the cuppboard

The Terrible Weakness of Our God

The baby lamb is meek and mild, yes, but far more important is this fact: The lamb is ready to die. Other animals struggle as they are being led to the slaughter, but the Sisters spoke of how the baby lamb offers the slaughterer its neck, how it nuzzles the hand of its killer. I watched a few videos of these lamb slaughterings, and they are remarkably heartbreaking affairs.

And yet, this is how God interacts with mankind. He kisses our hands and offers us his neck. He makes himself vulnerable to us. The idea of God that pervades our culture — God as a scary, old man and a monstrous rule-maker — becomes ridiculous when we realize that God came to us as a baby. He asks that we let him love us, and though I suppose that does take some amount of vulnerability on our part, he took the first step — he let us kill him. He exposed his flesh to our cruelty — we would do well to expose our hearts to his love. He was humiliated by our sins — it is no bad thing to be humbled in light of his greatness.