Grace

Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I am one of those people. I think back to not too long ago to who I was-resentful, wound tight with anger, a single hardened link in a long chain of ungrace learned from family and church. Now I am trying in my own small way to pipe the tune of grace. I do so because I know, more surely than I know anything that any pang of healing or forgiveness or goodness I have ever felt comes solely from the grace of God. I long for the church of Christ to become a nourishing culture of that Grace. I sometime let my mind wander and imagine a world without any forgiveness. What would happen if every child bore grudges against his or her parent, and every family passed down feuds to future generations? I let my imagination run further, to a world in which every former colony harbours grudges against its former imperial power, and every race hates every race, and every tribe battles its rivals all if all of history’s grievance amass behind every contact of nation, race and tribe. I get depressed when I imagine such a scene because its seems so close to history as it now exist. As a Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt said, the only remedy for inevitability of history is forgiveness; otherwise, we remain trapped in the predicament of irreversibility. Not to forgive imprisons me in the past and locks out all potential for change. I thus yield control to another, my enemy and doom myself to suffer the consequence of the wrong.
We forgive not merely to fulfil some higher law of morality; we do it for ourselves. As Lewis Smedes points out “the first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiving. When we genuinely forgive we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us. More often than that not forgiveness is directly connected with grace, if one does not have grace it is impossible to separated the wrong from the doer. A friend of mine questions whether forgiveness of those who have not repented makes sense. This man daily sees the result of evil from child abuse, drugs, violence and prostitution “if I know something is wrong and forgive without addressing the wrong what am I doing? He asks “I am potentially enabling rather than freeing”. My opinion is that Justice has a good, righteous and rational kind of power. The power of grace is different: unworldly, transforming, supernatural. Grace is unmerited, undeserved favour that roll away burden of guilt. The New Testament shows a resurrected Jesus leading peter by the hand through a three-fold ritual of forgiveness, after all he did Jesus knew peter didn’t need to go through life as the one who betrayed the son of God. Forgiveness breaks the cycle of blame and loosens the stranglehold of guilt, its accomplishes these two things through a remarkable linkage placing the forgiver on the same side as the party who did the wrong. Does grace apply to a helpless child who was abused? Is the message of grace relevant to man who was wrongly imprisoned twenty years for a crime he didn’t commit? It must be, or black South Africa, Yugoslavia will have no hope of living together. As so many abused children learn, without forgiveness we cannot free ourselves from the grip of the past, this same principle applies to all circumstance and it can only be done if you see like God sees, God loves us regardless of ourselves, nothing you do can separate us from his love, I have come to this one understanding that when we sin, we hurt ourselves but God in his infinite grace is always ever willing to forgive us.
There is one catch to grace that I must mention in the words of C.S.Lewis, “God gives where he finds empty hands”. A man whose hands are full of parcels can’t receive a gift; grace in other words must be received. Lewis explains that grace abusers stems from confusion of condoning and forgiving, to condone evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it is good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete; and a person who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness. There are two types of guilty people; the ones who acknowledge their wrong and the ones who expect the offended to understand their point of view. These two groups of people are converging in a scene recorded in John 8. The incident takes place in the temple court where Jesus is teaching, a group of Pharisees and teachers of the law interrupt this church service by dragging in a woman caught in adultery, adultery takes two, but the woman stands alone before Jesus. John makes its clear that the accusers have less interest in punishing a crime than in setting a trap for Jesus, and quite a clever trap it is. Moses’ law specifies death by stoning for adultery, yet Roman law forbids the Jews from carrying out execution; will Jesus obey Moses or Rome? All eyes fixed on Jesus at that moment Jesus does something unique he bends down and writes on the ground with his finger. John does not tell us what Jesus wrote on the ground. In his movie of the life of Jesus, Cecil B. Demille depicts him spelling out the names of various sins; adultery, murder, pride, greed, lust. Each time Jesus writes a word a few Pharisees file away. Thus in a brilliant stroke Jesus replaces the two assumed categories; self righteous and guilty (sinners who admit their sins and sinners who deny. Far more problematic were people like the Pharisees who denied or repressed guilt, they too needed hands empty for grace. I sincerely believe those who find it hard to forgive others and move on are the ones who cannot forgive themselves when they do wrong. If a person believes in God’s grace they will forgive people and move on. As much as we sometimes try to over look this, but Grace is very vital if you want to work in love.