Not long ago I sat in a restaurant and listened to yet another variation on a familiar theme. A good friend of mine, whom I’ll call Daniel, confided that he had decided to leave his wife after 15 years of marriage. He had found someone younger and prettier, someone who “makes me feel alive, like I haven’t felt in years.”
Daniel, a Christian, knew well the personal and moral consequences of what he was about to do. His decision to leave would inflict permanent damage on his wife and three children. Even so, he said, the force pulling him toward the younger woman was too strong to resist.
I listened to his story with sadness and grief. Then, during the dessert course, he dropped the bombshell: “The reason I wanted to see you tonight was to ask you a question. Do you think God can forgive something as awful as I am about to do?”
Scandalous Grace
Historian and art critic Robert Hughes tells of a convict sentenced to life imprisonment on a maximum security island off the coast of Australia. One day, with no provocation, he turned on a fellow prisoner he barely knew and beat him to death. The murderer was shipped to the mainland to stand trial, where he gave a straightforward, passionless account of the crime, showing no sign of remorse. “Why?” asked the bewildered judge. “What was your motive?”
The prisoner replied that he was sick of life on the island, a notoriously brutal place, and that he saw no reason to keep on living. “Yes, yes, I understand all that,” said the judge. “I can see why you might drown yourself in the ocean. But why murder?”
“Well, it’s like this,” said the prisoner. “I’m a Catholic. If I commit suicide I’ll go straight to hell. But if I murder I can come back here and confess to a priest before my execution. That way, God will forgive me.”
Do we fully appreciate the scandal of unconditional grace? How can I dissuade my friend Daniel from committing a terrible mistake if he knows forgiveness lies just around the corner? Or, why not murder if you know in advance you will be forgiven?
The scandal of grace must have haunted the apostle Paul as he wrote the Book of Romans. The first three chapters ring down condemnation on every class of human being, concluding, “There is no one righteous, not even one.” The next two chapters unveil the miracle of a grace so boundless that, as Paul says, “where sin increased, grace increased all the more.”
Paul’s tone changes in chapter six. I can almost see the apostle staring at the papyrus and scratching his head, thinking to himself, “Wait a minute! What have I said?” What’s to keep a murderer, adulterer, or common sinner from exploiting God’s lavish promise of “forgiveness in advance”?
More than once in the next few chapters Paul returns to this logical predicament: “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” To such a devious question he has a brief answer, “By no means!” (or, as the King James Version has it, “God forbid!”) and a lengthy one. What Paul keeps circling around in those dense, wonderful chapters (6–8) is, quite simply, the scandal of grace.
A Father’S Open Arms
Steven Spielberg’s film version of The Color Purple includes a moving portrayal of a parable of grace. Sugar, a sexy, knock-’em-dead nightclub singer, who works out of a ramshackle bar by the side of a river, is the classic prodigal daughter. Her father, a minister who preaches hellfire and brimstone in a church just across the way, has not spoken to her in years.
One day as Sug is crooning “I’ve got something to tell you” in the bar, she hears the church choir answer, as if antiphonally, “God’s got something to tell you!” Pricked by nostalgia or guilt, Sug leads her band to the church and marches down the aisle just as her father mounts the pulpit to preach on the prodigal son.
The sight of his long-lost daughter silences the minister, and he glowers at the procession coming down the aisle. “Even us sinners have soul,” Sug explains, and hugs her father, who hardly reacts. Ever the moralist, he cannot easily forgive a daughter who has shamed him so.
The Hollywood portrayal, however, altogether misses the main point of the biblical parable. In Jesus’ version the father does not glower, but rather searches the horizon, desperate for any sign of his wayward child. It is the father who runs, throws his arm around the prodigal, and kisses him.
By making a sinner the magnanimous hero, Hollywood dodges the scandal of grace. In truth, what blocks forgiveness is not God’s reticence—“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him”—but ours. God’s arms are always extended; we are the ones who turn away.
Forgiveness As Our Problem
Here is what I told my friend Daniel: “Can God forgive you? Of course. Read your Bible. David, Peter, Paul—God builds his church on the backs of people who murder, commit adultery, deny him, and persecute his followers.
“But because of Christ, forgiveness is now our problem, not God’s. What we have to go through to commit sin distances us from God—we change in the very act of rebellion—and there is no guarantee we will come back. You ask me about forgiveness now, but will you even want it later, especially if it involves repentance?”
Several months after our conversation, Daniel made his choice. I have yet to see any evidence of repentance. Now he tends to rationalize his decision as a way of escaping an unhappy marriage. He has rejected most of his Christian friends—“Too narrow-minded,” he says—and looks instead for people who celebrate his newfound liberation.
To me, though, Daniel does not seem very liberated. The price of his “freedom” has meant turning his back on those who cared about him most. He also tells me God is not a part of his life right now. “Maybe later,” he says.
God took a great risk by announcing forgiveness in advance. It occurs to me, though, that the scandal of grace involves a transfer of that risk to us. As George MacDonald put it, we are condemned not for the wicked things we have done, but for not leaving them.
