On
the Eleventh Day of Christmas:
What does the Church think of Christ? The
Church’s answer is categorical and uncompromising, and it is this: That Jesus
Bar-Joseph, the carpenter from Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the
most exact and literal sense of the words, the God “by whom all things were
made.” His body and brain were those of a common man; his personality was the
personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human
terms. He was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; he was in every
respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be “like
God”—he was God.
Now, this is not just a pious commonplace: it is
not a commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that
for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and
subject to sorrows and death—he [God] had the honesty and courage to take his
own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his
own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not
exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human
experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping
restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation,
defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born
in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.
– Dorothy
Sayers, ‘The Greatest Drama Ever Staged’
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