(2) Since death was unable to devour
Him without a body, or Sheol to swallow Him without flesh, He came to a virgin
to provide Himself with a means to Sheol. They had brought Him a donkey to ride
when He entered Jerusalem to announce her destruction and the expulsion of her
children. And with a body from a virgin He entered Sheol, broke into its
vaults, and carried off its treasures. Then he came to Eve, mother of all
the living. She is the vine whose fence death broke down with her own hands
in order to sample her fruit. And Eve, who had been mother of all the living,
became a fountain of death for all the living. But Mary, the new shoot,
sprouted from Eve, the old vine, and new life dwelt in her. When death came confidently,
as usual, to feed on mortal fruit life, the killer of death, was lying in wait,
so that when death swallowed (life) with no apprehension, it would vomit it
out, and many others with it.
(3) So the Medicine of Life flew down
from above and joined Himself to that mortal fruit, the body. And when death
came as usual to feed, life swallowed death instead. This is the food that
hungered to eat the one who eats it. Therefore, death vomited up the many lives
which it had greedily swallowed because of a single fruit which it had ravenously
swallowed. The hunger that drove it after one was the undoing of the
voraciousness that had driven it after many. Death succeeded in eating the one
(fruit), but it quickly vomited out the many. As the one (fruit) was dying on
the cross, many of the buried came forth from Sheol at (the sound of) His
voice.
(4) This is the fruit that escaped
death, which had swallowed it, and brought the living out of Sheol, after whom
it had been sent. Sheol stored up all that it had devoured. But because of one
thing which it could not eat, it gave back everything inside which it had
eaten. When a person’s stomach is upset, he vomits out what agrees with him as
well as what disagrees with him. Death’s stomach became upset, so when it committed
out the Medicine of Life which had soured it, it vomited out with Him the
living as well, whom it had been pleased to swallow. (Ephrem the Syrian, Homily
on our Lord Section III.2-4, in St. Ephrem the Syrian: Selected Prose Works [trans.
Edward G. Matthews, Jr. [The Fathers of the Church 91; Washington, D.C.: The
Catholic University Press of America, 1994], 278-79)
