Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Maximus the Confessor on Jesus and Melchizedek being without father, mother, or genealogy

  

20b. Application to the Lord of what was said regarding Melchizedek

 

For alone, and in a way without any parallel whatsoever, our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, is by nature and in truth without father, mother, or genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life. He is without mother according to His immaterial, bodiless, and utterly unknowable birth on high from the Fathers before the ages. He is without father according to His temporal and bodily birth on earth from His mother, in whose conception the seed of man did not take precedence. He is without genealogy because [1144A] the manner of both of His births is wholly inaccessible and incomprehensible to all. And He has neither beginning of days nor end of life, insofar as He is without beginning or end, being absolutely infinite, for He is God by nature. He remains a priest forever, for His being is immune to death by vice or nature, for He is God and the source of all natural and virtuous life. And you must think that no one else can have a share in this grace simply because Scripture speaks of it solely with respect to the great Melchizedek, for in all human beings God has placed the same power that leads naturally to salvation, so that anyone who wishes is able to lay claim to divine grace, and it not prevented, if he so desires, form becoming a Melchizedek, an Abraham, or a Moses, and from simply transferring all the saints to himself, [1144B] not by exchanging names or places, but by imitating their manner and ay of life. (Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua to John: Ambiguum 10, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 1:221, 223)