Big Screen Jesus

I think movies, in many ways, have done us a disservice. Seeing life on the big screen, larger than life, we lose sight of both the majesty and the miniscule-ness of life as it really is.

We (or is it just me?) see Jesus as a giant figure, a massive close-up, a star on a screen, forgetting that He was a man. He was as invisible as we are from the distance of a mile. He was the same size as we are, more or less, from the distance of a hug. He was a man who could easily fit through the nearest doorway.

On the other side of the world thousands of years ago, invisible to us both in space and time, tiny and barely noticeable, almighty God, vaster than all the universes, took on flesh. There and then He lived. There and then He loved, and taught, and served. And there and then He died, a being so small history should have forgotten Him.

So why have we not forgotten? And why would the Infinite God create a finite planet, a pale blue dot (to quote Carl Sagan), for tiny men to live as tiny images of Himself, knowing all along that He too must become that small to make His little creation everything He ultimately intended it to be?

Movies make men seem giant and make us forget our true size, and we lose the greatest wonder of all, that God would choose to be small to show he is truly great.

This is one reason the gospel is so hard for sinful humans to believe. It really is unimaginable that a Being so great would bother with something so small, let alone become small Himself. (We certainly wouldn’t do it, even if we could.) Even more impossible is that He fully intended to die in the process. And today, Jesus Christ, resurrected from the dead, remains a man, a glorified man, yes, but still a man, united for all eternity with His own tiny creation.

He is the great wonder of the gospel – not a super-size, big-screen Jesus, but the perfectly ordinary, perfectly physical, eternally divine man who now sits enthroned in heaven and intercedes for us at the right hand of the impossible vastness of God the Father.

And He is our great hope, because only this God-become-man “is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:25).

Psalm 8

O Lord, our Lord,
     how majestic is your name in all the earth!
 You have set your glory above the heavens.
 Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
 you have established strength because of your foes,
     to still the enemy and the avenger.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
     the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
 what is man that you are mindful of him,
     and the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
     and crowned him with glory and honor.
 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
     you have put all things under his feet,
 all sheep and oxen,
     and also the beasts of the field,
 the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
     whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

O Lord, our Lord,
     how majestic is your name in all the earth!

 

(This article was originally published here and is an edited republication of an article from December of 2019.)