It is a very beautiful doctrine of the Fathers that Christ submitted to the conditions and experiences of our life in order to restore and sanctify and endue them with the virtue of His merits. Hence Thomassini, after the Fathers, thus discourses in his treatise on the Incarnation: “The Fathers have been careful to attribute to the Word of God” (incarnate) “not only the physical parts—body and soul—but even the smallest and most particular things: grief, fear, tears; and all the emotions: conception, birth, babyhood; all the stages of life and growth: hunger, thirst, fatigue, and sadness, in order that a remedy might be applied at every place where sin had crept in, and that, as death had corrupted all, so upon all might the water of life be sprinkled.” Gregory of Nazianzus strikingly observes (Or. 37): “Perchance indeed He sleeps, in order to bless sleep: perchance, again, He is weary, in order to sanctify weariness: and perchance weeps, to give dignity to tears.” Hurter ad loc., who also cites Cyril of Alexandria on S. John xii. 27—“You will find each and every human experience duly represented in Christ, and that the affections of the flesh were called out into energy, not that, as in us, they might gain the upper hand, but that, by the might of the Word dwelling in flesh, they might be tamed and kept within bounds, and our nature transformed into a better state.”
Editorial footnote · Exposition of the Christian Faith, Chapter VII., editorial note cite_note-3 · Original source