The blameless priesthood in Christ; what the blind and the lame signify

Cyril: …rather, what he holds in honor is the blameless: what suffers no corruption from any quarter, what is sound, so to speak, in virtue and strong in sanctification, what has trained itself thoroughly to win approval through patient endurance, and is always quick to understand. That is why he makes his law on this point extend to the whole family, showing the sacred and chosen race to be his own and free of all alloy: then, in the tribe of Levi and the blood of Aaron; but now in those who have been sanctified in Christ, the great and true High Priest (Hebrews 4:14), to whom we have been joined through the Spirit, and so have been shown to be sharers and partakers of his own nature (2 Peter 1:4). So too, having called into brotherhood those who have been justified by faith (Hebrews 2:11), he rejoices over them as sharers with him, saying: ‘Here am I, and the children whom God has given me’ (Hebrews 2:13; Isaiah 8:18). Or did not the inspired Paul see fit to attach this saying, too, to the person of Christ?

Palladius: Certainly.

Cyril: He bars from serving as priest, then, anyone with any of the defects named, as infirm and open to ridicule. For it says, ‘A man who is blind or lame shall not come near to offer the gifts of God’ (Leviticus 21:17–18). Now even taken in a bodily sense, the matter plainly has much that is unseemly. For when the eyes have wasted away, and the foot is not firm and cannot walk straight, is it not better for the priest to keep still, since he cannot even tell where he ought to go, rather than to go about amid laughter, using another’s foot and another’s eyes? But we need not say much about that. Let us rather speak of what we need for knowledge and spiritual contemplation, getting beneath the coarse surface of the history. By ‘blind,’ then, he seems to mean the man who is very foolish and utterly senseless. For what the eye is to the earthly body, the mind may be called in the soul. It is lit up by the divine light, it opens its eyes to that pure beauty itself, and with the fine and nimble movements, as it were, of its thoughts it springs up readily toward exact belief, and knows how to keep from missing right doctrine. This, I think, is what is said in the Proverbs: ‘Let your eyes look straight, and let your eyelids nod toward what is just’ (Proverbs 4:25). And somewhere it is also said to the mother of the Jews, who did not see rightly: ‘See, your eyes are not good, nor is your heart; they are set on nothing but your greed, on innocent blood, to shed it, on your wrongdoings, and on murder, to commit them’ (Jeremiah 22:17). So the one who is blind in the spiritual sense is unfit for sacred service, that is, the man wholly without understanding, maimed in mind and judgment. Unfit as well is the lame man, that is, one who does not know how to walk uprightly and has no strength to walk soundly. For blindness, as I said just now, is a sign of utter lack of understanding; lameness, in turn, is a sign of a movement and eagerness that is, as it were, broken and feeble, such as a man may show toward each of the things he has to do. Unless it is right to call out to those so maimed: