One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (14 page)

Reactivity would have killed the marriage. But by some miracle, Munson did not give her husband what he was asking for, which was a fight and a way to scapegoat her for the pain he was feeling. Nor did she try to make him pay for the hurt he was causing. Instead, for all intents and purposes, she turned the other cheek. And it was the key to their recovery. If you’ve ever been in her situation, you know how miraculous it is that she was able to stay quiet. But if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of such an act of mercy, you know it can move mountains. And if you haven’t, well, God’s forgiveness extends even to those of us who can’t keep our mouths shut. Or so they tell me.

TAKING US TO THE PHONE STORE: GRACE AND CHILDREN

When it comes to the raising of children, one-way love is both the easiest thing in the world and the hardest. How many of us have responded to the experience of becoming a parent for the first time by saying, “I finally understand how powerful and profound of a thing it is that God considers us His children!” The relationship we have with a baby, after all, is about as one-way as it gets. They need and we give, period. They have no illusions about their own power. The very idea that a baby might do something to deserve our love—other than exist—is laughable. It’s no coincidence that Jesus speaks so highly of children; he praises their ability to receive love.

It’s once our kids grow up that understanding the difference between law and grace becomes so difficult—but also so urgent. I’ll give you an example. I recently caught one of our sons doing some pretty bad stuff. Stuff that we had explicitly and repeatedly told him he was not allowed to do. This was willful defiance, and it was affecting his schoolwork and the rest of the family (sound familiar?).

Needless to say, he was not as convinced of the gravity of his misbehavior as his mother and I were. His unrepentant attitude was driving Kim and me crazy, so it was decided that his car keys and cell phone would be confiscated. We put him on social lockdown. If he wasn’t at school, he was to be at home. No exceptions. The law had to do its crushing work. He needed to realize the seriousness of what he had been getting involved in. Being the social butterfly that he is, social lockdown was his worst fear, so that was what we chose. To make things even worse, we sold his smartphone.

He wasn’t happy about any of this, and it wasn’t a walk in the park for Kim, me, or the other kids either. It actually made things harder. Without his phone and his friends, he haunted the house like a drug addict going through detox. He couldn’t help out by giving his brother and sister rides, so Kim and I had to go back to serving as chauffeurs.

A month or so after the clampdown had gone into effect, I was traveling back from a conference. Before I left, I had told my son, in my most earnest, authoritative-father voice, that there was only one thing he needed to do while I was gone and that was to not give his mother a hard time. If he didn’t give her any unnecessary headaches, when I got back, we might revisit the phone issue. Midway through my trip, I received a call from Kim, who told me that my request was not, shall we say, being respected.

I spent the plane ride home battling with God. I mean, really going back and forth with Him about what I should do. I knew I had to deal with the situation as soon as I returned. I was angry with my son for putting me in this situation, and I was tired of dealing with his ingratitude. But more than that, I wasn’t ready to give up control. Not remotely. And if there’s anything the law affords, it’s control.

Yet as I prayed about it, I felt that the Lord was clearly telling me that, despite appearances, it was time to relent. Time to give the boy his phone back. Every fiber of my being was resistant to such an action. I was afraid of what my son would do with his freedom. I know what I had always done in those situations—taken advantage—and I was too smart and too prideful to allow that to happen to me. Plus, he didn’t deserve to get his phone back. The one thing I had asked him to do, he hadn’t done. He’d understood the condition before I left: be good, and you’ll get a phone. Well, he hadn’t been good. So no phone. Very reasonable to me. I was looking for an excuse, any excuse, to keep the handcuffs on. That I was flying back from a conference where I had spoken about one-way love was not lost on me.

Well, I got home, called my son out of his room, and told him we needed to talk. I reminded him of everything I’d said before I left—the conditions under which he would get a phone. He looked at me very sheepishly, knowing he was guilty—again! I talked to him for a few minutes about life and choices and how much we loved him. He listened intently. Then I looked at him and said, “Now put your shoes on, and let’s go to the phone store and get you a new phone.”

He was completely shocked. His lip started to quiver, and he finally burst into tears. I asked him what was wrong. With tears streaming down his face, he looked at me and said, “But, Dad, I don’t deserve a phone.”

