Furthermore, this Paul said strongly that the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking—or abstinence from wine or meat—but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.^[1] Which of them goes around like Elijah wearing a sheepskin and a leather belt?^[2] Which of them wears no shoes and nothing but a piece of sackcloth like Isaiah?^[3] Or with nothing on but a linen loincloth, like Jeremiah?

The blessed John disdained sheep’s wool because it savored of luxury; he preferred camel’s hair and clothed himself in it, giving us an example of simple, frugal living. Incidentally, he also ate only honey and locusts, food that is sweet and with a spiritual significance. So it was that he prepared the way of the Lord and kept it humble and chaste.^[1] He fled from the false pretenses of the city and led a peaceful life in the desert with God, away from all vanity, boasting and servitude. How could he possibly have worn a purple mantle? Elijah used a sheepskin for his garment and girded it tight with a belt made of leather.^[2] Isaiah, another historic prophet, went naked and without sandals^[3] and often put on sackcloth as a garment of humility. If you protest and make mention of Jeremiah, he wore only a loincloth made of linen.

Yet such is the order of nature. While truth is always bitter, pleasantness waits upon evildoing. Isaiah goes naked without blushing, as a type of the captivity to come.^[1] Jeremiah is sent from Jerusalem to the Euphrates (a river in Mesopotamia) and leaves his girdle to be marred in the Chaldaean camp, among the Assyrians hostile to his people. Ezekiel is told to eat bread made of mingled seeds and baked over the dung of people and cattle.^[2] He is commanded to experience the death of his wife without shedding a tear.^[3] Amos is driven from Samaria.^[4] Why is he driven from it? Surely in this case, as in the others, because he was a spiritual surgeon who cut away the parts diseased by sin and urged people to repentance. The apostle Paul says, Am I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth?^[5] And so the Savior found it, from whom many of the disciples turned back from following him because his sayings seemed hard.^[6]

We are the robe of Christ. When we have clothed him with our confession of faith, we, in turn, have put on Christ. It is the apostle who says that Christ is our robe, for when we are baptized, we put on Christ.^[1] We both clothe and are clothed. Would you like to know in what manner we clothe the Lord? We read in Jeremiah: Go buy yourself a linen loincloth. Wear it on your loins, and go to the Euphrates. There hide it in a cleft of the rock. Obedient to the Lord’s command, I went to the Euphrates and buried the loincloth. After a long interval, again I went to the Euphrates, and the loincloth was rotted, good for nothing. Then the message came to me from the Lord: ‘Listen very carefully. As close as the loincloth clings to your loins, so had I made this people cling to me,’ says the Lord. Why have I drawn this out to such length? To prove to you that the faithful are the garment of Christ.

The linen waistcloth clings about his hips. Why? In order to make clear that the people are like a shelter of God. For against those who wish to accuse God, the people of God are placed, and they cover him like a shield and do not allow something wrong to be said in what concerns God. But whenever we sin, just as the prophet puts aside this loincloth and condemns it to the Euphrates River in order that it may perish there, so the sinner is thrown from the hips of God. And once banished, he is banished to the Euphrates River, the river of Mesopotamia, where there are Assyrians, enemies to Israel, where there are Babylonians, and there he is ruined.

The girdle, or loincloth, which is attached to the loins of God, is the people of Israel, who, like this piece of linen, were assumed from the earth unwashed and having no softness or beauty, yet were nevertheless joined to God through his mercy. When Israel sinned (which is why it was represented as a loincloth), it was led across the Euphrates and Assyria and there hidden, that is, absorbed, in a manner of speaking, into the crowd of larger and innumerable peoples and from captivity. Despite this, they did not observe the precepts of God after they were restored but went after other gods in the extreme, even raising their hand against the Son of God, and then they wasted away in everlasting perdition. God’s loincloth is also every holy person who is assumed from the earth,^[1] even from the dust of the earth, and united to God as a companion, who, in a certain way, surrounds and covers with greater diligence the things that appear in God’s church to be indecent, lest they become vulnerable to the stings of the pagans and heretics. Yet, as the loincloth was affected by the water of the Euphrates and was assimilated to the river’s flow, so also Israel was imbued with the atmosphere of the Assyrian region, which destroyed its original strength and corrupted and dissolved it. Even though Israel returned to God’s service, it was never able to regain its pristine beauty, though this was not due to any severity of God’s part, but only to the Israelites’ own wickedness, for they would not hear his word but did whatever seemed good to themselves and walked in the depravity of their own hearts. But this is also why the divine word itself made the following analogy, saying, As the loincloth clings to the loins of a man, so I have fastened and joined all the house of Israel and the whole people of Judah [obviously the ten tribes and the two] to myself, that they may be a people for my name and my praise and my glory, but none of them would listen to me, following instead their own vices. Therefore, let the one who is able to say it is good for me to cling to God,^[2] be careful lest, through negligence, he is separated from the loins of God and passes into the Euphrates and is given over to the power of the king of Assyria and becomes situated not on the most solid rock but in the cleft of that corrupt and decaying rock, which is the sordid life and the wickedness of heretics, and there encounters so grave a deterioration that he would be no longer able to return to the service and the loincloth of the Lord.

The reversed order, however, furnishes a clue for our exegesis. The Lord is king, in splendor robed.^[1] The Lord is king, and he is robed in the splendor of patriarchs and prophets and a people that believes. He is robed in splendor. The patriarchs and prophets have been as the garment of Christ. They are the loincloth mentioned in Jeremiah—the girdle that he wore about his loins. Do you know that the saints are like a girdle and the vestment of God? God says to Jeremiah, As close as the loincloth clings to a man’s loins, so had I made my people cling to me.^[2] God’s people are as close to him as person’s clothing is to his body.

