Dorothy Sayers on the Jesus who became a man, and took his own medicine
It's a disquieting story
Best known for her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries and her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dorothy L. Sayers was also a lay theologian of weight in the Church of England. Among her theological work was The Mind of the Maker. Her insight into the nature of the Incarnation appears in her essay “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged” published in the book of the same title and later with other essays in Creed or Chaos?.
What think ye of Christ? Before we adopt any of the unofficial solutions (some of which are indeed excessively dull) — before we dismiss Christ as a myth, an idealist, a demagogue, a liar or a lunatic — it will do no harm to find out what the creeds really say about Him. 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 of 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 dæmon or fairy 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 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 had the honesty and the 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 worth while. . . .
Possibly we might prefer not to take this tale too seriously — there are disquieting points about it. Here we had a man of Divine character walking and talking among us — and what did we find to do with Him? The common people, indeed, “heard Him gladly”; but our leading authorities in Church and State considered that He talked too much and uttered too many disconcerting truths.
So we bribed one of His friends to hand Him over quietly to the police, and we tried Him on a rather vague charge of creating a disturbance, and had Him publicly flogged and hanged on the common gallows, “thanking God we were rid of a knave.” All this was not very creditable to us, even if He was (as many people thought and think) only a harmless crazy preacher. But if the Church is right about Him, it was more discreditable still ; for the man we hanged was God Almighty.
So that is the outline of the official story — the tale of the time when God was the under-dog and got beaten, when He submitted to the conditions He had laid down and became a man like the men He had made, and the men He had made broke Him and killed Him.
Previous: Charles Dickens on Cain’s question.