He was right. He didn’t deserve a phone. He didn’t deserve a pad of paper and a stamp. His words revealed that God knew a lot better than I how to handle my son. The contrition was genuine. The law had leveled him. It had shown him who he was in a way that left no doubt about his need. It was time for the Gospel, so to speak.

Notice that his humility did not precede the invitation. The chronology is crucial. His admission was not a condition for mercy; it was its fruit!

I looked at him and said, “Listen, son. God takes me to the phone store ten thousand times a day, and I have never ever deserved one.”

It was a happy day.

Now, before you line up to give me the father-of-the-year award, know that the reason I tell the story is because it was such a surprise to me too. My son had come by his rebelliousness honestly, after all. One of the main reasons his behavior bugged me so much was that he reminded me so much of myself—only he was so much sweeter! No, I am the chief of sinners here. I only tell the story for three reasons: One, it illustrates that the law
is
useful. But two, it illustrates how resistant we are to grace. We feel much safer with our hands on the wheel. I was so afraid that he would go nuts, that he would prove himself to be his father’s son once again. It was as hard for me to give up the sense of manageability the law provided as it was for him to lose his phone. It had to be taken from me. Three, the emotional response at being let off the hook was a powerful reminder that only grace can accomplish what the law demands, namely, only grace can produce a contrite heart.

To be clear, this does not mean that children never benefit from consequences. Of course not! My son certainly did. He needed the law to crush him. But then he needed a word of grace to cure him. Properly distinguishing the role and function of law and grace in parenting is crucial. I’ve tried to make clear throughout this book that both God’s Law and God’s Gospel are good and necessary, but both do very different things. Serious confusion—in both theology and daily life—happens when we fail to understand their distinct job descriptions. We’ll wrongly depend on the law to do what only the Gospel can do, and vice versa.

So, for example, in order to function as a community of five in our home, rules need to be established—laws need to be put in place. Our three kids know they can’t steal from one another. They have to share the computer. Since harmonious relationships depend on trust, they can’t lie. Because we have three cars and four drivers, my boys can’t simply announce that they are taking one of the cars. They have to ask ahead of time. And so on and so forth. Rules are necessary.

Still, Kim and I are under no illusions that telling them what they can and cannot do over and over again can change their hearts and make them
want
to comply. When one of our kids throws a temper tantrum (typically Genna), thereby breaking one of the rules, we can send her to her room and take away some of her privileges. And we do. But while this may rightly produce sorrow at the revelation of her sin, it does not have the power to remove her sin. In other words, the law can crush her, but it cannot cure her—it can kill its object, but it cannot make it alive. If Kim and I don’t follow up law with grace, Genna would be left without hope—defeated but not delivered. The Law illuminates sin but is powerless to eliminate sin. That’s not part of its job description. It points to righteousness but can’t produce it. It shows us what godliness is, but it cannot make us godly.

One final example, and we’ll move on.

At a dinner one evening, my friend Dr. Rod Rosenbladt told me a true story of how he’d wrecked his car when he was sixteen years old. Rod had been drinking, and in fact, he and his friends were all drunk. After the accident, Rod called his dad and the first thing his dad asked him was, “Are you all right?” Rod assured him that he was fine. Then he confessed to his father that he was drunk. Rod was naturally terrified about how his father might respond. Later that night, after Rod had made it home, he wept and wept in his father’s study. He was embarrassed, ashamed, and guilty. At the end of the ordeal, his father asked him this question: “How about tomorrow we go and get you a new car?”

Rod now says—and he has lived a lot of life, being nearly seventy at the time of this writing—that he became a Christian in that moment. God’s Grace became real to him in that moment of forgiveness and mercy. Rod has since spent his life as a servant of Christ, as spokesman for the theology of grace at Concordia Seminary and cohost on the
White Horse Inn
radio program. Rod’s father’s grace didn’t turn Rod into a drunk—it made him love his father and the Lord he served.

Now let me ask you: what would you like to say to Rod’s dad? Rod says that every time he tells that story in public, there are always people in the audience who get angry. They say, “Your dad let you get away with that? He didn’t punish you at all? What a great opportunity for your dad to teach you responsibility!”

Rod always chuckles when he hears that response and says, “Do you think I didn’t know what I had done? Do you think it wasn’t the most painful moment of my whole life up to that point? I was ashamed; I was scared. My father spoke grace to me in a moment when I knew I deserved wrath … and I came alive.”

