I am posting a paragraph a day, for the next twelve days, from Dorothy Sayers‘ essay “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged.” My own little Twelve Days of Christmas. Because it’s a apt musing for the Christmas season. And I think she whimsically and winsomely addresses the snarky attacks that Jesus and his way, Christianity, regularly receive. You can click here for the first post or here for the entire essay.

Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation, or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all. That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God, find him a better man than himself, is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that; though we are likely to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational.