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But it doesn't stop there. The God who runs toward us—the wrongdoers— also demands we do the same with those who have wronged us. So there is a social meaning to the cross. Divine grace obli-gates. In his book The Real Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson argues that the core of the gospel is found at the end of the Gospels in the story of the crucifixion. The significance of the crucifixion is not only what God does for us; consistently throughout the New Testament the crucifixion is portrayed as the pattern that we are to follow. It is a model of social behavior toward the other as well as a statement about what God has done for us.

How does a theology of embrace apply to conflicts in places such as Bosnia and Northern Ireland?
The basic challenge in all these conflicts—indeed, the basic challenge in all human conflicts—is the same one identified in the story of the Prodigal: the relationship between justice and peace, liberation and reconciliation, law and grace. Do you call first for justice, then peace? First liberation, then reconciliation? Or is it the other way around?

When I read the Prodigal story, I saw that the primacy was given to grace, embrace, reconciliation. Not cheap reconciliation—"nothing that happened between us matters, so let's hug each other and everything's going to be okay." Everything wouldn't be okay. But also not the pursuit of what you might call "strict justice." As a way of resolving problems between people, this simply will not work, because strict justice is impossible in the real world in which we live. The stage on which we fight for justice was partly built by unjust means, and the fight for justice itself always and inescapably creates new injustice. If our relationships are governed by the idea of strict justice, they will never be healed.

Instead, I see in this story a dual emphasis. One can distinguish in it the will to embrace and the embrace itself. The will to embrace the other is absolutely indiscriminate and unconditional. It does not depend on anything that the other person has done, and it applies to every and any individual. The Prodigal's father runs toward his son; he is willing to embrace him no matter what the son will say. The will is there. And yet the full reconciliation takes place after the Prodigal's confession. It takes confession for the Prodigal to be transformed into a son.

The grace we see demonstrated here affirms justice in the act of transcending it. Just as forgiveness always entails blame (try offering forgiveness to somebody who thinks he or she has done no wrong!), similarly, every act of grace entails affirmation of justice precisely in the act of transcending the claims of justice.

But it still takes two to embrace.
Yes. The offer of embrace can be there, but there must also be a willingness on the part of the other party to belong to the relationship and to behave in a way that builds rather than undermines the relationship. Consider the relationships between the father and the Prodigal and the older brother and the Prodigal. It took the willingness of both the father and the younger son before their embrace could take place. But the older son did not will to embrace. Therefore, no embrace followed, at least as far as the story goes.

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October 26 1998, Vol. 42, No. 12