When I was a child, I can remember sitting on the sidewalk in front of my house and watching ants. Occassionally a community of ants would decide to set up shop in one of the cracks of the sidewalk. They would build their two inch mound in the middle of the walkway, and go about their business as if this really was the best place to set up their mini housing development.
As only a little boy could do, I would lay on the ground and just watch. I would watch them do their work, carry their food, and head in and out of the little entrance way at the very top. Though this would hold my curiousity for awhile, it was only a matter of time before I would go about doing something else.
I have to be honest. I never really lost any sleep wondering what would happen to the ants. After all…they were ants – nothing more than tiny little insects that really didn’t understand the concept that they were setting up camp in the very place that giant feet would walk and massive rubber tires would carry bike riders. They also didn’t seem to grasp the fact that when the rains came the fastest flowing water would exist on the surface of the concrete in which they decided to live. Not the most easy to love creatures in the world.
Now don’t get me wrong. As a young boy, I did my best to help them out as much as I could. I can remember trying to help them build their fortress by adding a little more dirt to the pile. But that didn’t seem to be well appreciated. I can remember putting together for them a nice flag made from a small stick and a piece of paper. But they didn’t seem to appreciate me staking that into their self made mountain either. After all of those opportunities to work with the ants, I essentially concluded one overwhelming fact: The way ants live and do things doesn’t make any sense to me, so I’ve learned to leave them alone.
I suppose that if I wanted to really help them, I would have needed to be able to communicate with them. If I were to help ants move up a step or two in this world, I would have needed to speak their language. And the only real way to do that would have been to become one of them. As one author put it: “I needed to become an ant. Go from six feet two inches (or 5 feet 11 inches) to teeny-weeny. From 200-plus pounds to tenths of an ounce. Swap my big world for their tiny one. Give up burgers and start eating grass.” Sounds interesting...but I don’t think so. After all, they were and still are just ants; and though I may care enough to avoid them if I see them in my pathway, I can’t say I have an undaunting love for them. Besides, who would go the distance to save aimlessly wandering creatures? Who would ever have a love that would go that far?
Yet, in Christ we have someone who would do all of that and more. In Jesus, God’s love for us is so great that He was willing to travel a great distance and do for us what I was unwilling and unable to do for those tiny little ants.
For us, God has gone the distance. Though we can be as stubborn and wander as aimlessly through this life as ants appear to do, God willingly chose to go the distance in order to show us His love. Traveling from His rightful throne in a place where time is limitless, He allowed Himself to be confined by time. Traveling from a place where no boundaries exist, He even entered into the small womb of woman. Leaving His heavenly kingdom where there was no hunger, no thirsting, no exhaustion, chaos, or pain, Jesus willingly and completely entered into our flesh, and He would experience all those things and more. “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.” (John 1:14)
I have to admit that I don’t think any of us would have done what He did. If it were us, I think we would have looked at this world – all of those aimlessly wandering people filled with sin – and I think we would have turned right around and headed back to the heavenly throne. You know why? Because our love is all too often conditional love; and the distance that conditional love is willing to go is limited.
But the pure love of God – agape love – will go as far as necessary. Even if it means coming into our world, taking on our flesh, and bearing the weight of our sin and it’s consequences, agape love (God’s love) will go through all that it needs to go through no matter how loveable the recipient of such love is. Agape love is the love of God for us in Jesus Christ. Agape love is Jesus Christ.
Which is why, as we have gone through the seasons of Lent and Easter, we now anticipate the season of Pentecost. This is the season in which we now live our newly forgiven lives under the guidance of Christ’s Spirit – an eternal season in which we are now led by that same agape love that died for us on the cross of Calvary. The season of Pentecost is now our life in Christ – a life in which He continues to show His eternal love to us and through us so that others might know that Jesus has willingly gone the distance for them too.
In this season of Pentecost, may we be the Gospel as we share the Gospel, so that others may see that Love has truly gone the distance for all of us.
Saved to serve,