Lift up the Son of Man; crucified humanly, lives as God; one Christ

“When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am.” Explaining to us the causes of the Jewish madness they practiced against Christ, the divine John says: “For this reason the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was not only breaking the Sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, making himself equal to God.” And he has somewhere brought them in saying impiously: “We are not stoning you for a good work, but for blasphemy, because you, being a human, make yourself God.” So they have made faith in him unacceptable, thinking him a bare human as such, and not knowing that the Word, being God, took hold of Abraham’s seed and shared blood and flesh likewise with us, yet did not depart from being God — for he is unchangeable by nature and forever himself.

“When therefore,” he says, “you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am.” For he was crucified in a human way, but came back to life in a divine way; and through the resurrection it is believed that he is both God and truly Son of God. And if he is believed by us not as having raised another, but rather as himself raised, then somehow every necessity of the economy requires that the body that suffered death be understood as his own, so that he himself may also be said to rise, though by nature immortal as God. For by announcing the death of one Christ and Son and confessing the resurrection we are justified through faith. So the same one, existing as one and only Christ Jesus, is said to die in a human way according to the flesh, and to have been raised in a divine way as Life.