Someone else might say, perhaps, that it would have been better for the Lord to have avoided the designs of the Jews against Him, and so to have guarded His body from death altogether. But see how unfitting this also would have been for Him. Just as it would not have been fitting for Him to give His body to death by His own hand, being Word and being Life, so also it was not consonant with Himself that He should avoid the death inflicted by others. Rather, He pursued it to the uttermost, and in pursuance of His nature neither laid aside His body of His own accord nor escaped the plotting Jews.
This did not show weakness in the Word. Rather, it revealed Him as Savior and Life, because He awaited death in order to destroy it and hastened to complete the death offered to Him for the salvation of all.
Moreover, as it was the death of all humanity that the Savior came to accomplish, not His own, He did not lay aside His body by an individual act of dying, for to Him, as Life, this simply did not belong; but He accepted death at the hands of men, by this completely to destroy it in His own body.
There are some further considerations which enable one to understand why the Lord's body had such an end. The supreme object of His coming was to bring about the resurrection of the body. This was to be the monument to His victory over death, the assurance to all that He had Himself conquered corruption and that their own bodies also would eventually be incorrupt; and it was in token of that and as a pledge of the future resurrection that He kept His 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 weaknesses of others if His own temple was sick while united to Him? Either He would have been mocked as unable to drive away disease, or, if He was able but did not do so, He would have been thought lacking in love for humanity toward others as well.