If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.
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Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
If therefore the Song of Solomon , &c. I alone can make you free, not Abraham or Moses, though most beloved servants of God. So S. Chrysostom and others.
To Him Alone (He says) Who is by Nature Son of a Truth free and remote from all bondage is found to pertain the power of freeing and to none other whatever save He. For as He because He is by Nature Wisdom and Light and Power, makes wise the things recipient of wisdom, enlightens those that lack light and strengthens those that want strength; so because He is God of God, and the Genuine and Free Fruit of the Essence That reigns over all, He bestows freedom on whomsoever He will. For no one can become truly free at his hands who has it not of nature. But when the Son Himself wills to free any, infusing His own Good, they are called free indeed, receiving the Dignity from Him who hath the Authority and not from any of those who have been lent it from Another and been ennobled with so to say foreign graces.
Most needful therefore is the preceding explanation, and great the profit which arises from that distinction to those who are zealous to hear it more diligently. For it was right to...
Man never was without free-will; but, having the grace of Christ, his will is truly made free from the servitude of sin. (St. Augustine, tract. 41. in Joan.)
But again, those who assert that He was simply a mere man, begotten by Joseph, remaining in the bondage of the old disobedience, are in a state of death having been not as yet joined to the Word of God the Father, nor receiving liberty through the Son, as He does Himself declare: "If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."
Do you see the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and how He declares that He has the same power as the Father? If the Son make you free, no man afterwards gain-says, but you have firm freedom. For it is God that justifies, who is He that condemns? Romans 8:33-34 Here He shows that He Himself is pure from sin, and alludes to that freedom which reached only to a name; this even men give, but that God alone. And so he persuaded them not to be ashamed at this slavery, but at that of sin. And desiring to show that they were not slaves, except by repudiating that liberty, He the more shows them to be slaves by saying,
You shall be free indeed.
This is the expression of one declaring that this freedom was not real. Then, that they might not say, We have no sin, (for it was probable that they would say so,) observe how He brings them beneath this imputation. For omitting to convict all their life, He brings forward that which they had in hand, which they yet desired to do, and s...
