From the Vicars Pen August
Grace is a lovely word, I think. It is used in the scripture frequently. It is also used in church. Perhaps it’s a churchy word, a holy word but maybe we should be thinking of it much more beyond the world of the church? What is grace anyway? What does it mean? What does grace look like?
To start off, here are two examples of what grace looks like in the life of Jesus. When people saw Zacchaeus, a tax collector, they saw a greedy, intimidating, bullying crook. When Jesus saw Zacchaeus, he saw a small man who was rich by his ill-gotten gains but lonely and isolated, so he invited himself to dinner with Zacchaeus and the tax collector changed completely. That is what grace looks like.
When Jesus was being crucified people saw the soldiers hammering the nails as evil, fearsome, unthinking brutes, servants of the Roman occupying
force. When Jesus saw those soldiers looming over him he saw men, brutalised by violence, blindly following orders who deserved forgiveness and encouragement to live in a new way and so, as the nails ripped into his flesh, he forgave them. That is what grace looks like. Grace is undeserved mercy. In the life of Jesus grace is seen in his generosity of spirit, his willingness and desire to take a moment to look carefully at people and situations. Jesus did not order his world as we do, by labelling people. He did not order his world by only seeing things and people as being either good or bad. He did not order his world by counting people as either in or out of my tribe, my team, my social class, my religion, my political party and so on. Jesus ordered his world by loving everyone and that only happens when you are full of grace, when you take time to see the glimmer of goodness, or even the glimmer of the possibility of goodness, in all people. God in Jesus loves all which obviously includes you and me.
A famous song of the 1960’s said that ‘What the world needs now is love, sweet love’. We would all agree, as we hopefully begin to emerge from a pandemic. The world will start being full of love when we start filling it with grace sweet grace, a generosity of spirit which does not succumb to labelling or lazy binary thinking, that is not swept along by the tide of public opinion because public opinion is sometimes ill-informed as so much of it is manipulated these days by influential people to further their own ends.
What you and I as individuals, our families, our communities and our world need now is grace, sweet grace. Like me, you might have experienced God’s grace at several points in your life. God’s grace is amazingly overflowing in good days and not so good days. We trust in Him and His grace.