After fifteen years and nearly seventeen thousand miles, an unlikely fleet was set to make port on the beaches of Britain. On January 29, 1992, three massive containers on a cargo ship from Hong Kong crashed into the Pacific Ocean during a storm. The containers were filled with brightly colored bathtub toys bound for the United States. Instead, twenty-nine thousand little plastic ducks, frogs, beavers, and turtles began a journey that would be carefully monitored by children, oceanographers, environmentalists, and newscasters alike.
After 23 years, the tiny bobbing friends have traveled past Japan and back to Alaska, drifted deliberately down the Bering Strait and past the length of Greenland, and carefully floated down the eastern coastline of the United States. They have persevered through storms that would have left boats and crews in dire straits. They patiently endured four years frozen in ice as they crossed the Arctic Ocean. They have arrived at various intervals on various shores, faded and tattered by sun and surf, some with animal bites and barnacles to show for the journey. But each smiling plastic face seems to return with an ironic confession: the smallest vessels on tumultuous seas are not necessarily the most vulnerable.
Life is certainly far more than an attempt to keep our heads above water, and yet at times it feels a suited metaphor. Like tiny rubber ducks in an oceanic bathtub, we are tossed about the rocks of fear and anger, pulled under by currents of despair and disappointment, and broken at times by the journey. Human fragility is often as startlingly obvious as the image of a bath toy in the Bering Strait. We are at times almost averse to this fragility, whether seen in ourselves or in others. Fighting to keep afloat in an unpredictable sea, we take on distracting cargo and build defensive walls—anything that makes us feel less like tiny vessels lost at sea and more like giant ships passing in the night.
But metaphors of strength can be misleading, and vulnerability is often fearfully misunderstood. Though we may be reluctant to hear it, there is one tradition that clearly puts forth the story of a fragile and fleeting humanity. Jesus spoke readily of his own death and wept at the grave of a friend. The apostle Paul wrote of our bodies as “jars of clay,” words hastening back the image of David who lamented that he had become like “broken pottery.” Yet even well beyond the fragile images of humanity given in Scripture, the vulnerability of a God-man comes into focus and redefines all of our terms. The image of Jesus on the cross further turns our understanding of fragility on its head, challenges every discomfort with brokenness, and redirects our associations of weak and strong. In these images of Christ we discover a vulnerability of God that makes our greatest images of strength seem somehow childish. In his cruciform journey, God uses the weak to shame the strong, a suffering Son to meet the wounds of creation, and the vulnerable image of a broken savior who comes near.
The Christian profession is that it is by the Cross which we live, by a seemingly weak vessel, that we are brought home. Christ is not promised as a religious escape raft for the hard realities of this world. On the contrary, he calls to us in our weakness and reminds us that it is not unfamiliar to him. Through tumultuous waters, he beckons us to see there is potential in fragility, mercy in affliction, life beyond and within the journey that currently consumes us. Something like the image of tiny ducks arriving after an unlikely voyage, the journey of a soul to the cross is one in which Christ redirects our thoughts on vulnerability, the weak and the strong. And along the way, God is aware of every last and fragile vessel, going after even one that is lost, longing to gather us unto himself like a hen bringing together thousands of chicks under her wings.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
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