Deficiencies in the Body of Christ

Christ assumed a true human body with the normal requirements of that body, and with the limitations and the deficiencies connatural to such a body, excluding those that could detract from the dignity of perfect human nature. Thus Christ could suffer in his body such things as hunger, thirst, pain, death. These hardships or defects are in themselves punishments for the sin which Christ had not. But it is suitable that he who came asman to atone for human sin should take on the nonstaining punishments consequent in man upon the original sin. By assuming human nature with these bodily deficiencies, our Lord both proved his true humanity, and gave to all men a most noble example of humble and patient endurance.

It is by natural necessity that a child of Adam has such deficiencies as the enduring of hunger, thirst, pain, death. And God chose to become man as a true child of Adam. It was by divine Will in the effecting of the incarnation that the flesh was thus allowed to do and to endure what belonged to it to do and suffer.

Human beings are said to contract the defects of human nature inasmuch as these are due to sin and are inherited by the sin-infected offspring of a sinful first parent. It is notso with the human nature of Christ. Our Lord did not inheritsin; he did not contract or inherit the consequences of sin in his body. He assumed sinless human nature. He might have assumed human nature without any bodily deficiencies at all. Those defects which he took, he took by his own will to let natural necessity have its way in all that is not degrading- not setting this necessity aside by exercise of his divine power.

Christ as man did not have defects that conflict with his perfect knowledge, grace, and dignity. He was not, for instance,subject to sickness, or disease, or disfigurement, or suppuratingsores, or broken bones.