Chapter 51 concludes:
In this marvellous example I have teaching like a beginner’s ABC,
So I might have some understanding of our Lord’s meaning.
For the secret things of the Revelation are hid therein;
Even though all the Showings are full of secret things.
The sitting of the Father shows His Godhead:
by showing rest and peace:
for in the Godhead there is no travail.
That He showed Himself as Lord,
is a sign of our humanity.
The standing of the Servant shows travail.
On one side, to the left:
showing he was not worthy
to stand at God’s right hand.
His starting was the Godhead,
His running was the Manhood.
The Godhead started from the Father
into the Maiden’s womb,
falling, taking our kindred.
And in this falling he took great sore:
the soreness He took was our flesh,
in which He felt severe, deadly pains.
He stood full of dread before the Lord, not truly right,
in that His clothing was not seemly
and it might not, nor should not, be His office,
as he was a labourer;
nor might He sit in rest and peace with the Lord
till He had won His peace rightfully with His hard work.
That He stood by the left side
was a sign that the Father left His own Son,
willingly, in Man’s flesh, to suffer all man’s pains,
without sparing Him.
By his tunic being at this point, ragged and rent,
is understood the blows, the scourgings,
the thorns, the nails,
the drawing, the dragging,
His tender flesh rending.
(As I saw in part before,
how the flesh was rent from the skull,
falling in pieces
until the time the bleeding ceased,
when it began to dry again,
cleaving to the bone.)
By the struggling, writhing, groaning and moaning,
is understood that He could not rise almightily
from the time He was fallen into the Maiden’s womb,
till his body was slain and dead,
yielding His soul into the Father’s hands
with all Mankind for whom He was sent.
Then he began first to show His might:
He went into Hell,
and when He raised up the great crowd
out of the deep deepness
which was rightfully knit to Him in high Heaven.
The body was in the grave till Easter-morning.
From that time He lay no more.
For then the struggling, writhing,
groaning and moaning
was rightly ended.
Our foul deadly flesh that God’s Son took on Himself,
Adam’s old tunic,
strait, threadbare, and short,
was then by our Saviour made fair,
new white, bright and of endless cleanness;
wide and long, fairer and richer
than that clothing I saw on the Father.
That clothing was blue,
but Christ’s clothing now is coloured,
a fair seemly medly,
so marvellous that I cannot describe it:
for it is of all true worships.
the Son no longer sits on earth in wilderness,
but in His noblest Seat,
which He made in Heaven to His delight.
He no longer stands before the Father as a Servant
dreadingly, meanly clad, part naked;
but He stands before the Father in equal-right,
richly clad in blissful greatness,
with a Crown of precious riches on His head.
For it was shown that we are His Crown,
the joy of the Father,
the worship of the Son,
the satisfying of the Holy Ghost,
and endless marvellous Bliss to all in Heaven.
The Son no longer stands before the Father
on the left, as a labourer,
but He sits at His Father’s right hand,
in endless rest and peace.
(But not on the right hand, side by side,
as one man sits by another in this life,
for there is no such sitting, as to my sight, in the Trinity,
but He sits on His Father’s right hand
in the highest nobleness of the Father’s joys.)
Now the Spouse, God’s Son,
is in peace with His beloved Wife,
the Fair Maiden of endless joy.
Now the Son sits,
very God and Man,
in His City in rest and peace:
which His Father has ordered and arrayed for Him
as His endless purpose;
and the Father in the Son;
and the Holy Ghost in the Father
and in the Son.
LII Fifty-second chapter.
God enjoyeth that He is our fadir, mother, and spouse, and how the chosen have here
a medlur of wele and wo, but God is with us in three manner; and how we may eschew synne but never it perfectly as in heaven.
And thus I saw that God
delights to be our father,
our mother, our true spouse;
our soul, His beloved wife.
And Christ delights as our brother,
and Jesus, to be our Savior.
There are these five high joys,
in Him for our delight,
praising, thanking, loving Him,
and endlesly blessing Him.
In all that shall be saved,
through all this earthly life,
is found a wondrous medley
a song of weal and woe.
Be Christ we are steadfastly kept,
by the touch of His grace we are raised
to the secure trust of salvation.
By Adam’s fall we are so broken
in our feeling in so many ways,
by sins and sundry pains,
in which we are made so dark and blind
we can scarcely take comfort.
But we await God,
faithfully trusting His mercy and grace.
And this is His working and goodness in us:
He opens the eye of our understanding,
by which we have sight,
sometimes more,
sometimes less,
as He gives ability to see.
we hate and despise our evil stirrings
and all that might occasion sin,
ghostly and bodily.
Nevertheless when this sweetness is hidden,
we fall again into blindness,
into woe and tribulation
in many ways.
This then is our comfort,
that we know in our faith,
that by the virtue of Christ, our keeper
we never assent therto,
but we groan against it
enduring pain and woe,
praying for that time He shows Himself again to us.
And thus we stand in this mingled medley
all the days of our life.
‘great crowd‘: the words Julian used were gret rote which others have translated as ‘great Root’, but it is Middle English, from Anglo-French, of Germanic origin; related to Old High German ‘hruozza’ meaning crowd. Its first known use was in the 14th century, Julian’s own period. Here it refers to the crowd of captives won by Christ from hell.Back
anthonyinuk 