I am the Jesus You Say You Love
A powerful story comes out of World War II about a little Jewish boy who was living in a small Polish village when Nazi troops rounded up him and all the other Jews in the vicinity and sentenced them to death.
The boy joined his neighbours in digging a shallow ditch for their own graves. Then the soldiers lined them up against a wall and machine-gunned them down. But none of the bullets hit the little boy. The blood of his parents splattered his naked body, and as he fell into the ditch, he pretended to be dead.
The grave was so shallow that the thin covering of dirt did not prevent him from breathing and several hours later when darkness fell, this ten-year-old boy crawled out of his grave.
With blood and dirt caked to his little body, he made his way to the nearest home and begged for help. A woman answered the door and immediately recognised him as one of the Jewish boys marked for death by the Nazis so she screamed at him to go away and slammed the door.
Dirty, bloody, and shivering, the little boy limped his way from one house to the next begging for help but got the same response at each door. People were afraid to help.
Finally, in desperation, he knocked on a door, and just before the lady of the house could tell him to leave, he cried out, “Don’t you recognise me? I am the Jesus you say you love.”
The lady froze in her tracks for what seemed an eternity to the little boy. Then with tears streaming down her face, she threw open her arms. She picked up the boy and took him inside to safety.
That is Christian love in action, and it illustrates the risk that love sometimes demands.