Every Holy Week I recall one of Meister Eckhart's teachings that pricks me at my core. While I do as much as I can to distance myself from the difficulties of Christ's life and make excuses for the teachings of Jesus that call me to die to myself, Eckhart's teachings calls me back to a Truth that I don't want to know that I know:
"Scripture says, "No one knows the Father but the Son." Therefore, if you want to know God, you must not only be like the Son, you must be the Son."
Many of us in the West are not comfortable with poetic mystic language. We tend more toward toward didactic (and verbose) prose.
Enter Martin Luther.
In much the same spirit of Eckhart, Luther wrote in The Freedom of a Christian (1520):
"As our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christs to one another and Christ may be the same in all, that is, that we may be truly Christians..."
You may have seen on the internet the acronym TLDR which means: Too long, did't read. C.S. Lewis understood that many people were not going to read Eckhart or Luther so he wrote books that were more accessible and shorter. So to quote Lewis from Mere Christianity (1952):
"Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”
As we enter into Good Friday, I confess I am not ready to be a Little Christ.