Then I said, I am cast out of your sight; yet I will look again toward your holy temple.
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Jerome
AD 420
LXX: 'all your whirlwinds and your waves passed over me'. No one can doubt that the swelling waves of the sea encompassed Jonah, that there was fierce thunder in the storm. But we ask how all the whirlwinds, billows and the waves of God encompassed the Saviour. "The life of men on earth is temptation", or as there is in the Hebrew, "a military service", for we serve here to be crowned elsewhere. There is no man who can sustain all the temptations, except him who has been tempted by all, in our image, except sin. This is why it is said in Corinthians, "no temptation will take you, I hope, unless it is human. God is faithful, he will not let you try beyond your ability, but he will produce an exit that you may hold on to." And like all persecutions and all wicked things that happen to us they do not happen without the will of God, we speak of whirlwinds and waves of God, which have not crushed Jesus, but have come down upon him with a simple threat of shipwreck which does not happen. Thu...
LXX: 'you cast me into the deep of the heart from the sea, and the waves surrounded me'. The interpretation of the person of Jonah is not difficult: from the moment when he was closed in the stomach of the whale and found himself at the deepest and middle of the sea, he was surrounded by waves. For the Lord, the Saviour, prefiguring psalm 68 in which he says, "I am enshrouded in the deep mud where there is no ground. I have come to the deepest part of the sea and the storm engulfs me". It is said of him in another psalm: "but you, you have rejected, despised and disquieted your Christ; you have cursed the covenant of your master, you have dishonoured his sacred place on earth, you have destroyed all its walls", and so on. For in this comparison of divine blessing and that place about which is written, "his home is in sacred peace", all habitation on earth is full of waves, full of storms. And the "heart of the sea" means hell, for which we read in the Gospel, "in the heart of the earth...
