Once upon a time.....
a botanist who had been studying ants all his life discovered an ant colony at a site where a new road was being built. The machinery that would build the road and destroy the ant colony would arrive within the next week.
He loved ants and did not want them to suffer, so he set to and built an ant world on a table in the spare room of his house. His construction contained everything that ants would need for a good life, including food, warmth and moisture. The botanist had studied ants for most of his life, so he understood everything that they needed. His ant world was a paradise for ants.
The ants lived happily in the ant world for many years. But one day, a restless ant found a crack in the outside wall of their home. He pushed out through the crack and dropped onto the floor of the spare room. A group of ants followed him as he moved out the front door and into the garden.
The move into the garden proved to be a dangerous adventure, because the garden was full of birds that attacked and killed many of the escaping ants. The few who survived formed a small colony, but the attacks by the birds were so severe that the colony was in danger of dying out.
The young ants who were born in the garden colony heard stories about the paradise in the ant world that their ancestors had escaped from, but they did not know how to get back there. As they struggled for survival, they longed to get back, but they had no hope of doing it.
Although the ants had escaped from his care, the botanist loved the ants that were struggling to survive in the garden. He built a tube that went back up into the ant world, but he had no way of showing the ants in the garden how to find it. Even if they had found it, they would have been scared to go up the tube.
The botanist did not have the ability to speak to the ants, and the ants had no ability to hear him speak. If he went too close to the garden colony, he would be in danger of crushing with his feet the ants that he wanted to save. He could write a big sign on the front door of his house, but the ants could not read it.
The botanist decided that the only way he could resolve the situation was to transform his favourite daughter into an ant. He told her what he wanted her to do. She would go into the ant colony and tell them about the paradise in the ant world that was still open to them. She would show the ants the way to the tube that he had built that led back up into the world. She would tell the ants that the botanist still loved them and would look after them in the ant world paradise. He would forgive them for their mistake, and there would be no negative consequences.
Once she knew what to do, the botanist used scientific power to change his daughter into an ant. He took her carefully into the garden and place here near the dying ant colony. This was a hugely risky move, as once she was on the ground, he could not distinguish her from any other ants. The birds were still flying around, and if she could not get into the shelter of the ant colony, they would quickly pick her off. Her father could not protect her from destruction and failure.
At first, the daughter ant received a hostile reception from the ant colony. The guards recognised her as an outsider and tried to attack and kill her. They only stopped when she told them that she had good news for the colony. Some still wanted to kill her, but a few thought they should listen and took her to the leaders of the colony. They were hostile at first, but she pleaded with them, and her description of the ant world paradise appealed to them. Eventually, they agreed that they had nothing to lose from following her up the tube to see if they could find the ant world. Their situation in the garden was so desperate that they decided it was worth the risk.
When nightfall came, and the birds went to bed, the daughter ant led the members of the ant colony towards the house. They filed under the front door and into the spare room. The daughter ant led them up the tube and back into the ant world paradise. The ants living in the ant world recognised the ants from the garden as their distant cousins and welcomed them back into their paradise. They quickly settled back into the pleasant life that it provided.
The ants guarding the ant world did not recognise the daughter ant, so they would not let her in. They pushed her out of their world and back down the tube through which she had rescued the garden ants. This seemed like another disaster, because the daughter ant would be quickly killed by the birds if she went out into the garden to find some food.
Fortunately, the watching botanist was prepared, because he had expected that his daughter would be rejected and ejected. When the rescuer ant tumbled down out of the tube, he knew it was his daughter. He quickly and gently scooped her up and reversed the process that had transformed her into an ant. Once she was restored, she was even more special to him because she had rescued the ants that he cared about.
The botanist and his daughter lived happily ever after....
And the ants in the ant world continue to enjoy the paradise that the botanist had prepared for them.
This story is a bit stupid because no sensible man would turn his favourite daughter into an ant that could be eaten by birds just to rescue a few runaway ants, even if he was a botanist who had spent his life studying them.
Yet this is something like what God did when he took the immense risk of sending his favourite son to be born as a human baby to rescue the people who had rejected his care, even though he had created them.
This story demonstrates what a great act of love the incarnation was. God did something that no human father would do.
More at The Incarnation.
