Ant Jesus

Can you imagine someone telling you that you had to live among the ants as one of them? Knowing how big the wide world is outside, you had to stay in your little ant life taking up only one square foot of your backyard (I don’t really know how much space an ant takes up in his whole life, he could travel the world for all I know… I’ll have to consult an entomologist and find out but go with me on this one for the sake of this illustration). You could tell your ant friends and ant family that you aren’t really an ant and that there is more outside than they could imagine in their little ant brains… but many of these ants wouldn’t believe you. I can imagine it would be frustrating to be “stuck” in an ant life. Wanting to do big human things….. wanting to be your full self.

A lot of people get that God sacrificed His son for us. A lot of people get that Jesus died for us. One thing I don’t think that a lot of people really “get” is that Jesus/God, lived among us. He lived as one of us. I think this was the greater sacrifice. I know of people who would be willing to die for me. Firemen, soldiers, and police officers are ready to risk their life for a stranger in trouble. My dad would have surely stepped in front of a bullet for me (thanks daddy!) and even some of my friends would probably be willing to make that sacrifice for me in the right (or wrong?) situation. People who are not God are willing to die for other people who don’t deserve it. But Jesus didn’t just die for me because he saw a fire enveloping me and took a risk by doing the right thing and walking through the fire to pull me out. No, he took his big God self and put it into a minuscule little human body… and lived among the wretched race of man. Jesus was God. God was human. How did all that Godness fit in that human frame? I bet it hurt. I bet Jesus felt like bursting at the seams all the time. I bet he had to suck it in to keep it from popping out. But he did it anyway. And he loved us even though we were so much less than he was. And he didn’t complain about our small brains and our hard-to-inhabit skins. He walked in that shell for 33 years and then let the small brained people treat him badly, blame him in his innocence, and cause his death.