Preface II of the Nativity - Christ raises all that is cast down

For on the feast of his awe-filled mystery,
though invisible in his own divine nature,
he has appeared visibly in ours;
and begotten before all ages,
he has begun to exist in time;
so that, raising up in himself all that was cast down,
he might restore unity to all creation
and call straying humanity back to the heavenly Kingdom.

Boylan (1) - Sacraments unite us to every point in Jesus's life, especially Crucifixion

This moment [the Crucifixion] is the center of all history; it is the focus and the center of all Christian life. In a sense, it stands in juxtaposition with every moment of history, and with every event of each man’s life. One remembers how some maps of the world are drawn in Mercator’s projection so that the North Pole, expanded into a line, is due north of every point on the surface of the globe. The sacramental system has something of this power of extending its pole or center; it “extends” Christ, and also Christ’s sacrifice, so that he is in contact with every point of space and time . . . 

One can take any single moment or event in one’s own life and place it in vital contact with any single moment or event in the human life of Christ. And every single event of Christ’s life on earth must be considered as taking place in vital contact with each and every event in the lives of each and every member of his Mystical Body . . .

Dom M. Eugene Boylan, O.C.R. - from The Mystical Body: The Foundation of the Spiritual Life [quoted in Magnificat, April 2021]

Part 1 | Part 2

Balthasar - Jesus as humble human being, not "hero" or "demigod"

This new reality rests on the incomparable claim of the man Jesus of Nazareth to be able to speak and act with the authority of the God of Israel and the Creator of the world, the claim to be the conclusively valid Word of God to Israel and the whole world, as a human being and not as a hero or demigod as the pagan religions imagined them. This unsurpassable claim, which also demands an unconditional “following”, is presented with incomparable humility, naturalness and closeness to the poor and despised and also always as a fulfillment and yet unexpected surpassing of Old Testament prophecy.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Short Primer for Unsettled Laymen (1980) - in chapter titled The Incomparable

This is a small point, but one that never occurred to me specifically, although it certainly should have at some point in my getting a bachelor's degree in Classics. Experts in mythology often point to the parallels between Jesus and the heroes of various mythological systems (e.g. Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces), but miss the huge divergence—that is, Jesus's humility. In His humanity, he is presented as merely human, with all the weaknesses that entails. In addition, He insists on identifying with the lowest and weakest among us—the poor, the sick, criminals, the possessed. Then in contrast to this, we have His miracles and claims to divinity. The two together place him both below and above any mythological hero—humanly lower but divinely infinitely higher. He is truly Man and truly God, not a third thing that somewhere between the two. This is the paradox of the Incarnation, and it has no parallel anywhere in mythology. It is, as C.S. Lewis says, the True Myth.