The God of Poopy Diapers, Pieces of Silver, and Backwards Butterflies

 

Today we remember a God who became a bitty baby - starting life on this planet in a wooden box in a cruddy manger; this infant King greeted with the grunted lullabies of filthy farm animals. No worldwide royal celebration like little Prince George received. No. Scratchy hay on tender newborn skin, an unknown teenage mom with a bad reputation changes His poopy diaper and nurses His hunger, and a few curious rednecked shepherds look on. 

  As if that weren't lowly & odd enough to start with, He ended a perfect 33 years on a wooden cross with nails in His feet & hands high atop a hill called The Skull - a shameful and cruel death only foreign criminals deserved. His friends placed His lifeless body into a dark cave where He was expected to stay for eternity; stay and rot, stay and finally quit causing so much damn trouble to the MegaPastors of the day. 

  But He didn't stay there in the rocks He created; while His ragtag band of friends reeled from the shock over His sudden and violent death, while they hid in fear and wept from grief, He journeyed even farther down into darkness, farther from the oneness with God that He had forever known, all the way to hell - a world and a dimension apart from everything He created. He was the farthest away from God He'd ever been, as far from God as anyone can be - all the while still BEING God.

  But why? What kind of a god does that? No noble Greek god would dare, no pagan deity, no god of imagination, and no god of histories past has endured such an unfathomable low. (Such an unkingly thing showing such weakness!).
But it was in the starless void of light filled with demons and lost souls - when He left the manger, when He had finished what He had set out for, when He was done on the cross, when He was done in Gehennah - then and only then was He done in the tomb. 

  And here is how much He loves us: that He came back again, back to us, back FOR us - while our hearts were full of blackness and hate for Him. We had just turned our backs on Him, just denied Him, just sold Him for 30 pieces of silver, just spat on Him as He walked past with the weight of the world crushing His shoulders. Truly this is the only God who could love the face of a child like me. The only One who WOULD.

  He stepped out of heaven and onto this earth - like a butterfly that crawls back into a cocoon and turns back into a chrysalis. He died to take the sin that is uniquely ours, to let that eternal blackness be nailed to the cross with Him as He suffered in our place - and our rightful place is separation from God. But He did what only a true god could do, what no other god has done - defeated death itself. He came out of that deadly bout as the undefeated champion over my sin and your sin. He left the center of the earth that meant to hold Him and walked back into sunshine; because His name is Emmanuel - God with us.

And He is.