In the early 1980s, when Bob Dylan embraced Gospel music shaped by a newfound Christian faith, he famously sang, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” In less poetic terms, that means we’re all held captive to something.
It’s tricky, this captivity. It may be that having money—or its inverse, living simply—becomes what identifies Christians more than Christ. We could be held captive to self-disgust as we age—or to its inverse, the cult of skin serums and neck lifts that promise youth for a little while longer.
As David Zahl puts it in his latest book, The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World, “The great question is not if we are captives, but how we approach our captivity.”
I, for one, was reading so much news around last year’s presidential election and in the first months of the new administration that I thought I was held captive by the next headline. I gave up news for Lent and filled the void by looking for vintage T-shirts on Facebook Marketplace and making trip wish lists to Morocco on Airbnb. It turns out I, maybe like you, am held captive by distraction.
We’re captive to this or that habit or obsession because we’re bored, maybe, or numbed out. We’re tired or wanting a minute to ourselves. Zahl argues that the only way out of our personal and collective captivity, whatever its flavor, is grace. Like we crave food, Zahl says, “we crave grace because it answers our real, objective spiritual predicaments: guilt, lack of love, death, separation from God.”
Grace—the unconditional love God showers upon undeserving sinners—is a core biblical tenet that every Christian knows and that few take time to carefully consider. And I may be projecting here, but even if some of us understand grace theologically, few consider its power to help untie the knots that bind us to our disordered desire and captivity.
“Grace,” writes Zahl, “is the most evergreen reason that people become Christians, and it is the most compelling reason for remaining one.”
What you find in the Christian faith that you cannot find elsewhere is what my neighbor and plenty of other modern people besides have found: the Big Relief of God’s saving grace, which is to say, the gospel of Jesus Christ. Grace is the most important, most urgent, and most radical contribution Christianity has to make to the life of the world—to your life and mine!
Zahl, an author and director of Mockingbird Ministries, describes himself in the book as a “fairly comfortable middle-aged husband and father of three.” Despite a high degree of cultural literacy, he comes across as a “normie” dad who takes his kids to sports practice and loads the dishwasher after a long day at the office.
Zahl is not trying to put on an air of over-intellectualism in these pages—the writing style in The Big Relief is as approachable and practical as its ideas. Zahl is also pastoral. I wrote in the margins of my copy, complete with all-caps emphasis, “I feel MINISTERED to as I read.”
“We are all chasing relief,” Zahl argues. “The experience of being a person is, in many ways, the experience of craving and seeking relief. We want out from under, room to breathe, if just for a little while.” In each chapter, Zahl breaks down the theology of grace, illustrating the particular forms of relief it brings. (Chapter titles include “Favor: The Release from Rejection” and “Rest: The Relief from Keeping Up.”)
Zahl notes that “relief is not a word often associated with God today, at least not with the God of Christianity.” For many people, he says, religion “feels less like a place to seek refuge than a system to seek refuge from.” That hasn’t been Zahl’s experience of church, which he describes as “the place I go when there is no place left to go.” But instead of analyzing reasons the church is failing, Zahl finds hope for its future through the lens of grace, calling it “the Big Relief at the heart of Christianity.”
The book should appeal to a wide range of readers, whether they experience the church as a place of refuge or long to break free of its grip. Zahl covers themes so broadly relatable—like rejection, regret, guilt, status anxiety, and “keeping up” with neighbors and peers—that nearly everyone should find at least some welcome insight or encouragement. (For most readers, of course, certain topics will resonate more than others. In my case, having long ago thrown in the towel on meeting the world’s standards of productivity, I found myself less interested in Zahl’s chapter on play as a release valve.)
In some of Zahl’s most incisive sections, he looks at matters of favor and guilt through the lens of contemporary politics. “The pressure to belong—to be both loved and liked by others—is less of a pressure and more of a longing,” he writes. “The most popular road to belonging today is probably politics. … When political arguments get overheated, it behooves those of us on the sidelines to remember that, for some people, it’s not just policies at stake but personal acceptance.”
Here, Zahl drills down to our emotional motivations for taking sides, the dynamics of which look a lot like the playground and the high school lunchroom. We long to be liked, and advertising our political opinions and affiliations can seem like the surest path to belonging.
Yet taking this path also courts the risk of alienation from friends or family members on the other side of the political aisle. As Zahl explains, we find relief from these tensions by resting in the grace of belonging first to Christ. “The Big Relief reverses the order of belonging,” he writes. “In a setting of grace, belonging precedes behavior. … Grace makes the first move.”
Zahl, in his chapter on the grace of Christ’s atonement, is also insightful in connecting our political passions and divisions to the weight of guilt we carry. Here, Zahl holds both progressive and conservative readers to account with a refreshing reminder that, whatever our politics, guilt is a driving force in how we identify politically and who we identify with.
“Guilt,” he writes, “is more a default state of being, exerting constant pressure and wreaking havoc on mental health. In left-of-center circles, many people feel pressure to demonstrate contrition and regret over cycles of injustice. In right-of-center circles, many people feel pressure to assert their innocence and reject any framework that might imply otherwise.” For members of either circle, Zahl argues, relief comes from the “once and for all atonement of Calvary,” which takes our guilt off our shoulders.
Despite its focus on contemporary sources of anxiety and captivity, The Big Relief is generationally ecumenical. Gen Xers in particular (Zahl’s own cohort) will find plenty of Easter eggs, including subheads riffing on records from alternative rock bands like The Replacements and Pavement. One especially resonant section recalls classic ’90s-era college campus debates on postmodernism and moral relativism.
Zahl leaves us with a warning to be careful, cautioning that “grace can become a new test of purity.” We can waste time running after a specific act of God’s grace instead of discovering it in life’s more mundane expressions.
I’ve seen people I love chase a dramatic form of grace—something miraculous, maybe, like a radical healing or revival—for extended periods. This can leave them insular and disconnected from family. Even worse, it can tempt them to look for tangible gifts of grace more than they look to the God who grants them.
Zahl reminds us that grace, like so many good gifts, is usually delivered in boring circumstances—in other words, in real life. Remember Zahl’s central question here: not “if we are captives, but how we approach our captivity.” As a captive to my own internal and external desires, I appreciate Zahl’s timely reminder that I, and others burdened like me, have never been freer.
Sara Billups is the Seattle-based author of Orphaned Believers: How a Generation of Christian Exiles Can Find the Way Home and the forthcoming Nervous Systems: Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in Your Body, the Church, and Politics. She writes at Bitter Scroll on Substack.
