Son to save it. For words
spoken in reference to God have not the same force as when spoken in reference to ourselves:
for instance we say God is jealous, God is wroth, God repents, God hates. These words are
human, but they have a meaning which becomes the nature of God. How is God jealous?
“I am jealous over you with the jealousy of God.”840 Is God wroth? “O Lord reproach me
not in thine indignation.”841 Doth God slumber? “Awake, wherefore sleepest thou, O
Lord?”842 Doth God repent? “I repent that I have made man.”843 Doth God hate? “My soul
hateth your feasts and your new moons.”844 Well do not consider the poverty of the expres-
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sions: but grasp their divine meaning. God is jealous, for He loves, God is wroth, not as
yielding to passion, but for the purpose of chastising, and punishing. God sleeps, not as
really slumbering, but as being long-suffering. Choose out the expression. Thus when thou
hearest that God begets the Son, think not of division but of the unity of substance. For God
has taken many of these words from us as we also have borrowed others from Him, that we
may receive honour thereby.
8. Dost thou understand what I have said? Attend carefully my beloved. There are divine
names, and there are human names. God has received from me, and He Himself hath given
to me. Give me thine, and take mine He says. Thou hast need of mine: I have no need of
thine, but thou hast of mine inasmuch as my nature is unmixed, but thou art a human being
encompassed with a body, seeking also corporeal terms in order that, by borrowing expres-
sions which are familiar to thee, thou who art thus encompassed with a body, mayest be
able to think on thoughts which transcend thy understanding. What kind of names hath
He received from me, and what kind hath He given to me? He Himself is God, and He hath
called me God; with Him is the essential nature as an actual fact, with me only the honour
of the name: “I have said ye are gods, and ye are all children of the most highest.”845 Here
are words, but in the other case there is the actual reality. He hath called me god, for by that
name I have received honour. He Himself was called man, he was called Son of man, he was
called the Way, the Door, the Rock. These words He borrowed from me; the others He gave
840 2 Cor. xi. 2.
841 Ps. vi. 2.
842 Ps. xliv. 23.
843 Gen. vi. 7.
844 Is. i. 14.
845 Ps. lxxxii. 6; comp. John x. 34.
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Homily II. After Eutropius having been found outside the Church had been…