What’s more, this Jesus will grow up and teach us a different way to live in a world like ours. And his method will not be to reassure pretty good folks like us that we pretty much see things for what they are. He will tell stories, violate norms, ask questions meant to provoke or expose our deep confusion about how God sees things. He will tell us that the ones we see as last, and least, and lost are the first ones God seeks out and finds. He’ll insist that we find our lives by laying them down for one another. That we save them by losing them. And he will live out what he taught us all the way to the incomprehensible love we see on the cross and in the resurrection of that love, even on the far side of death.