Isn’t that the nature of grace? We know that we deserve punishment and then, when we receive mercy instead, we discover grace. Romans 5:8 reads, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (
KJV
). God gives us Grace. He gives forgiveness and imputes righteousness to us while we are weak, ungodly, sinful; while we are His enemies (Rom. 5:6, 8, 10). Our offenses are infinitely greater than a sixteen-year-old getting drunk and wrecking his car, yet God boasts about pouring out His one-way love on His undeserving children.

No one had to tell Rod to be sorry for his foolishness. No one had to tell Rod to be thankful that his dad didn’t repay him “as his sins deserved.” That one act of grace and mercy transformed him—and his whole life was changed by it. Because that’s what grace does. It is the only thing that can transform entitled boys and girls into grateful men and women.

So hurry up and throw on some shoes. The car’s running and the phone store awaits.

NOTES

CHAPTER 8

AN OFFENSIVE GIFT

The legendary antagonist of Hugo’s
Les Misérables
is the unrelenting and supremely competent inspector Javert. When we initially meet him, Javert is serving as a guard at the jail where Jean Valjean is imprisoned. When Valjean is given parole, it is Javert who insists that no matter where he goes or what he does, he will always be defined as a criminal. After the plot details recounted in chapter 4, Valjean breaks his parole and eventually assumes a false identity as mayor of a small town. A few years later, Javert, now promoted to the rank of inspector, recognizes his former prisoner and makes it his personal vendetta to bring him to justice. He does his job, but Valjean eludes him.

To say that Inspector Javert is committed to the rigorous inflexibility of the law would be an understatement. Javert does more than enforce the law—he embodies it. Indeed, mankind’s relationship with the law was actually one of the main themes of the book, according to Victor Hugo himself.
1
When they adapted the work for the stage, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg made this very clear. “Mine is the way of the law,” Javert sings early on.

Valjean refuses to play by the same rules of quid pro quo, going so far as to be gracious with Javert in their several encounters. Valjean’s treatment of him haunts and radically disorients Javert. In the climatic scene, instead of doing away with him once and for all, Valjean saves Javert’s life. Javert is utterly undone by this unexpected act of mercy. Hugo’s description of his inner conflict captures the offense of grace at its most visceral:

Jean Valjean confused him. All the axioms that had served as the supports of his life crumbled away before this man. Jean Valjean’s generosity toward him, Javert, overwhelmed him.… Javert felt that something horrible was penetrating his soul, admiration for a convict.… A beneficent malefactor, a compassionate convict, kind, helpful, clement, returning good for evil, returning pardon for hatred, loving pity rather than vengeance, preferring to destroy himself rather than destroy his enemy, saving the one who had struck him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, nearer angels than men. Javert was compelled to acknowledge that this monster existed.

This could not go on.…

All that [Javert] believed in was dissipating. Truths he had no wish for besieged him inexorably.… Authority was dead in him. He had no further reason for being.
2

The Law is ironclad. It does not make exceptions. It cannot abide mercy. Like a robot being given a directive that contradicts its programming, the law-addicted person has a complete meltdown when shown grace. Which is precisely what happened to Javert. In the same scene in the musical, he sings:

Damned if I’ll live in the debt of a thief …

I am the Law and the Law is not mocked …

Granting me my life today

this man has killed me even so.
3

For Javert, as with all of us, the logic of law makes sense. He has lived his entire life according to the if-then conditionality: if you do wrong, then you must be punished. This makes him, and us, feel safe. It’s easy to comprehend. It promotes a sense of manageability. And best of all, it keeps him, and us, in control. We get to keep our ledgers and scorecards. Javert would rather die than deal with the disorienting reality of the one-way love he receives from Valjean—so he jumps into the river, ending his life. He chooses death over grace, control over chaos.

Like Javert, we are, by nature, allergic to grace. The logic of grace is deeply offensive to our law-locked hearts. In fact, it isn’t really logic at all. It is more of a counterintuition that turns everything upside down and inside out. If the law says, “Good people get good stuff; bad people get bad stuff,” then grace says, “The bad get the best; the worst inherit the wealth; the slave becomes a son.”

