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Verse:“For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” —Luke 19:10
In March 2016, I visited the Natural History Museum of Bern, Switzerland. My main purpose was to see the taxidermy mount of Barry (1800–1814), the most famous mountain rescue dog in history. This male Saint Bernard was born at the Great Saint Bernard Pass Hospice on the Alpine border between Switzerland and Italy.
At 8,200 feet (about 2,500 meters) above sea level, with freezing temperatures and snowstorms, this region presented immense challenges for travelers attempting to travel the pass. People from the hospice went out with their dogs each day to look for lost travelers. Barry, the most tireless of them all, has been credited with rescuing more than forty people. Over the years, paintings and storybooks have kept his memory alive. Legends suggest that he used to carry a small barrel filled with a stiff drink around his neck, that he once found a half-frozen boy and carried him to the hospice on his own back, and that while he was rescuing his forty-first person, who happened to be one of Napoleon’s soldiers, the man mistakenly confused the rescue dog with a wolf and killed him with a bayonet. Nevertheless, these myths cannot undermine Barry’s extraordinary legacy. On June 13, 2014, two hundred years after his death, the Bern Museum opened a permanent exhibition titled Barry, the Legendary St Bernard.
As I gazed at Barry, my thoughts went back more than two hundred years.
I imagined him rescuing travelers in the snowy Alps.
Then my thoughts drifted to another rescue —one that happened some two thousand years ago when the Son of God left the heavenly courts and came to this dangerous world to reclaim it with His saving grace.
At that moment, I offered a silent prayer, thanking God first for what He had done through that rescue dog for lost travelers and then through His Beloved Son for all of humanity. Scripture assures us that Christ’s rescue mission was so effective that “where sin abounded, grace abounded much more” (Romans 5:20) and that He is “able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him” (Hebrews 7:25).
Regardless of our sinful past, Christ has “delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13, 14).