Someone might say that He should have avoided the Jews’ plot so that He could keep His body entirely free from death. But such a person should understand that this too would have been unfitting for the Lord. Just as it was not fitting for the Word of God, who is Life, to put His own body to death, neither was it fitting for Him to flee from death when others sought to inflict it. Rather, it was fitting for Him to pursue death in order to destroy it. Therefore He neither laid aside His body of His own accord nor fled when the Jews plotted against Him.
This did not show weakness in the Word. Rather, it revealed Him as Savior and Life, because He waited for death in order to destroy it and hastened to die the death imposed on Him for the salvation of all.
Moreover, the Savior came to fulfill the death belonging to humanity, not a death of His own. Therefore He did not lay aside His body through a death of His own—for, as Life, He had no death of His own—but accepted the death inflicted by human beings, so that when it came upon His own body He might completely destroy it.
Further considerations also show why the Lord’s body met such an end. The Lord was especially concerned with the resurrection of the body that He was going to accomplish. For this was His monument of victory over death: to display the Resurrection to everyone and to assure everyone that He had wiped away corruption and that their bodies would from then on be incorruptible. As a pledge of this incorruption and a sign of the resurrection that will come to all, He has preserved His own body incorrupt.
Again, if His body had become sick and the Word had been separated from it in the sight of everyone, it would have been unfitting for Him who healed the diseases of others to allow His own instrument to waste away in sickness. How could people have believed that He drove away the illnesses of others if His own temple was sick while He was in it? Either He would have been mocked as unable to drive away disease, or, if He was able but did not do so, people would have thought that He had no love for others either.