28 October 2012

If Grace is an Ocean


I have spent a good chunk of my time recently thinking about the idea of grace, mostly because the older I get the more I realize how desperately in need of grace I am. There is an interesting progression in the letters of the apostle Paul. By the end of his ministry, as he is penning the letters to his protégé Timothy, he writes that he is the foremost of all sinners, the chief of sinners. In other words, even as his ministry experience, righteousness, and good works increase, he comes to view himself as inadequate, desperately in need of the grace of Christ. Age shows us our brokenness and grace is what heals that brokenness. We also learn that we are weak. Nietzsche, Marx, and the other detractors from Christianity who disparage the faith for its utility as a balm or opiate against a harsh world are precisely half right. Christianity is indeed such a thing, but we are desperately in need of a balm.

There is a line in a recent hymn that tells its singers that “if grace is an ocean we’re all sinking.” I love this line, love this song, and it has pointed me to the reality of grace. Most of us, it seems to me, treat grace as if it were a faucet. We dirty ourselves with sin and then we go to the grace faucet and clean ourselves up. We go back out into the world, get dirty again, repeat.

What I have learned recently is how impoverished of a view of grace this is. This view treats grace as mere forgiveness. And grace, quite simply, is more than that. It is an ocean to drown in, not a faucet to clean ourselves in from time to time. And when you drown in an ocean of grace, sinning or not sinning is no longer the issue, precisely. The issue is giving room to grace, luxuriating in its bounty, its tendency to overflow into every part of our lives. Grace is not something we go to, it is, rather, something we cannot escape from.

There is a passage in the anonymous epistle to the Hebrews that I misinterpreted for nearly my entire life. It says the following:

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (4.14-16)

I used to zero in on that final verse, about approaching the throne of grace with confidence and I completely abstracted the preceding two verses from consideration. How I read this, then, was as follows: when you mess up, you can have confidence to go and get grace from God. So I would sin and then I would take comfort in this verse.

But this passage changes entirely if you consider verses 14-15, verses telling us how our Savior confronted the same temptations we faced when he was a man but refused to sin. It no longer is about grace after sinning, but grace to not sin. Grace to be different. God surely forgives us of the sins we still commit; the authority of Scripture is clear on this matter, but we do grace no favors to rob it of its central power: the power to no longer be held sway to sin in the same way. The power to drown in an ocean of grace. 

Forgiveness could be had under the law, obtained through ritual and sacrifice. But the grace to be different, comes through Christ and his perfection alone. That perfection is our heritage, and that grace our treasure.

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