On a cold winter’s day in 2003, I had the opportunity to officiate at a couple’s reaffirmation of their wedding vows. This husband and wife had gone through a very difficult period in their marriage in recent years. Their careers had taken them in different directions. They had grown content with spending as little attentive time with one another as they possibly could. They fell out of the habit of breaking bread with one another. They fell out of the routine of having daily conversations with one another. They fell out of the practice of sleeping in the same bed. In essence, they stopped caring about one another’s lives. The result was a condition of marital indifference. But that indifference soon gave way to a condition of marital anger. They became angry over having to stay married to someone that they didn’t really know or like anymore. Before long, they separated and initiated the process of divorce.
Before the divorce was ever finalized, however, this husband and wife found their way back to one another and reconnected. The instrument of their reconnection was their eight-year-old daughter’s elementary school choral concert, where, during the singing of the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” they realized that they still had a thing for one another. They began to rekindle their friendship. And in the context of that friendship, it became clear to them that they had never stopped loving one another. On a cold winter’s day in 2003, this husband and wife gathered in the church sanctuary with family and friends in order to reaffirm their wedding vows to one another. It was an experience that I will never forget.
After the reaffirmation, as I was making ready to leave the sanctuary, the husband walked up to me with tears in his eyes. “I just wanted to tell you,” he said, “that I think I learned something really important through all of this.”
“What’s that,” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “I learned that, when there’s a chasm between a man and his soulmate, there is nothing sweeter than finding the bridge that leads back home.”
As soon as I heard his words, I knew that they applied, not only to his marital relationship, but also to the reconciliation with God that Jesus Christ makes possible. The book of Romans essentially says to us that our enslavement to sin makes us enemies of God, meaning that we find ourselves separted from God by a spiritual chasm that we, on our own, do not have the wherewithal to bridge. Therefore God, out of a love that travels well beyond the boundaries of human comprehension, built the bridge for us. God built the bridge that we could not build, and the bridge that God built was none other than Jesus Christ.
“While we were enemies,” are the words found in the fifth chapter of Romans, “we were reconciled to God by the death of his son” (Romans 5:10). These words declare a glorious mystery. They are words that compel us to acknowledge that, somehow, when Jesus suffered and died on the cross, he gathered into himself everything that was separating us from God, thereby bridging the chasm between us and God that we could not bridge, and thereby enabling us to be “justified by his blood and saved through him from the wrath of God” (Romans 5:9).
That’s a big deal, isn’t it? In an age in which the church is often tempted to lose its christological focus, perhaps Romans 5, with its bold emphasis upon Christ as divine reconciler, is an important chapter to keep close to one’s heart and mind. After all, the husband that I described at the beginning of this post was absolutely right. When there is a chasm between soulmates, there is nothing sweeter than finding the bridge that leads back home.
When I first started reading your blog, I thought you were telling my story. But the husband in my case said in marital counseling that the reaffirmation of vows was not a “watershed” experience for him so I firgured it was someone else. (OK, so I’m still a little bitter about things of that sort.) However, the brokenness of that relationship has indeed built a bridge out of anger into love with God. Lately my mind has been spinning a tune (country western somehow) “God Bless the Broken road that led me back to you.” I alternate “God” and “Me” for the final word in that phrase now. I have been reconciled to God and to myself and it is a blessing.
Amen, brother.
Ahh, the power of the Beatles’ music!