st. john of damascus (676-749 - Cristo Raul

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112 ST. JOHN OF DAMASCUS.
Lord ordain thee to set in order. Thy disciples, thy
sheep, which the good chief pastor placed in thy
charge, have brought thy words to their fulfilment,
by erecting for Christ, and for his ministers Moses
and Elias, the tabernacle wherein we now keep the
feast
(c. xvi).
The cloud entered by the three was the antitype of
that cloud and darkness which Moses entered at the
giving of the law. For the law, as St. Paul writes,
has a shadow of good things to come. Only on that
former occasion the cloud was one of darkness ;
now
it is a cloud of light.
For the mystery hid from past
generations was now revealed that mystery which
the law and the prophets had alike foretold. Hence
the fitness of Moses and Elias being now present, one
the representative of the law, the other of the prophets;
one moreover representing the quick, and the other
the dead (c. xvii). That voice from the cloud which
proclaimed, This is My beloved Son, was the voice of
Him who at the first saw all that He had made and
pronounced it very good. The good pleasure of the
Father welded together in His only-begotten Son the
connecting link of all. For if man is indeed the
microcosm, bearing in himself the link which couples
the visible universe with the invisible, being in fact
both the one and the other; rightly was it well-pleasing
to the Lord and Creator and Governor of all things,
that in His only-begotten and consubstantial Son
there should be made a connecting link of Godhead
and manhood, and, through that, of the whole
that God might be all in all
creation ;
(c. xvii).
In his exposition of the words Hear ye Jfim,