Our initial response to one-way love tends to be one of shock and suspicion. We hear, “Of course you don’t deserve it, but I’m giving it to you anyway.” We wonder,
What is this really about? What’s the catch?
Internal bells and alarms start to go off, and we begin saying, “Wait a minute.… This sounds too good to be true.” Like Javert, we wonder about the ulterior motives of the excessively generous. What’s in it for Him? After all, who could trust in or believe something so radically unbelievable?

But perhaps, like Javert, our defenses and suspicions are finally overwhelmed, and we are brought face-to-face with the extent of this free gift. When we do, we may find that disbelief is replaced by fear. Grace violates our deepest sense of justice and rightness, and like Javert, we are scared to death when grace wrests control completely out of our hands. In fact, life according to the law no longer makes sense in light of grace. Fearful of what kind of chaos would ensue if we abandoned ourselves wholly to its radicality, we cling to control—we stick with what we know so well, with what comes naturally. And just like Javert, we choose death over freedom.

Of course, the offensiveness of grace is not limited to literature. It is one of the main themes of the Bible. As we all know, Jesus encountered massive amounts of resistance to his ministry; indeed, his message is what got him killed. Grace was enormously threatening to the status quo then, just as it is today. As much as we might crave it when we are at the end of our rope, one-way love runs counter to the natural inclinations of the human heart. As this chapter seeks to illuminate, we see its offensiveness born out in the Bible, in the church, and in our everyday lives.

A RUINED DINNER PARTY

One of the Pharisees asked [Jesus] to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.” (Luke 7:36–39)

To grasp the depth of the offense we read of here, we need to understand a few things about social mores in the ancient Near East. From their earliest years, girls were instructed in proper etiquette. They were warned by their mothers about what happened to women who ignored the rules. Those women were the kind of women other women would shun. They weren’t welcome in “nice” society, and self-respecting men disdained them. They had to hide during the day and do whatever work they did under the cover of night. And if they ever once decided that they might want to get right with God, there wasn’t really any avenue open to them. Once a woman was marked as being immoral, beyond the pale, a sinner, she was and always would be an outcast.

Today, there are social programs to help women like this. And yet in some ways, we’ve romanticized the background of women who are down-and-out. We tend to look at them with pity and wonder what drove them to this sad end. You would never have found that kind of pathos surrounding immoral women in Israel. Think more along the lines of the disdain that celebrities like Lindsay Lohan inspire these days. Today we throw rocks via online character assassination and paparazzi sensationalism. Back then, they threw actual rocks. Ouch!

YOUR REPUTATION PRECEDES YOU

Notice the names and lack thereof. We are given the name of the Pharisee who had invited Jesus for dinner, Simon, but the name of the woman who barges in goes unrecorded. Perhaps because it does not need to be. She is known by reputation, “the” immoral woman, “the” sinner. When news of this encounter gets out, it is very likely that nobody wonders, even for a moment, who the “she” is.

Now, not only was this woman despised for her lifestyle, she was evidently unafraid of adding fuel to the fire. First, she entered Simon’s home uninvited and unaccompanied. “Who does she think she is? How dare she?”
everyone in attendance would have murmured in shocked dismay. This was the
last
person you would want coming to a dinner party. She wasn’t crashing just any dinner party—it was a party at the home of a religious leader, a Pharisee, a holy man, the opposite of a place where she might conceivably be welcome. So here she came, this epitome of everything a woman should not be—rebellious, promiscuous, uncouth, foolish, and very likely diseased—and she threw herself down at the feet of Simon’s guest. Why didn’t she just wait for Jesus outside or try to catch him beforehand? Why wasn’t she afraid of what would happen?

Her brazenness didn’t end there. No, the indignities just kept multiplying. Out from under her soiled robes, she brought an alabaster flask of ointment. Onlookers could easily surmise where she had gotten the money to buy it and for what purposes she had previously used it. But now she fell behind a reclining Jesus, while Simon, the disciples, and even the house slaves stood aghast. She poured her precious perfume on Jesus’s feet. Then she uncovered her head (another religious no-no), took down her hair, and used her hair as a towel to clean him. Apparently she wept so intensely that her tears made a bath for his calloused, dry feet. And then she kissed him. Over and over again.
And he welcomed it. Jesus welcomed the kisses of a whore.
She, the defiled, was cleaning Jesus, the pure.

