Potamius of Lisbon

In order that the unity itself of the threefold majesty and imprint should encounter our understanding, the invisible majesty itself states so: “Let us make man in our image and according to our likeness.” Look! He has demonstrated what we believe. God has engraved his image on the face of the human and has said “in our image.” The knowledge of Father and Son is impressed upon the face of man; and the very features of his face, by means of the clay by which we are formed, revealed in the human original model how the Father and the Son were, so that man could admire God in man.

Lazarus, this intimate friend of God, died, as is known through the testimony of the Gospel. According to John, for forty years he had compensated for the losses of the flesh by the actions of his will. And so after a quick death which was due to his earthly frame, that is, to earth itself more than humanity—according to the book of Genesis the rich fluidity of clay is responsible for us as well—while Christ the judge was far away, imparting the gifts of salvation on the borders of Judea, Lazarus was buried and placed in the tomb in order that he might begin to be what he had been—clay.

Here indeed, throughout the gloomy spheres of darkness and the shades of black horror, that is, throughout the course of four days that are renewed in accordance with the alternate interchange of increase and diminution—throughout eight days, we may say, by including also the dark nights—he lay with his jaws gaping and hanging down, the teeth in his mouth dropping, his mouth obstructed since he was really putrefying like a crumbly clod, consumed by earthly destruction, and his unhappy burial condemned his nerve bundles with the essence of his body to a miserable corruption. Thus, with the contraction of his limbs, his blackened skin is stretched over the dry and easy-to-count ribs, and a stream of bodily fluid, which is released from the cavity of the entrails, an already foul-smelling sewer, flowed filthy and dark to the feet of the corpse.

God wept, moved by the tears of mortals, and although he was about to release Lazarus from the bond of death by the exercise of his power, he fulfilled the component of human affection with the comfort of his sympathetic tears. God wept, not because he learned that the young man had died before him but in order to moderate the sisters’ outpourings of grief. God wept, in order that God might do, with tears and compassion, what human beings do on behalf of their fellow human beings. God wept, because human nature had fallen to such an extent that, after being expelled from eternity, it had come to love the lower world. God wept, because those who could be immortal, the devil made mortal. God wept, because those whom he had rewarded with every benefit and had placed under his power, those whom he had set in paradise, among flowers and lilies without any hardship, the devil, by teaching them to sin, exiled from almost every delight. God wept, because those whom he had created innocent, the devil through his wickedness, caused to be found guilty.