And these things he said, setting laws and rules for his own disciples, that when they should have to receive as disciples those of all sorts that should come from the whole world, they might deal with them very gently. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins.^[1] Consider how his illustrations are like those in the Old Testament. The garment? The wineskins? For Jeremiah, too, calls the people a waistcloth and makes mention again of jar and of wine. Thus, the discourse being about gluttony and a table, he takes his illustrations from the same.

Understand these skins in terms of evil and virtue in order to envision how every skin is filled with wine. But if it is necessary to see the effects of evil and of virtue—punishments due to the evil, blessings and promises due to virtue—let us set down from the sacred Scriptures how the punishments and the promises are discussed as wine: Take the cup of this undiluted wine, and give to all of the nations to which I have sent you to drink—he says this to Jeremiah, and he adds to it—and they will drink and vomit and go mad and fall. Hence he has called the punishments here undiluted wine, which those deserving of undiluted wine drink, that is, an undiluted punishment. But there are others who drink a punishment that is not undiluted but that has been diluted. For in the hand of the Lord is a cup filled with a mixture of undiluted wine, and he poured it from this into this. Though its lees were not emptied out, all of the sinners of the earth drink. If you also wish to know the cup of blessing that the righteous drink, the text from Wisdom then also suffices, in which it says, Drink the wine that I diluted for you. But see with me the Savior on the Passover who goes up into a large upper room furnished and ornamented and who feasts with the disciples and gives to them a cup, about which it is not written that he diluted. For Jesus, who cheers up the disciples with undiluted wine, cheers them up and says to them, Take, drink, this is my blood, which is poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins. Do this as often as you drink in memory of me, and, Truly I say to you, I shall not drink again of this until that day when I drink it new with you in the kingdom of God. You see the promise that is the cup of the new covenant. You see the punishments as the cup of the undiluted wine, and another form of punishment as the cup that has been diluted so that in each person what he drinks is diluted according to the amount the worthwhile action mingles with the futile action. Notice that those who are strangers in every way to the worship of God and who do not commit themselves but live as it happens drink the undiluted wine—to which we apply the text from Jeremiah—while those who are not in every way apostates and sinners but are still unworthy of the cup of the new covenant, these people sometimes do better, sometimes the opposite acts, and drink wine of an undiluted mixture.

And showing the unchangeable nature of his wrath, God introduced these words: I will not yearn after them, and I will not spare them, and I will not have pity on them because of their destruction, rather than [I will not have pity on] their destruction. Then he calls their punishment drunkenness since those who fall into great misfortunes resemble those who are intoxicated inasmuch as they are not able even to mourn because they are suffering so much.

Also, he showed so much love in his religion that, leaving behind a queen’s court, he came from the farthest regions of the world to the Lord’s temple. Hence, as a just reward, while he sought the interpretation of something that he was reading, he found Christ, whom he was seeking.^[1] Furthermore, as Jerome says, he found the church’s font there in the desert, rather than in the golden temple of the synagogue.^[2] For there in the desert something happened that Jeremiah declared was to be wondered at, an Ethiopian changed his skin, that is, with the stain of his sins washed away by the waters of baptism, he went up, shining white,^[3] to Jesus.

By the reading of the prophet the eunuch of Candace, the queen of Ethiopia, is made ready for the baptism of Christ.^[1] Though it is against nature, the Ethiopian does change his skin, and the leopard his spots.

Then immediately quickening her pace, she began to move along the old road that leads to Gaza, that is, to the power or wealth of God, silently meditating on that type of the Gentiles, the Ethiopian eunuch, who, in spite of the prophet, changed his skin and, while he read the Old Testament, found the fountain of the gospel.^[1]

For as the prophet speaks, If the Ethiopian changes his skin, or the leopard his spots, then will they be willing to think religiously who have been instructed in irreligion. You, however, beloved, on receiving this, read it by yourself. If you approve of it, read it also to the brethren who happen to be present, that they, too, on hearing it, may welcome the council’s zeal for the truth and the exactness of its sense and may condemn that of Christ’s foes, the Arians, and the futile pretenses, which for the sake of their irreligious heresy they have been at the pains to frame among themselves.

Moreover, what did the prophet say? If the Ethiopian changes his skin and the leopard its spots, this people will be able to do well, when it has learned evil. He did not mean that it was impossible for them to practice virtue, but that they did not wish to do so; therefore, they could not.

But if even real virgins, when they have other failings, are not saved by their physical virginity, what shall become of those who have prostituted the members of Christ and have changed the temple of the Holy Spirit into a brothel? Immediately they should hear the words, Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground—there is no throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans. You shall no more be called tender and delicate. Take the millstone and grind meal. Uncover your locks, make bare your legs, pass over the rivers. Your nakedness shall be uncovered. Yes, your shame shall be seen.^[1] Shall she come to this after the bridal chamber of God the Son, after the kisses of him who is to her both kinsman and spouse?^[2] Yes, she of whom the prophetic utterance once sang, At your right hand stands the queen in gold of Ophir,^[3] shall be made naked, and her skirts shall be discovered on her face.

After committing many transgressions, he says, you were not prepared to have recourse to repentance. I shall no longer demonstrate longsuffering. Instead, I will inflict punishment. It is better, therefore, to live according to the divine laws. But since we who are human will most likely fall at some point, we ought to have recourse to the remedies of repentance, and through them placate the judge and escape the experience of the punishments he threatens. May we for our part continue to not experience them, thanks to the grace and lovingkindness of our Lord Jesus Christ.