8
Blessed too are you, O thief,
For from your death, life met you.
They hurled you down to be cast from one evil to another,
but our Lord took [you] and placed you in Eden.
Our tongue cannot tell of you,
for Judas deceived and handed him over.
Even Simon denied, and the disciples fled and hid,
but you proclaimed him!
9
Symbolically was he crucified between thieves,
one of whom blasphemed and the other confessed--
a symbol that revealed the people of our day:
see how they mock him while the peoples confess.
With silence he despised the denier in a symbol of them
that look: those [people] are also despised in the world.
To the believer, he showed honor through his word,
and see how his companions have increased!
. . .
13
His tomb and his garden are a symbol of Eden,
in which Adam died a hidden death.
For [Adam] fled and hid among the trees,
and entered and was concealed as within a tomb.
The living buried one, who was resurrected in a garden,
raised up him who fell in a garden.
from the garden’s tomb to the garden’s wedding feast,
he made him enter in glory. (Ephrem the Syrian, “On the Crucifixion 8,” trans.
Blake Hartung in St. Ephrem the Syrian: Songs for the Fast and Pascha [The
Fathers of the Church 145; Washington, D.C. The Catholic University of America
Press, 2022], 180-81)
16
His birth is our purification,
and his baptism our propitiation.
His death is our vivification,
and his ascension our exaltation.
how much should we praise him! (Ephrem the Syrian, “On the Crucifixion 15,”
trans. Blake Hartung in St. Ephrem the Syrian: Songs for the Fast and Pascha
[The Fathers of the Church 145; Washington, D.C. The Catholic University of
America Press, 2022], 193)