Vertical and Horizontal

Sunday January 18, 2015

Jean Vanier was an accomplished naval officer who had recently completed a PhD, and whose family oozed with prestige (his father had been the Governor General of Canada). Yet, living in the small French village of Trosly-Breuil, Vanier was alone and downhearted. His pastor encouraged him to invite two disabled men to live with him, and L'Arche (communities where disabled and those who Vanier calls "temporarily-abled" share friendship and life together) was born. Fifty years later, L'Arche communities exist around the world.

At the centre of Vanier´s work - and L'Arche´s vision - is the belief that God brings people together who would normally have little reason for friendship. The apostle Paul insists that the gospel provides for reconciliation, where barriers are shattered and people are reunited.

Reconciliation´s first movement is between God and people, bringing "us back to himself through Christ" (2 Corinthians 5:18). In the second movement, God gives "us the ministry of reconciliation", reconciling humans to one another by virtue of the life we´ve come to share in Him (v. 18 ESV). Reconciliation is vertical (between us and God), and then it´s horizontal (between us and our neighbour).

Reconciliation is not first a social agenda, but God´s action in Christ. "All this is a gift from God," Paul says (v.18). As Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice say in their book Reconciling All Things: "A Christian vision of reconciliation cannot be conceived or sustained without the particular life of the God whom Christians confess, the living God of Israel who raised the crucified Jesus from the dead. The life and preaching of Jesus shape our lives distinctly in a broken world." - Winn Collier

Read
2 Corinthians 5:11-19
Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men. What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your conscience. We are not trying to commend ourselves to you again, but are giving you an opportunity to take pride in us, so that you can answer those who take pride in what is seen rather than in what is in the heart. If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For Christ´s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation : that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men´s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

Question to Ponder
What does it mean to receive God´s gift of reconciliation?
How can you better offer that gift to others?

**Article taken from ODJ (Our Daily Journey with God) Dec 2014 - Feb 2015 issue