The Fragrance of Christ and the New Covenant

They make our Lord Jesus Christ a sweet fragrance to God the Father. First, they have Him dwelling and abiding in them through the Spirit. Then, as they proclaimed to people everywhere and carried about the message concerning Him, they offered to God their zeal in this work like one of the most fragrant incenses. And in a third way, having been conformed to Him, they have been made perfect through like sufferings.

But they say that they themselves are the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing: to the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life (2 Corinthians 2:15–16). It follows that we should look into this.

Those being saved and those perishing, then, may fittingly be understood by us, at least according to the aim proper to spiritual contemplation, as those who believe and those who thrust the faith away. Some have not yet known Him who is God by nature and in truth, but have worshiped the creation rather than the Creator (Romans 1:25). These do not accept the message of the divine preaching; they laugh it to scorn instead and think the mystery of Christ foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:23), and so they receive “the fragrance of the knowledge” of the Father (2 Corinthians 2:14) from death to death. For since they are in death through the ignorance and hardness within them, they would all but stumble into a second death as well and be caught by it (Revelation 20:14).

But those who have been brought through the training of the law to the beginnings of the knowledge of God are in a certain sense in life; yet if they should believe, they will receive the fragrance of the knowledge of the Father from life to life. For Christ says somewhere to His Father and God in the heavens, “And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3).

“And who,” he says, “is sufficient for these things?” (2 Corinthians 2:16). And with good reason. For truly hard to find is the one who has the power to speak the mystery of Christ rightly and without error, as the inspired disciples did, who also set right the perversities of those who think otherwise. It is the custom of these people, and they have spent the greatest zeal on it, to peddle, as it were, the word of God (2 Corinthians 2:17), and they love always to make their account of the faith a mixture of deceit and falsehood; for among them one cannot find the truth unmixed and unadulterated. But the divine teachers of the mysteries, speaking in the Spirit, do and say all things as from sincerity, in the sight of God (2 Corinthians 2:17).

“You are our letter, written on our hearts” (2 Corinthians 3:2).

We need no testimony in words. For you, who have been shown to be disciples and believers of Christ and are approved by the deeds themselves, crown us your teachers and have shown us to be approved. Therefore “you are our letter, written on our hearts” (2 Corinthians 3:2), that is, kept always and at every moment in the memory that lies within us; for we always take pride in you, he says.

“Not on tablets of stone, but on fleshly tablets of the heart” (2 Corinthians 3:3).

He seals the words “Not on tablets of stone, but on fleshly tablets of the heart” with the testimony of the prophet as well. For God said somewhere, he says, through the voice of the prophet, “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; because they did not continue in My covenant, and I disregarded them, says the Lord. Putting My laws into their mind, I will also write them on their hearts; for this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord” (Jeremiah 31:31–33).

For of old the inspired Moses received the law, our tutor (Galatians 3:24), on tablets of stone, as it is written (Exodus 31:18). And we say that this became a figure of the hardness of heart of the Jews. For it shows rather that the law could not, so to speak, be received into their minds, and that it had settled into them as into stones, only a little and with difficulty, yet …