Hannah Sorenson’s Reviews > God so Loved the World > Status Update

^There has only been one man in the history of the world who supremely matters to the world. This one man made man, was man, saved man, and is man to all eternity, and apart from him no other man has any manhood at all.^

^”Prophesy unto us, thou Christ, Who is he that smote thee?” He endured the blows and jeers, as he had endured the lies, in silence, but a French writer, Père Perraud, has said that if he had answered the question he would have said to them, as to each one of us when we strike him with our sins, “The one I love.”^

^It is all intensified now; the mystery, the sense of love and reverence, of holiness, of guilt; and added to it all there is a feeling of terror because this had to happen, because the only absolutely sinless man who has ever lived had to suffer more than the greatest sinner who has ever lived, because God Almighty had to die, and we—every one of us—caused his death.^

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^How could Judas have endured it when Our Lord reached so humbly for his feet and gently washed them?^

^There is so much for a man to watch who knows his death is near. The beauty of earth is not lost for those who die, for all beauty exists in God, and God is never lost, but the dying know that they will never again see it in just this way, out of these eyes, touched with this hand that will soon be dust, the warm air soft upon this body.^

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^this riding forth of Our Lord and our Gos to his death takes our thoughts back to his birth, for it is the angels’ song that we hear again in the shouts of the happy people. “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest,” they cried. “Hosanna! Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord.”^

^Long ago, in Eastern countries, when some conqueror came riding to a city bent upon war he rode a dark war horse, but if he came in peace he rode a white ass.^

^They had given their gold and frankincense and myrrh, their wealth, their prayer, their pain, to the King, to the Priest who is also Friend and Mediator, and to the Saviour, and Mary now did the same. The gold of the gift was its costliness, the aromatic scent filling the room was the incense of prayer, and spikenard, like myrrh, was used to embalm the dead^

^Worldly growth is an expanding process, a building up and a swelling out, but the paradox of spiritual growth is a refining process; we have to shad one layer of useless and grubby accretion after another until there is nothing left at all but the golden kernel of a child’s humble, loving, and contrite heart.^

^Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to the kingdom of heaven. The path is narrow as the needle’s eye, the kind of little path that children love, the gate small and easy for them to unlatch, the lintel above it adjusted to the height of a child.^