To Pammachius against John of Jerusalem 30

30. Listen to those words of thunder which fall from Job, the vanquisher of torments, who, as he scrapes away the filth of his decaying flesh with a potsherd, solaces his miseries with the hope and the reality of the resurrection:“Oh, that,” he says, “my words were written! Oh, that they were inscribed in a book with an iron pen, and on a sheet of lead, that they were graven in the rock for ever! For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that in the last day I shall rise from the earth, and again be clothed with my skin, and in my flesh shall see God, Whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. This my hope is laid up in my bosom.” What can be clearer than this prophecy? No one since the days of Christ speaks so openly concerning the resurrection as he did before Christ. He wishes his words to last for ever; and that they might never be obliterated by age, he would have them inscribed on a sheet of lead, and graven on the rock. He hopes for a resurrection; nay, rather he knew and saw that Christ, his Redeemer, was alive, and at the last day would rise again from the earth. The Lord had not yet died, and the athlete of the Church saw his Redeemer rising from the grave. When he says, “And I shall again be clothed with my skin, and in my flesh see God,” I suppose he does not speak as if he loved his flesh, for it was decaying and putrifying before his eyes; but in the confidence of rising again, and through the consolation of the future, he makes light of his present misery. Again he says: “I shall be clothed with my skin.” What mention do we find here of an ethereal body? What of an aërial body, like to breath and wind? Where there is skin and flesh, where there are bones and sinews, and blood and veins, there assuredly is fleshy tissue and distinction of sex. “And in my flesh,” he says, “I shall see God.” When all flesh shall see the salvation of God, and Jesus as God, then I, also, shall see the Redeemer and Saviour, and my God. But I shall see him in that flesh which now tortures me, which now melts away for pain. Therefore, in my flesh shall I behold God, because by His own resurrection He has healed all my infirmities.” Does it not seem to you that Job was then writing against Origen, and was holding a controversy similar to ours against the heretics, for the reality of the flesh in which he underwent tortures? For he could not bear to think that all his sufferings would be in vain; while the flesh he actually bore was tortured as flesh indeed, it would be some other and spiritual kind of flesh that would rise again. Wherefore he presses home and emphasizes the truth, and puts a stop to all that might lie hid in an artful confession, by speaking out plainly: “Whom I shall see for myself and my eyes shall behold and not another.” If he is not to rise again in his own sex, if he is not to have the same members which were then lying on the dunghill, if he does not open the same eyes to see God with which he was then looking at the worms, where will Job then be? You do away with what constituted Job, and give me the hollow phrase, Job shall rise again; it is as if you were to order a ship to be restored after shipwreck, and then were to refuse each particular thing of which a ship is made.