Jesus didn’t wait for us to come to him. He left heaven to come to us. He became our brother. He bore our humiliation on the cross. And he brought freedom from our sin. He made reconciliation with God possible…and he made reconciliation among God’s image bearers a possibility.But what about those people down here…the ones we can’t get along with? The answer is that in Jesus we have been given the building blocks of reconciliation: we confess our sin, we repent, and we forgive…just as we have done vertically. But there has to be a desire for reconciliation and there has to be a change of heart – repentance. Then God can turn a dysfunctional family into a loving and functional one.
Dysfunction. Betrayal. Heartbreak. These are some of words describing the life of Joseph. But his story is our story, too. In a striking parallel to the Gospel, where God redeems and restores broken and dysfunctional sinners and makes us into a family.
