I read long ago in St. Anselm that Christ could have redeemed us by spilling a single drop of His precious blood. Divine justice could have been appeased, man’s fall and all our subsequent sins — from Cain’s slaughter of Abel to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews — could have been blotted out by the blood Jesus shed… at His circumcision.
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It may be that Jesus so emptied Himself to show the immensity of His charity, to give us a tantalising peek at the secret love that fuels the Trinity.
Creation didn’t happen on the cheap. God did not make a single planet with just one sun, or a stingy complement of plants and animals sufficient to keep us fed — but instead cast out a vast and gorgeous universe, and crafted for us a planet teeming with wild beauty. Likewise the Redemption: Christ would undertake no minimal intervention, no frugal-but-fair exchange of a drop of the God-Man’s blood for the billion petty squalours we pile up every day. Instead, He overwhelms us, explodes our sensibilities, and offers us in the Cross an appalling spectacle that thousands of years of contemplation can never exhaust.
—John Zmirak, No Morphine on the Cross

When one loves, one does not calculate.
—St Thérèse of Lisieux