A higher call

It could have been otherwise. Had he chosen his own will in the garden, had he on the cross denied God, then he would have turned out not to be the one he claimed to be.  Because his will was perfectly responsive to the will of the Father, he turned out to be the one he claimed to be.  And because he turned out to be who he claimed to be, it turns out that it could not have been otherwise.  He really is the Word of God incarnate, which means one of us.  It follows that the story of Jesus is not about the exploits of a Superman whom we call true God and true man; it is the story about us.  This human stuff of which we are made is capable of living in perfect responsiveness to God.  We know that because it was done in the life, death, and resurrection of a human being named Jesus, and we are his brothers and sisters. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus - Death on a Friday Afternoon


Of course, Fr. Neuhaus is now talking utter nonsense.  He's talking as if we no longer have any excuse for our continued failure to live the holy lives to which this Jesus calls us and into which he delivers us.  "I'm only human!" we protest, believing that in his divinity this is one argument that Christ could never make.  We keep trying to mix his humanity and his divinity all together, and the latter becomes our alibi for not living our own humanity anywhere near as well as he did.

It is as if we keep seeing Christ as a standard we must live up to by our own efforts, and as if we do not really believe ourselves to be inhabited by the very Spirit of God.

And the people I know that are most Christlike in their humanity are the first to protest how unlike him they are.  The nearer we allow God to draw us, the more clearly we see how far we have to go.  And yet our lives become less strained as we more fully we understand that the perfection that God seems to ask of us is a gift he longs for us to receive, a work he wants to complete in us, as opposed to a demand he is imposing on us.