FAIR Blog

I love Easter.

The events recounted in Scripture of the Easter story carry a one-two punch: the willing sacrifice of God’s own Son and then three days later His glorious resurrection! Every year the reality that Jesus sacrificed His life for me, well, it melts me!

A short story that breaks my heart every time is the Drawbridge Keeper. Speaking as a father, it is heartbreaking, but I also find it helpful in terms of grasping the emotions God must have felt watching His Son Jesus die on Good Friday. You may want to get a tissue before continuing to read.

The Drawbridge Keeper has been in circulation since December 1997. Thirty years earlier, in 1967, it was known as To Sacrifice a Son: An Allegory, a short story written by Dennis E. Hensley and first published in the Michigan Baptist Bulletin.

There was once a bridge that spanned a large river. During most of the day the bridge sat with its length running up and down the river paralleled with the banks, allowing ships to pass through freely on both sides of the bridge. But at certain times each day, a train would come along and the bridge would be turned sideways across the river, allowing the train to cross it.

A switchman sat in a shack on one side of the river where he operated the controls to turn the bridge and lock it into place as the train crossed.

One evening as the switchman was waiting for the last train of the day to come, he looked off into the distance through the dimming twilight and caught sight of the train lights. He stepped onto the control and waited until the train was within a prescribed distance. Then he was to turn the bridge. He turned the bridge into position, but, to his horror, he found the locking control did not work. If the bridge was not securely in position, it would cause the train to jump the track and go crashing into the river. This would be a passenger train with MANY people aboard.

He left the bridge turned across the river and hurried across the bridge to the other side of the river, where there was a lever switch he could hold to operate the lock manually.

He would have to hold the lever back firmly as the train crossed. He could hear the rumble of the train now, and he took hold of the lever and leaned backward to apply his weight to it, locking the bridge. He kept applying the pressure to keep the mechanism locked. Many lives depended on this man’s strength.

Then, coming across the bridge from the direction of his control shack, he heard a sound that made his blood run cold. “Daddy, where are you?” His four-year-old son was crossing the bridge to look for him. His first impulse was to cry out to the child, “Run! Run!” But the train was too close; the tiny legs would never make it across the bridge in time.

The man almost left his lever to snatch up his son and carry him to safety. But he realized that he could not get back to the lever in time if he saved his son.

Either many people on the train or his own son – must die.

He took but a moment to make his decision. The train sped safely and swiftly on its way, and no one aboard was even aware of the tiny broken body thrown mercilessly into the river by the on rushing train. Nor were they aware of the pitiful figure of the sobbing man, still clinging to the locking lever long after the train had passed. They did not see him walking home more slowly than he had ever walked; to tell his wife how their son had brutally died.

Every time I read this story, I just have to sit and cry. I imagine losing my own child and just weep… but then I also start to think about God...

Can there be any wonder that He caused the earth to tremble and the skies to darken when His Son died? How does He feel when we speed along through life without giving a thought to what was done for us through Jesus Christ?

The tale of a son sacrificed for the salvation of many is best classified as an inspirational parable. It attempts to render God’s sacrifice of His Son Jesus understandable on a more direct level by relating it in terms of an earthly father’s anguish over having to make a comparable offering.

As a “Jesus died for us” parallel, the tale falters on one key point: Jesus did not go to his death as the result of an accident. Though the Heavenly Father did give up His Son to save mankind (the way the drawbridge keeper sacrifices his child to spare the lives of strangers), the choice was not forced upon Him by circumstance. The death of Jesus Christ was predetermined; the Son was always fated to die for mankind’s sins. Some scholars find that inconsistency a sticking point with this allegory: they say it debases God’s planned sacrifice by presenting it as a spur-of-the-moment decision.

The fact that this was “predetermined” strikes me with greater force. As Isaiah 53:10 (NIV) states, “Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him...”

As followers of Christ we have entered into His death and resurrected life, and we now have an additional motivation for giving. I suggest that rather than a sense of compulsion we are blessed with the Spirit of God living within us, directing us as to both the need and amount to sacrifice.

This Easter, as you reflect upon Christ’s great sacrifice for you, consider your giving. I pray that all of our giving is in response to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and is guided by His Spirit to the needs that touch His heart.

FAIR can help you respond appropriately through its catalogue of projects and relief programs.