Mastery

God so mastered Himself that He was able to achieve dominance even over His Human Nature to accept His Humanity with perfectly.  Knowing full-well that He had the power to assume His Divinity at any moment.

Christ in the Tomb (Holbein)

Christ is Perfect God and Perfect Man.

I have always known this.  It is something that good little Catholic children are taught when they were taught their Catechism in the olden days, when I was a little girl.

And though I have repeated the words and thought bout this a bit, I have not really ever tried to understand why this is.

After all, could it not be possible for God in all His Divinity to suffer for our sins?  What does it really mean that Christ became a Man – albeit a perfect one – when He was conceived of the Virgin?  How does that change the moral of the story?  How does that affect the outcome or the merit of the Sacrifice He made?

Well, the first thing to note is that Christ as Man is a sacrifice in humility.  It would be like having the most advantages in the world and choosing – deliberately – to forgo them.  And when Christ decided to forgo all the advantages of His Divinity by assuming His Mortal nature, He did not do this for Himself.  No.  He did this for us.  He did it for me – and He did it for you too.  There is literally nothing at all that Christ could gain from making this sacrifice.  The only gain is for me…

When Christ reminds us to lay down our life for our friend, He is leading by example – not by the physical death of His Human Body, but even more – the “Death” for a time of His Divine Life.  The sacrifice of stopping the benefits of His Divinity and replacing those benefits with all the possible disadvantages of His Humanity…

Basil Maturin writes in “Christian Self-Mastery” at page 97, “I think most people have felt this. Looking forward to the temptation they anticipate, they know that they can resist, or, at any rate, that they can avoid it; and looking back after the sin has been committed, they are filled with shame and remorse and self-condemnation. But at the moment it seemed as if all the succors of their nature fell back and they were swept away in the strong currents of blinding passion. And this is undoubtedly true. Who would be so rash as to assert that at any moment every man is free without impediment to choose as he wills? That the action of the will is unhampered by the past? That however often a man has yielded to a sin, at any moment the will is absolutely free from the power of that sin?”

And I have been reflecting on that.  For it seems that my God so mastered Himself that He was able to achieve dominance even over His Human Nature to accept His Humanity with perfectly.  Knowing full-well that He had the power to assume His Divinity at any moment.

And when I think of the Mastery involved in that I shudder to think of the power of my God…

For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.