ACC ~ Acts 13 v25b

BEING WORTHY TO UNTIE JESUS’ SANDALS. ORIGEN: If the passage about the sandals has a mystic meaning we should not reject an investigation of it. Now I consider that the full humanization, when the Son of God assumes flesh and bones, is seen in one of his shoes. The other humbling is the descent to Hades, whatever that Hades might be, and the journey with the Spirit to the prison. As to the descent into Hades, we read in the sixteenth psalm, “You will not abandon my soul to Hades.”As for the journey in prison with the Spirit, we read in Peter in his Catholic epistle, “Put to death,” he says, “in the flesh but quickened in the Spirit, in which also he went and preached to the spirits in prison, which at one time were disobedient, when the long-suffering of God once waited in the days of Noah while the ark was in preparation.” He, then, who is able worthily to set forth the meaning of these two journeys is able to untie the strap of the sandals of Jesus. Such a one is whoever bends down in his mind and goes with Jesus as he goes down into hades, and whoever descends from heaven and the mysteries of Christ’s divinity to the advent that he had to spend with us when he took on humanity (as his sandals). Now he who put on humanity also put on the dead, since “for this end Jesus both died and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and the living.” This is why he put on both the living and the dead, that is, the inhabitants of the earth and those of hades, that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living. Who, then, is able to stoop down and untie the latchet of such sandals, and having untied them not to let them drop, but by the second faculty he has received to take them up and bear them, by bearing the meaning of them in his memory? COMMENTARY ON THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 6.18.