Again, you have to ask yourself, “What was she thinking, pulling such a bold move? How did she think those men would respond? How did she think Jesus would respond? What was her hope? And where did she get the courage to do such a thing?” Clearly, this woman had come to the end of herself. Like an addict hitting bottom, she had died to everything but her desire for help. She ran to Christ, and he did not turn her away. Grace begins where pride ends.

The scene offended those who witnessed it. And it did not offend them because they were overly prudish or hyperreligious—although they probably were. Grace offends because it
is
offensive. Unlike every other kind of love there is, one-way love does not depend on our loveliness. It precedes loveliness. And while we see it mirrored in countless ways in our daily lives and relationships, the Gospel is the only place where we find this kind of paradigm-shattering grace in its pure, unadulterated state. Jesus is its starting point, and yet we must never forget that it got him crucified.

FINALLY AND FULLY FORGIVEN

“Your sins are forgiven. Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
Wait—whaaat?
In response to Jesus’s words, Simon and the other guests sitting around the table were knocked off their theological high horses.
Who is this man that he can forgive sins?
they all wondered. Of course, at that point, Jesus was not terribly concerned about answering their questions. Right then, he was binding to himself a woman who had been lost and was now found.

Note that we don’t have any record of her saying anything like, “I’m really sorry. I promise to live a reformed life from now on.” We don’t have a record of her saying anything at all! All we have a record of her doing is kissing his feet, washing them with her tears, and drying them with her hair. No promises to do better. No declarations of her own fidelity and determination to live a changed life. No Sinner’s Prayer prayed; no resolutions signed. Just tears and kisses and audacious love.

I remember a recently divorced woman who came to me for counseling. She was consumed by anger at her ex-husband, and it was spilling out into her relationships with everyone around her, including her children. She had plenty of reason to be mad. He had treated her terribly and then abandoned her at a particularly vulnerable time. You could not blame her for her anger.

After she finished sharing, I asked if she thought there was any possibility of forgiveness.

“Forgive him? He would never ask for forgiveness! And unless he asked for it, I would never grant it. And even then, I’d have to really believe it, you know? I’d have to see some real change. We are only called to forgive those who have repented. That’s how God works.”

Oh, really?
I remember thinking at the time.

Now, there are plenty of reasons why she might not forgive or be able to forgive her ex-husband, but invoking God as her example would not be one of them. If God forgave only those who sincerely repented and changed their ways, it would be a very short list. “While we were yet sinners” is how the apostle Paul put it (Rom. 5:8
KJV
). In her victimhood and woundedness, this woman had lost sight of the fact that God had forgiven her—and continued to forgive her—in the midst of her sin and pride, lost sight of the fact that if He waited for her to straighten out, He would wait forever.

At this point, you may be wondering whether Jesus granted forgiveness to the woman at the dinner because of something he saw in her. You may be wondering if it was her display of love that procured her salvation, rather than his outrageous grace. In anticipation of our question, Luke 7:47 teaches us that her forgiveness wasn’t the result of her love, but rather the cause of it. Jesus told her that her faith in the forgiveness he had already granted was what ultimately saved her. It is what saves us, too, thank God.

ANOTHER LOST SOUL

Although it was shocking to the people in attendance, I am guessing that Jesus’s response to this woman doesn’t offend us much. Perhaps we feel sorry for the woman. We know she was a victim of forces outside her control—no one
chooses
to become a prostitute, after all. Or perhaps we are just used to Jesus’s compassion for sinners. Truth be told, in our day and age, it is not really the story of the immoral woman that is so shocking. It is Christ’s interaction with Simon the Pharisee that gives us pause. Indeed, there was more than one person at that dinner party in need of saving.

We don’t know why Simon invited Jesus to dine with him. Perhaps as a high-ranking member of the religious elite, he thought it was his social obligation. Perhaps he had a secret hope that Jesus was the Messiah and that he would be the first to herald him. Maybe he was suspicious and looking for a way to discredit Jesus in the eyes of his fellow villagers. Or perhaps he wanted Jesus to see how righteous
he
was and to honor
him
. We don’t know. We only know that Simon was not overly welcoming to Jesus when he arrived, refusing to offer him the customary gestures of cleansing water, a kiss, or anointing oil. But like every other encounter Jesus had with the uninitiated, we know that Simon’s life was about to be completely inverted. What might have begun as a search for a flattering word, a burning curiosity, or an embellished reputation ended up demolishing everything Simon thought he knew about God.