Having ended up writing an essay on the monster typology in A Canticle for Leibowitz stimulated by Jonathan Pageau’s exploration of the place of monsters in Christendom. It was only after that the penny dropped on the full mythic implications of that talk.
Jesus is a monster!
In retrospect it seems obvious.
Perhaps it’s easiest to see with a simple mythical comparison to the Niphilim (the Bible’s first monsters): sons of God and daughters of man. Well, Christ is the offspring of God and of man; the only begotten son of God and the firstborn son of a daughter of man. Christ is the Son of God incarnate, Christ is a monster.
Christ is he who stands at the Limits and the Limit, who is the Limit. An incarnation of things that cannot be, a dead God, an omnipotent foetus, a slave who was before Abraham, he’s went the whole way down and the whole way up, he’s being eaten at the four corners of the world, knight of the far country, a wrangler of all chaos, a stiller of all waters, full stop and comma, the end of every chapter, the start of every book.
Christ is the only true form of human limitlessness.
The man can walk through walls! He can fly, he can’t die, he can do magic, he can bring people back to life, your nightmares are scared of him and he’s got body gore. People drink his blood for crying out loud!
Of course he’s a monster! What else could he be. Christ the gargoyle. Ha!
Or rather he is the fulfilment of all monsters, everything any monster ever hoped to be, everything we ever needed any monster to ever be, anything any monster ever meant.
Strange to think zombies, vampires, werewolves omens of the Way, the Truth, and the Life, but also how very like God. And there’s always the old “whatever is not assumed is not redeemed”.