A Next Door Savior

[soso]

A Next Door Savior

There was something wrong with the picture.

We used to look /at such scenes in elementary school.

To keep us occupied, the teacher would pass out [drawings with the question at the bottom],

"What's wrong with this picture?"

Remember them?

We'd look closely for something //that didn't fit.

A farmyard scene with a piano near the water trough.

A classroom with a pirate /seated on the back row.

An astronaut on the moon with a pay phone in the background.

We'd ponder the picture and point /to the piano or pirate or pay phone

and say, "This doesn't fit."

Something is out of place.

Something is absurd.

Pianos don't belong in farmyards. Pirates don't sit in classrooms.

Pay phones aren't found on the moon,

and God doesn't chum with the common folk or snooze in fishing boats.

But according to the Bible he did. "For in Christ there is all of God in a human body" (Col. 2:9 TLB).

Jesus was not a godlike man, nor a manlike God. He was God-man.

Midwifed by a carpenter. Bathed by a peasant girl.

The maker of the world with a belly button.

The author of the Torah /being taught the Torah.

Heaven's human.

And because he was,

we are left with scratch-your-head, double-blink, what's-wrong-with-this-picture? moments like these:

Bordeaux instead of H2O. A cripple /sponsoring the town dance. A sack lunch /satisfying five thousand tummies.

And, most of all, a grave: guarded by soldiers, sealed by a rock, yet vacated by a three-days-dead man.

What do we do with such moments?

What do we do with such a person?

We applaud men for doing good things.

We enshrine God for doing great things.

But when a man does God things?

One thing is certain, we can't ignore him.

Why would we want to?

If these moments are factual, if the claim of Christ is actual, then he was, at once, man and God.

There he was, the single most significant person //who ever lived.

Forget MVP; he is the entire league.

The head of the parade? Hardly.

No one else shares the street.

Who comes close?

Humanity's best and brightest fade like dime-store rubies next to him.

Dismiss him? We can't.

Resist him? Equally difficult. Don't we need a God-man Savior?

A just-God Jesus could make us but not understand us.

A just-man Jesus could love us but never save us.

But a God-man Jesus? Near enough to touch. Strong enough to trust. A next door Savior.