Christmas and Easter, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end……. but yet not end but new beginning.  Which Jesus is easier to picture or more pleasent to visualize? 

In Christmas we see the baby, yet still acknowledged as the king to come.  We see loving devotion of parents and the celestial miracle of the moving star.  We can also visualize what comes next, the young man.  We are told that he obeyed his mother and father.  Eventually I know that his life is going to lead to the wisest of teaching, wonderful saving healings and the opening up of a glimpse into His Father our God.

But in the back of my mind I also have very terrible images; images of betrayal and hate leading to a day of immearsurable torment.  Finally comes the excrutiating death.  A death not deserved but a sacrifice freely given.  He became sin in all it’s hideous ugliness; but not his, he took mine.

Still I should not have used the word finally, for His death was no way near final except that He finally broke the power of sin and death for us.  Here is where the visualization gets really  hard.  For we’ve seen babies and unfortunately we have seen the inoscent badly abused.  Yet we have never seen the dead raised again; totally fully alive.

And now He is the King of Kings.  To visualize Him sitting at the Right Hand of God the Father Almighty is a site almost inconcievable.  We have no reference point with which to compare.  So we try to grasp Jesus Christ in His current state but we fall short.  Truth be known His current Glory is so far removed from us as to be frightening to behold.

So while the baby may be easier to see and that vision should not be discounted, it is the sacrifice of the Man who is God; badly disfigured and in three days transformed that allows us once and for all time to come into the presence of Our Heavenly Father. 

It is critical to our salvation that we see and celebrate both