Patristic Wisdom: Looking to Holy Trinity Sunday

Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a Man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs which God did through Him in your midst, as you yourselves also know—Him, being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death; whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it. For David says concerning Him:

I foresaw the Lord always before my face,
For He is at my right hand, that I may not be shaken.
Therefore my heart rejoiced, and my tongue was glad;
Moreover my flesh also will rest in hope.
For You will not leave my soul in Hades,
Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption.
You have made known to me the ways of life;
You will make me full of joy in Your presence.

Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption. This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses. Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He poured out this which you now see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he says himself:

‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at My right hand,
Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.

Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ. (Acts 2:22–36)

Who then was exalted? The lowly or the most high? And what is the lowly if it be not the human? And what is the most high save the divine? But God being most high needs no exaltation, and so the apostle says that the human is exalted, exalted that is in being “made both Lord and Christ.” Therefore the apostle does not mean by this term “he made” the everlasting existence of the Lord but the change of the lowly to the exalted that took place on the right hand of God. By this word he declares the mystery of religion, for when he says “by the right hand of God exalted” he plainly reveals the ineffable economy of the mystery that the right hand of God, which created all things, which is the Lord by whom all things were made and without whom nothing consists of things that were made, through the union lifted up to its own exaltation the manhood united to it.

Theodoret of Cyrus, Dialogue 2

We, learning this from him, say that the whole context of the passage tends one way—the cross itself, the human name, the indicative turn of the phrase. For the word of the Scripture says that in regard to one person two things were wrought—by the Jews, the passion, and by God, honor. It is not as though one person had suffered and another had been honored by exaltation. He further explains this yet more clearly by his words in what follows, “being exalted by the right hand of God.” Who then was “exalted”? He that was lowly, or he that was the highest? and what else is the lowly but the humanity? what else is the highest but the divinity? Surely, God needs not to be exalted, seeing that he is the highest. It follows, then, that the apostle's meaning is that the humanity was exalted: and its exaltation was effected by its becoming Lord and Christ. And this took place after the passion. It is not therefore the pretemporal existence of the Lord that the apostle indicates by the word made but that change of the lowly to the lofty that was effected “by the right hand of God.”

Gregory of Nyssa: Against Eunomius 5.3