Several times in the past week or two I have found myself crossing a bridge. Nothing spectacular, mostly built for utility and convenience over a river, a burn, a stream, the usual geographical features that prevent you taking the shortest distance from one side to the other, from here to there. The one not in the photo spans the River Deveron. It is a photo of both sides, taken from the middle, above the water, with my feet dry. The bridge is a means to an end; it is a makes-all-the-difference means to a makes-all-the difference end, of passing over an obstacle.
I like bridges. They take you places. They are also viewpoints where you can stand and see both sides. One of my all time favourite songs is about those special people who are like a bridge over troubled water.
One of the most significant texts in the entire New Testament is from 2 Corinthians 5.18-21. It is all about bridge building: "God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation...and he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors..."
Really? Is that what the church, each community of Christian faith, is?
Forget the developed strategies for a wee while, scrap the strap lines, rethink the re-brand.
Think bridges. Think churches as bridges. Think Christ as reconciling bridge, the church as a community of bridge-building reconciled reconcilers. Then imagine the good news as the lived reality through the renewed structures of a church whose defining passion is reconciliation.
Then think again Paul's text, too easily overlooked by those who want to use God as a name of division, over-againstness and hostility, "All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave to us the ministry of reconciliation." Bridge building is God-like work, and will sometimes cost what it cost God.
The Cross of Christ is the bridge that spans the troubled waters or a broken and divided world. A paraphrase of 2 Corinthians 5 could well be, "Like a bridge over troubled waters, I will lay me down." That is cruciform language, the language of the bridge as a place of meeting, holding two sides together.
Those who know me know my love for the writing of one of Scotland's finest theologians, Principal James Denney. His last book is called The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation. It is a profound, and at times anguished examination of the cross of Christ as the reconciling centre of the universe. I still remember the afternoon I found a previously unknown letter of Denney's in which he lamented to his friend William Robertson Nicoll, the latest casualty figures from the Somme. He had been notified earlier of the deaths in action of several of his students from the United Free Church College in Glasgow.
Those events compelled Denney to think ever more deeply about the meaning of the cross, until he came to what he believed the deepest layer of mystery, the cross as the place of reconciliation, where judgement and mercy meet on a bridge that spans from eternity.
Near the end of his book, and probably one of the last things he wrote before his unexpected death in 2017, he wrote this paragraph on what he called "the life of reconciliation":
"The life of reconciliation is a life which itself exercises a reconciling power. It is the ultimate witness to that in God which overcomes all that separates man from Himself and men from each other. Hence it is indispensable to all who work for peace and good will among men. Not only the alienation of men from God, but their alienation from one another -- the estrangement of classes within the same society, the estrangement of nations and races within the great family of humanity -- yield in the last resort to love alone. Impartial justice, arbitrating from without, can do little for them. But a spirit delivered from pride and made truly humble by repentance, a spirit purged from selfishness and able in the power of Christ's love to see its neighbour's interest as its own, will prove victorious alike in the class rivalries of capital and labour, and in the international rivalries that are now devastating the world. It is in its all-reconciling power that Paul sees most clearly the absoluteness and finality of the Christian religion." (The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, James Denney, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1917, pages 329-30)
The life of reconciliation is bridge shaped. Bringing together two sides, joining what is divided, refusing to function as a wall, overcoming estrangement in the power of Christ's love, seeing our neighbour's interest as our own, spanning and supporting the road to friendship and the two way travel of mutually acknowledged dignity, rights and obligations.
The life of reconciliation is lived under the shadow of the cross. The cruciform life is a bridge capable of bearing the weight of a world's sin, overcoming cycles of hostility, wearing down intractable indifference, deconstructing competitive rivalry, curing habits of suspicion, and expelling long nourished hatreds - all of this, in the power of Christ's love.
I like bridges. They take you places. They introduce you to the other side. They are meeting places, a two way conversational encounter of people travelling in opposite directions. The life of reconciliation is such a bridge.
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