Grace. (1 of 3)

[Some thoughts on grace, excerpted from personal correspondence.]

All right.

You ready? Sit down for this one, it's gonna be long. Feel free to read thru in a few sittings.

I have been wanting to get back to this question, for quite some time.

Grace is such a difficult thing to talk about, primarily because it is so mystical (mystical in the purest, least "religiousy" way possible... mystical in the sense of transcending what we are used to thinking about), so personal, and so rarely seen. That said, I think that the core of Christian faith and belief must be Grace: so it is also an incredibly important thing to talk about. So I'll try.

Let me see... OK. First things first: I am gonna say what I think Grace is, including what it's not, where it comes from (both in a mundane and divine way, though [as you could probably guess] I think the two are actually the same), and then, based on those beliefs/definitions, address some questions commonly raised.

What Is Grace?
I think the simplest and most impactful definition I've heard is simply this: Grace is receiving what we don't deserve. But packed into that definition (really more of a description, actually), is a lot of mind-twisting thought.

For one: by definition, we cannot deserve grace. And thus, grace is something that cannot be worked for; nor can it be pursued, strived for (one of my favorite Bible verses says that "equality with God is not something to be grasped"), or earned in any way. This is one of the biggest, worst, most fundamental mistakes that people (even many of the Christian faithful) make: they confuse the grace of and from God with something that we work to get. And so you get people "doing the right things" to "stay out of hell".

Nahhhhh.

[Side note: there is a point to doing "good" things, even after receiving grace: doing good things is a response to receiving Grace. It serves as a sort of sign that receiving Grace has changed us, and that it has really impacted our lives in a meaningful and life-altering fashion (another favorite verse says, "faith without works is dead").]

So, grace is something that we don't deserve, but that we receive. More than that: Grace is something that we don't deserve, but we need. It is literally vital to us: without grace, not only will we die, but we are dead. Grace is like the air in CPR, being breathed into unresponsive lungs. The lungs are made for that air, will quickly die and atrophy without it, but cannot, on their own, pull that needed air into themselves.

Why is this? It seems stupid for something to be made (humans) that intrinsically need something that they cannot grab hold of (grace), right? What kind of designer (ahh shades of "intelligent design" rhetoric... sorry.) would do something as stupid and broken as that?

Why Do We Need Grace?
Well, it comes back to a pretty oft-repeated topic: sin. What we humans nowadays consider to be our "natural" state is not the state of our nature as intended at creation (and I don't mean some dogmatic anti-scientific Creationist creation, either, I mean, at the metaphysical point where God designed the human). We were created to love God and to be loved by God; to know our Creator and be known by the Creator. But at some point in the history of our race - a point that is repeated in each of our individual lives - we broke ourselves. We were greedy, or fearful, or weak in some other way, and we heeded our own understanding of our purpose instead of the understanding of our Creator. And so we removed ourselves from that love, care, and nurture that was supposed to be the air in our spiritual lungs, replacing it with some noxious fluid of our own creation. And so now we lie, on the beach of this earth, gasping for nourishment. It is my fault, not the Creator's.

But, thank God (literally), the Creator still has a purpose for us; God still holds onto God's perfect love for us, despite our having abandoned it. So God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves: the Creator seizes the Creation and provides for us. It is my absolute and convicted belief that the way in which God provided that Grace (which is, really, a sub-heading of the greater umbrella of Love) is by a living act of sacrifice, the act and person of Jesus Christ.

Because, you see, Grace is free and offered to all (we'll get to it), but it is not cheap: to breath air into a victim's lungs, the person administering CPR must sacrifice her own air, right? It takes work to resuscitate the near-dead.

So this great illness that besets us - this fragmented person, this broken identity, this thing that is not as it ought to be - has to be made right, at some great cost; and, in the Christian faith, that cost was Jesus Christ, a perfect God and a sinless (and hence unbroken) Man, condescending to our level and taking our sins on himself. Dirtying himself, to clean us off. Which we in no way deserved, but which God wanted to give us. No child deserves a present - have they ever truly earned it? - but yet good parents love to give good things to their capricious children :)

[Next: Who gets Grace? And then - closing questions.]