Scandalous Grace
Grace is scandalous. The more you plumb its depths, the more you realize this. I found myself contemplating this reality a few weeks ago. It struck me how utterly dependent on God we all really are.
It was one of the beautiful October days we experienced a few weeks ago. The air was dry and light, the breeze containing just a hint of coolness. It was all complemented by a good dose of Vitamin D offered by the sun's gentle warmth. As if on cue, leaves had begun to change and fall, only to flitter down the street on my slow, aimless walk. The beauty of it all moved me. The orchestration of it all amazed me. Nature knows its lines and delivers them to perfection without rehearsal.
I was suddenly aware of the rise and fall of my chest. Each inhale a gift. Each exhale an offering of praise. It was there, on a sidewalk one October morning I was taken back by the scandal of grace.
We often mistake grace for forgiveness. Grace is so often conflated into a judicial act of pardon by a kind judge who chooses to overlook the violence we've committed to those God loves. This incomplete picture of grace fails to see its comprehensive beauty. While yes, an act of divine mercy is undoubtedly a grace, this is not the limit of grace's intrusion into our world.
Grace is God acting on our behalf, doing for us things we can't or won't do for ourselves. We get what we don't deserve and what we could never have provided for ourselves in grace. It does not just take away. It adds. In grace, we obtain things precious and unobtainable. It is God sustaining us, nourishing us, surprising us, and loving us. A life of grace understands that all things good and beautiful flow from God. Perhaps this is why Jesus gladly adopts the pervasive first-century imagery of God as Father. God acts, grace flows freely. And we, the recipients, stand as beloved children.
“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”
It is in God's endless generosity and our surprising powerlessness that grace becomes a scandal. We tend to regard human beings as the primary movers of history. Both personally and as a society, we are masters of our destiny. Everything rises and falls on our efforts, ability, and wits. Raw human power sustains us—an anthropology of Invictus. Work hard. Be smart. Create success.
Grace undermines all of that. All good things, even those given to the wicked, become gifts given by God and given just as generously as they are indiscriminately. The Hitlers, Pol Pots, and other vile representatives of the human race are all recipients of copious amounts of God's grace. Heaps of God's divine favor. They were allowed to revel in the same beauty you and I are.
When framed this way, we begin to tug on the thread underlying our hesitation to lean into the reality of God's grace. Its embrace is far more vast, its reach far more comprehensive, and its benevolence far more indiscriminate than we are comfortable with. If we can keep grace neatly within the confines of forgiveness, we can cling to our self-righteousness. Like resetting a video game, the limited version of grace gives us a fresh start, and "we can take it from here, thank you very much. We will do much better this time—certainly better than 'them.'"
At root, we so badly, maybe even subconsciously, want to believe we have earned or deserved grace. Perhaps not because we are good in God's eyes, but we are at least better than "them." Like the anthropology of Invictus, God gives me grace because I am somehow more worthy of it than the "other." Grace won't be wasted on me. We would perhaps never say this out loud, but when we frame God's grace in terms of our enemies, our internal gut check is undeniable. Surely grace is for "us," not "them."
Yet grace is there for "them" too, offered in spades just as it is to us. And in this, we find the bedrock of Christian theology. God is a God of grace because God is love.
We know God, experience God, and anything (goodness, beauty, love, etc.) that comes from God because God is constantly giving Godself to us —all grace. All realities we cannot conjure, coerce, earn or deserve. Our efforts get us the same grace the wicked's lack of effort does—our existence, our salvation, our flourishing, all dependent on the whims of God. An affront to the 21st-century mind, to be sure.
But when we keep going, through the scandal, we come out the other side, emerging into the reality of God's love. And there we can rest and delight. Here we discover that we have been attempting to coerce or circumvent God all along. When we embrace the scandal of grace, we realize we never needed to arrive because we were born into the center of where we have always needed to be—the center of God's restorative love.
In the end, we are reminded that our God is a God of grace because God is a God of love. God extends Godself to the beloved creation, bestowing goodness, beauty, and grace to her, restraining the full measure of chaos and darkness. Offering each of us, and all of us, real hope and genuine love.
