God, compressed

God is big. Really, really big. Bigger than space. Bigger than time. Bigger than space-time. Bigger than all those lame alternate space-times on Sliders. Bigger than anything you can imagine. Bigger than anything you can't imagine. Imagine infinity. Real infinity is infinitely bigger than that, and God is infinitely bigger than infinity. Big, big, big.

So why does no one ever talk about the baby Jesus as some kind of supermassive mega-giant-baby? I'm no great biblical scholar, but I don't see anything in the Bible about Mary giving birth to a gargantuan freak-child. I've read a lot of the spurious "gospels" that have been circulated, and even though there's no shortage of strange happenings and unexplainable phenomena in them, not a single one has ever described Christ as abnormally giganormous. Weird.

In fact, even as an adult he doesn't seem to have been epically colossal. You'd think someone would have noticed a mile-high Brobdingnagian bestriding the hills of Galilee, but no, it seems to have escaped their notice. Honestly, it's a bit of a disappointment. You'd think the maker and sustainer of all creation would have been at least as big as, say, a radiation-enhanced iguana. But no, he was apparently pretty average-looking.

[Not Jesus.]

I'm no divine engineer, but that seems impossible. How do you take something infinitely big and cram it down to fit a package that was probably smaller than my 69-inch frame?

I don't know. But he did it. God himself -- the Son, the second Person of the Trinity -- became an average-looking baby, grew into a perfectly normal-looking child and a likely nondescript man. People could and did meet him and even spend years with him without realizing he was in fact the whopping great Creator of All the Universe.

That's some serious compression. That's some serious power. That's some serious humility.

There were flashes of what he really was, of course. There were hints, and occasional outright acknowledgment of the true nature of the man Jesus. You can tell these glimpses of divinity by the fact that so many people want to deny them. Thomas Jefferson loved the human Jesus found in the Gospels, but couldn't accept the divine, so he simply cut the miraculous parts out, leaving only the "wise teacher".

The problem is that without the mammoth, tremendous, stupendous God inside, the human frame doesn't mean much. It doesn't make sense. Why should I care that a pretty good Jew lived a couple thousand years ago? What difference does it make if he said some wise things? So did Buddha. So did Will Rogers. Even I've gotten it right a few times. Even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and then.

Of course, most of the world sees Jesus Christ that way, as just another pretty good teacher. They don't want to acknowledge that he was anything else. They're certainly entitled to say these things, but that doesn't mean that they make any sense.

Governments don't execute people for being decent law-abiding folks. Religious leaders don't target inoffensively nice people. And wise-yet-merely-human teachers aren't lauded for proclaiming themselves God. There are plenty of decent, law-abiding, inoffensively-nice, wise-yet-merely human people in the world ... and Jesus didn't look like any of them.

There's a reason for this: he wasn't one of them. He was God in human form, and while he certainly was good, no one would have called him "inoffensively nice". He went out of his way, it seems, to drive away those followers who were looking for just another wise teacher.

To our modern way of seeing things, he was a terrible leader and teacher. When he was executed, he had a few dozen followers, all of whom forsook him when the going got tough. The ones he spent the most time with didn't get him. His family didn't get him. The ones who got him killed didn't get him.

He wasn't someone you got, because he wasn't just another person. He was the God who's infinitely bigger than infinity, and the only way to even halfway "get" him was for him to get you. That was true then, and it's true now.

God is bigger than we can imagine. Why should we think, then, that he's smaller? Why should we be surprised when Jesus doesn't look like our picture of what God should look and sound and act like? Maybe we should stop trying to explain how he's too small and restrictive; the fact is he's too big and unrestrained for us to comprehend without his coming in some way to our level.

The life of Christ wasn't the story of a good teacher tragically misunderstood. It's the record of God condescending to our level. It's the account of God compressing himself into a form we could see.

He was humble enough to do that. Are we humble enough to look?