Canter Bridge

We are not pawns. Yet we are players in a Great Game in which everything is at stake and large powers move amid shadows and light.

We do not move alone, do not decide alone, do not—no matter our pretensions—create our own future, alone.

Theologians, as they should, make passable stabs at systematizing all this. They boil it down into its crystallized form. Some of us outliers memorize these schemata. It hardens into backbone, sometimes, allowing us to live, flex, thrust, chase with the kinds of agile coherence that a healthy body manifests.

But in reality, redemption’s story is a drama, not a code.

Great forces act on us. Some deserve our worship or something close to that, others our disdain. We fool ourselves if we think we live alone. Autonomy, in the clear light of day, is a laughable self-deception that—oddly—can be sustained for a lifetime if a guy puts his mind to it.

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:3–6 NIV11)

The apostle Paul may well have gasped at his hearers’ resistance to the clarity of his gospel. The joy and trauma of the Damascus Road still clung to his clothes, his beard. He was a man heading south when Jesus turned him north. His intellect traced redemption’s sinews, but did not lead him from darkness to the light that was appropriately and in the first instance a blinding light. He was assaulted by grace, not the recipient of an emailed invitation to think about it.

How could people not believe in this Jesus whom Paul had come to adore, this glorious Son of Judaism’s divine Father, this Impress of God? This Mercy?

They are not merely blind, the apostle eventually concluded. That would merely beg more explanation, an unsatisfying step towards the infinite regression of loss.

More than blind, they have been blinded.

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

Yet the Great Game—if the second word elicits playfulness, we must discard it at once—has not just one barely discernible player, a ‘god of this age’ unmatched by beneficent power. Darkness and its prince claim their casualties, to be sure. Yet an invading Presence that despises darkness and floods it with light is also afoot amid these shadows and this light.

For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.

Paul’s allusion here is to Creation, but his point in invoking that prehistoric moment is to say that God’s creative work continues on. If it was a flash in the past, it also manifests itself in ongoing bursts of light. These continuing acts of creation, now seen in their redemptive results, illuminate human hearts and minds so that Glory is not just a thing out there, known only to heaven and its secretive forces.

Rather, it is seen and celebrated down here by those who once were blind but now can see.