 than the Lord Jesus. Sometimes we can think that He must have been less tempted than we because He never gave in, so He was stronger. Any weightlifter can tell you what nonsense that is. When He overcame one temptation, another more powerful temptation came along. He had a body. That body had all the normal physical impulses of the human body. It wanted to eat, sleep, and gain strength. It's hard for the more gnostic among us to understand and accept, but his body had a sexual impulse too. The problem, for example, with The Last Temptation of Christ was not that Jesus was tempted to marry Mary Magdalene. It was that he floated around as though he was not subject to the laws of nature. 
I'm sorry the bishops of the Episcopal church can't understand that. May the Lord Christ illumine them.
One group of ancient heretics was called the Docetai or Docetists. Their name derived from the Latin “dokein”: to appear. They taught that Christ did not really suffer or die, but only appeared to. Some believed that Simon of Cyrene died on the cross, a rather adolescent attempt to evade the implications of Divine Manhood that the Muslims picked up in some of their apologetic writings.
The honor of God and of Christ are at stake in such a claim. Christ did not deceive us into thinking He suffered. His body felt His agony and His soul felt the agony of His body as much as ours does when our bodies suffer.  
His body hung on the cross where the impassable God experienced the passion of death and genuine sorrow.
His body died. It was laid in the tomb, ready to be honored by an extravagant sacrifice of spices from Nicodemus.
His body that had died every bit as thoroughly as your body and mine will one day die was resurrected, and that same glorified body, the same glorified body that you and I will one day inherit if we “continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel” ascended into heaven where He intercedes to the Father on our behalf.
And having ascended bodily into heaven and presented Himself as an eternal sacrifice to the Father on our behalf (the Father who was not pleased with sacrifices and offerings that went on endlessly so He prepared a body for His son), He was able to fulfill the promise given to Israel and send His Holy Spirit.

Do not tarry, O my God!
In John 1:16 we read "And of His fulness we have all received, and grace for grace." The fulness of Christ, which is what John is refering to, includes vs. 4: "In Him was life and the life was the light of men."
Vs. 12, "As many as received Him, He enabled them to become the children of God," is included as well.
Vs 14: "We beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth" is included as well.
Christ, by the mystery of the holy incarnation, delivered to us the fulness of God. If we deny Him his deity, we rob ourselves of His gifts - for He does not give His spirit by measure. When Christ came, he came "full of grace and truth." He fulfilled the law that had come through Moses, and in so doing He set us free from it. The law could separate Jew from Gentile no more, the law could condemn us no more, the law could demand detailed rituals of sacrifice and offerings no more.
The law had fulfilled its purpose in Christ's submission. It had tutored us and in tutoring us it had brought us to Christ. Now, in Christ - into whom we are baptized because He is God the Son - we are made sons. We have been equipped for all the responsibilities of the mature adult and are no longer under the detailed regulations of the law. Now the Spirit of Sonship is upon us and we act out of love of the Father, fulfilling our duties with joy, carrying on the ancient mission of the family with devotion, bearing one another's burdens with the strength Christ has brought us, bearing our own burdens with hopeful perseverence, knowing that we have been baptized into a new life of freedom. We, by the mystery of the incarnation, have been brought into nothing less than the Sonship of Christ.
The Word submitted to the law for us. The Logos was baptized for us. Christ Fasted for us. The Lord Jesus overcame temptation for us.
And of His fulness we have all received.
In Luke 10:22 Jesus says "All things were delivered to Me by My Father." Athanasius tells us that Arius, Eusebius and other early heretics used this verse to deny the deity of Christ. "If all things were delivered..., there was a time when he had them not."
In the case of Christ, one set of people argue that Christ was God but not fully man. They refer to John 1, Colossians 1, Hebrews 1, and some of the other extraordinary descriptions of His glory. Another group argues that Christ was man, but not fully God. They refer to passages like the one above. For good reason, theologians find it terribly difficult to settle on the idea that Christ is both God and man. We will always find it difficult to believe that a man standing before us is God - at least if we believe in the one true God.
Arius, often called the arch-heretic or heresiarch, held to the latter position. Christ was a man. The Father adopted Him, as it were, into the trinity because Christ was such a perfect man. But the Son was not equal in stature to the Father. He was a lesser god. He was not eternally begotten of the Father.
Athanasius devoted his life to defending the honor of the Son he loved - that is, not his own son, but the Son of God. He loved the bride too - that is, not his own bride, but the bride of the Son he loved. He knew that the identity of her groom was of enormous importance to the bride. He knew the myth of Cupid and Psyche (retold by CS Lewis in Till We Have Faces) in which Psyche comes to doubt the identity of her beloved Cupid and, losing her faith, loses her husband. Perhaps he understood the universality of that dynamic and applied it to the eternal Groom and His most-glorious of brides.
He also knew that who Christ was qualified what He could do. Bishop Allison, in his book The Cruelty of Heresy, reminds us of a famous principle the church fathers held to that kept them from drifting into fundamental errors about Christ: "What He did not assume, he could not redeem." He had to be fully man or he could not fully redeem man.
They also realized that if He was only man, not a new man, not divine, His sacrifice could never be acceptable. If He were not the the only begotten of the Father, then He had to be born of man, with man's fallen nature. But because He was the only begotten of the Father, born of the virgin Mary, He could assume the fulness of human nature without its corruption, without sin.
In short if Christ was not man, He couldn't save man. If He wasn't fully man, He couldn't fully save man. But if Christ was not God, He couldn't save man either. But as God and man, two natures in one person as the fathers put it and as we should constantly be putting it, He could save eternally, making an eternal sacrifice on our behalf, one that always satisfies the Father and doesn't need to be repeated year after year and month after month and day after despairing day.
Here is a groom whose nobility and might must overwhelm thes senses and heart of any bride. May we learn to love Him more, to know Him more to be what He is and thus be delivered from all false doctrine, heresy, and schism - but also from hardness of heart and contempt.
Peter Leithart writes one of the finest blogs I've seen and yesterday's entry presented a model of thinking about a text that is well worth thinking about. Go to http://www.leithart.com/ to read Hart, Beauty of Infinite, a discussion of Christian rhetoric in the post-modern world.
The desk calendar at the Y said, "Better a creative mess than stagnant order."
I thought, "Yes, if you have to choose. But why do we constantly limit ourselves to options that don't work?" It's a mental habit of our age that arises from our excessive love of freedom. We hate borders so much that anything that suggests the idea of a limitation is seen as bondage. Adolescents naturally think this way, but calendar publishers shouldn't. Working within nature, within the limits natural to a sphere of thought or being, sets us free; that is, if freedom has any meaning.
God was very creative in Genesis one. But there was no mess. And the order was not stagnant.
Order is the prerequisite for genuine and effective creativity.
The following link was sent to me by a writing workshop alumna in Texas. It tells the story of a team of home schoolers who went to Oxford and won a debate tournament.
We are the dust of the earth, otherwise known as humus. When we catch on, we develop a sense of humor, which is another word for earthiness. This keeps us humble, which is to say, mindful of the fact that we are made of dust.
But when the Word became flesh, he humbled Himself, taking