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Grace is the radical idea at the heart of the Christian faith. So radical, in fact, that some people find it difficult to understand. Others find it impossible to accept. And those who embrace it spend a lifetime working out the radical implications of grace in every aspect of life. Grace changes everything.
Grace is radical because it cuts across the way we expect – even demand – our world to operate. That is, we expect to be treated fairly. This is true from our earliest days through adulthood. Small children implore their parents to enforce equal playing time with the favorite toy du jour, and quickly develop an uncanny ability to detect when their sister’s bowl of ice cream contains a teaspoon more than their own. Students expect teachers to grade their work impartially and accurately. Workers expect to be rewarded for their accomplishments.
The flipside of our vigilant insistence that we be treated fairly – that we get what we deserve – is that we are constantly evaluating ourselves based upon some aspect of our performance. After all, if I expect to be treated fairly, I need to make sure I’m doing whatever is necessary to ensure that others will treat me the way I would like. As a result, our sense of self-worth and significance inevitably becomes dependent upon how well we are measuring up to whatever standard we have set for ourselves. It may be an explicitly religious standard, whether right rituals, right beliefs, or right behaviors. Most often, it is a seemingly irreligious standard. How successful is my career? How happy is my marriage? How good of a parent am I? How wealthy am I? How attractive am I? How exciting is my life? How secure is my future?
And since we expect to get what we deserve, we also – whether consciously or not – ensure that others get what they deserve as well. In our marriages, we lavish or withhold affection based upon the degree to which our spouse is meeting our needs and expectations. In society, we distinguish between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, allocating aid accordingly.
But the reality is that none of us can live up to whatever standard we set for ourselves. And nobody else can live up to the expectations we impose upon them either. These performance gaps lead to a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction with ourselves, and a growing trail of broken relationships in our wake.
Into the midst of our world of incessant evaluation and striving comes good news that is as counterintuitive as it is radical: God isn’t fair. He doesn’t treat us as we deserve. Because He loves us, He treats us far better than we deserve. Bono summed up the idea this way:
“Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff.”
At the heart of the message of grace is what Christians believe to be the central event in the history of God’s dealings with humanity, namely the self-sacrificial death upon a Roman cross of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God – that is, God Himself in the flesh. The event of the cross is both mysterious and multifaceted. Not only is it the act by which God somehow reconciles humanity to Himself, it is also an act of revelation. Through the cross, God reveals to us what He thinks about our performance. (Hint: it’s worse than we think) But through the cross God also reveals to us the astounding measure of His love for us. The cross is God’s megaphone of grace. Through it, God shouts to us without ambiguity that He doesn’t love us because of what we do; He loves us in spite of what we do.
Being children of grace means that we are members of a family working out together the radical implications in every aspect of life of our Father’s passionate, relentless, sacrificial love for us. This involves seeking, bit by bit, to displace identities based upon how much we do with one based upon how much we are loved. And since being recipients of God’s grace motivates and empowers us to be conduits of God’s grace, children of grace also seek to abandon the self-protective habit of loving others based upon what they do, and are instead learning to freely love others in spite of what they do.
We are children of grace
We are participants in a story
We are agents of reconciliation
