The Bridge

18 When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance, 19 and said to Moses, "You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die."

(Exodus 20:18-19)

The Ten Commandments expressed the ideal way that humankind would relate to God and to one another. Honor and reverence, mutual respect and mutual care would recreate the Eden-like world God had intended - an open-handed way of living where the only purpose for receiving is to give away. For those gathered with Moses, the contrast between the Holy and their reality was too great - they could not bear the presence of the Almighty.

When Jesus told the story (recounted in Matthew 21:33-40) of the landowner and the tenants, where the landowner sent servants to collect what was his due from the harvest, and the tenants refused and even killed the landowner's son, he shifted and expanded what would have been a well known passage from Isaiah 5. While the chief priests and Pharisees readily saw themselves as the tenants in Jesus' story - those who had been given management over the care of God's people (the vineyard) - their fists were clasped so tightly around the power they didn't really possess that they refused to face Jesus' indictment that they had mismanaged God's people, and focused instead on the fact that Jesus clearly cast himself as the Son. Once again the chasm was too great.

At a time when civility is all that we as a society can hope for, and yet seem unable to achieve with anyone who thinks or believes differently, we are at risk of falling into the toxic abyss of self-centeredness and self-importance. Thankfully, Jesus is the bridge of grace - the Way that we can choose to take to cross over the gulf of sin that separates us from God's purpose. May we let go even of the potentially good gifts of privilege and power, giving them away to serve those without a voice as we strive to be vessels through which God's grace passes.

7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8 More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. (Philippians 3:7-9)