Last night I was thinking about grace and I was reminded of a story I read in Rumors of Another World by Philip Yancey. He writes...
Nelson Mandela taught the world a lesson in grace when, after emerging from prison after twenty-seven years and being elected president of South Africa, he asked his jailer to join him on the inauguration platform. He then appointed Archbishop Desmond Tutu to head an official government panel with a daunting name, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Mandela sought to defuse the natural pattern of revenge that he had seen in so many countries where one oppressed race or tribe took control from another.
For the next two-and-a-half years, South Africans listened to reports of atrocities coming out of the TRC hearings. The rules were simple: if a white policeman or army officer voluntarily faced his accusers, confessed his crime, and fully acknowledged his guilt, he could not be tried and punished for that crime. Hard-liners grumbles about the obvious injustice of letting criminals go free, but Mandela insisted that the country needed healing even more than it needed justice.
At one hearing, a policeman named van de Broek recounted an incident when he and other officers shot an eighteen-year-old boy and burned the body, turning it on the fire like a piece of barbecue meat in order to destroy the evidence. Eight years later van de Broek returned to the same house and seized the boy's father. The wife was forced to watch as policeman bound her husband on a woodpile, poured gasoline over his body, and ignited it.
The courtroom grew hushed as the elderly woman who had lost first her son and then her husband was given a chance to respond. "What do you want from Mr. van de Broek?" the judge asked. She said she wanted van de Broek to go to the place where they burned her husband's body and gather up the dust so she could give him a decent burial. His head down, the policeman nodded agreement.
Then she added a further request, "Mr. van de Broek took all my family away from me, and I still have a lot of love to give. Twice a month, I would like for him to come to the ghetto and spend a day with me so I can be a mother to him. And I would like Mr. van de Broek to know that he is forgiven by God, and that I forgive him too. I would like to embrace him so he can know my forgiveness is real."
Spontaneously, some in the courtroom began singing "Amazing Grace" as the elderly woman made her way to the witness stand, but van de Broek did not hear the hymn. He had fainted, overwhelmed.
When I read stories like this I began to realize how I often sell the idea of grace short, and I don't think I am the only one. Webster's defines grace as: A) beauty or charm of form and movement B) a delay granted for payment of an obligation C) a short prayer of tanks for a meal D) a title of an archbishop.
I think we could agree that to Christ grace means a lot more than any of these definitions. Yet even when we think of grace in divine terms, I don't think we quite grasp its meaning. Grace is not only what He did for us, it's what we do for others. This is where it gets difficult because true grace is considerably more costly than just tolerating the person who stole your parking space at the mall and infinitely more demanding than choosing to overlook the customer service representative who was a little rude to you.
Yancey says that true grace is shocking and even scandalous. It shakes our standards with its insistence on getting close to sinners and touching them with mercy and hope. And not just "sinners" in general, grace chooses to forgive those closest to us. Those who have truly let us down, those who have brought havoc into our lives with their careless words or selfish actions, those who stole the things most precious to us, those who cheated us, lied to us, and left us with nothing but pain. Grace forgives the unfaithful spouse, the racist, the child abuser and grace loves today's AIDS-ridden addict as much as Jesus loved the tax collectors, adulterers, and prostitutes of his day.
This kind of grace is difficult to even think about and truly impossible to pull off on our own. It can only come from Christ who is at work in our lives. That's why true grace is more than just a nice idea or a pretty word, it is revolutionary. This kind of grace will transform lives, restore marriages, unify the church, and truly change the world.
"Don't let evil conquer you, but conquer evil by doing good" - Romans 12:21
