St. Cyril and the Suffering of God

Since late last year I’ve been reading and thinking about a whole lot of Christological things.  Fascinating stuff which simply leads me to wonder and praise!  I think I might blog a little through some thing soon, but here’s an absolutely brilliant quote from Fr. Thomas Weinandy on Cyril’s understanding of the suffering of God:

“For Cyril this is the marvellous truth of the Incarnation.  God from all eternity may have known, within his divine knowledge, what it is like for human beings to suffer and die, and he may have known this perfectly and comprehensively.  But until the Son of God became man and existed as man, the Son of God, who is impassible in himself as God, never experienced and knew suffering and death as man in a human manner.  In an unqualified manner one can say that, as man, the Son of God had experiences he never had before because he never existed as man before – not the least of which are suffering and death.  This is what, for Cyril a proper understanding of the Incarnation requires and affirms, and this is what the communication of the idioms so remarkably, clearly, and even scandalously safeguards, advocates, and confesses.

The eternal, almighty, all-perfect, unchangeable, and impassible divine Son, he who is equal to the Father all in ways, actually experienced, as a weak human being, the full reality of human suffering and death.  What was an infamy to the Docestists, to Arius, and to Nestorius was for Cyril and the subsequent Christian tradition the glory and grandeur of the Gospel.  Even among those today who advocate a suffering God, the Incarnation is still a scandal, for while, with the best of intentions, having locked suffering within God’s divine nature, they have, in so doing, locked God out of human suffering.” (pg52-53, The Theology of St. Cyril of Alexandria: A Critical Appreciation)