Spiritual sabbatism in Christ; Hebrews rest; wood-gatherer type

of sin, unto freedom and forgiveness, unto incorruption and unto life, and unto the coming hope. And in many manners the faith of the sacred Letters also riddles for us the sabbatism understood in Christ, sometimes under-drawing the cessation in himself—the one as from sins—and defining the most bitter and harsh justice of the transgressor, and sometimes again typically showing the ransoming and forgiveness in him unto freedom, and indeed also the preparation unto the coming age.

Palladius: Say then how. For I would know as most sweetly.

Cyril: Through faith, O Palladius, understood spiritually in Christ we sabbatize, ceasing from the distractions in this world, and resting from empty carrying-around, and standing off from baseness, and stripping out of the yoke of the sin, we are let go hereafter unto free holiness. And at any rate the divine Paul says concerning those not yet having believed: ‘And with whom was he vexed forty years? Was it not with those having disobeyed, whose limbs fell in the desert? And to whom did he swear not to enter into his rest, if not to those having disobeyed? And we see that they were not able to enter because of disobedience. Let us fear then lest ever, a promise of entering into his rest being left, someone from you should seem to have come short.’ And after other things: ‘Therefore a sabbatism is left for the people of God.’ And yet how is it not true that if the sabbatism is only to be idle on Sabbath, how did Israel not enter into the rest, although having kept the idleness on Sabbath? But the matter was unto a type of the rest in Christ, and of the ceasing from sin of the one being justified by the faith. Therefore God commanded that the one collecting woods on Sabbath must have died stone-struck; and the justice upon that one was an under-type of an intelligible and necessary matter. Or is not the wood having already been withered from its own root, having been thoroughly cleaned and dried, a symbol of deadness? And would it also otherwise be nurture of fire?

Palladius: Truly.

Cyril: Some such thing is the all-toiling sin, as it were some deadness, and an unholy nurturer of the untamed flame for those loving it. Whenever then as in a season of cessation—I mean the one from sins—some should hold dead and fruitless works, and should choose to love, having let go virtue, the things through which penalties and flames would be kindled for them unto an age, they will reasonably undergo the condemnation upon death, because although it is possible not to live loosely, they willingly go through unto needing to be punished. Therefore we who have believed enter into the rest, according at least to the voice of blessed Paul. And at any rate through Jeremiah’s voice God accuses those signifying beside the beauty of the truth through sin unto the type, saying: