Sydney Carton Sacrifice Quotes

For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you. And when you see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you.

Under the condition of biblical embodiment, we can read everything else and find where the image of Jesus Christ is reflected. “Christ plays in ten thousand places,” and it is our joy to find where he is and disclose his presence to the world. When I was in college at a Christian university, we sometimes sought the Christ figure in literature: Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. We looked for those characters that best imitated Christ in their meekness, sacrifice, or charity. After Christians fell in love with The Lord of the Rings, they identified several characters as Christ figures: Aragorn the king, Gandalf who dies and is resurrected, the hobbits in their humility. In reality, the most lovely stories will show us thousands of reflections of Christ in the faces of dozens of characters. The truthfulness by which the author depict the human beings in their work determines how much we will be able to see the Human One in the story. We should look for him everythere. However, I caution readers against two fallacies of reading with a biblical lens: first, prioritizing message over narrative, and second, so-called Christian literature that fronts as biblically informed.(p. 43)