A folly to the French

"There is a carnivalesque quality about a faith for which the whole cosmos is at stake in the gift of a cup of water.  The Son of Man sweeps majestically down on the clouds of glory only to inquire prosaically whether you have visted the sick and fed the hungry.  Conventional Messiahs tend to make their entrance into the national capial in bullet-proof limousines with police outriders, not on a donkey.  Jesus is presented as a sick joke of a Saviour.  Yet the Christian gospel sees in such humdrum activity as clothing the naked the foretaste of a transfiguration of the earth, one which is folly to the French.  The exceptional and the everyday are not divided domains, as they are for the disciples of Lacan."

Terry Eagleton, The Trouble With Strangers: A Study of Ethics, 292-3.  via Sublunary sublime