One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (15 page)

Simon’s assumption, of course, was that if Jesus knew this woman was immoral, he wouldn’t let her near him. But there was another, more insidious assumption hidden in his presuppositions:
She’s different from me. She is a sinner, and I am not.
It probably never crossed his mind that Jesus had to condescend to come into
Simon’s
house just as much as he did to receive this woman’s kisses. Simon’s problem was that he thought he didn’t have a problem. Not surprisingly, this is what we call
pharisaism
.

The miracle is that Jesus had great love for this self-righteous zealot and was determined to rescue him:

And Jesus answering said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he answered, “Say it, Teacher.”

“A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon answered, “The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.” And he said to him, “You have judged rightly.” Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.” And he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” Then those who were at table with him began to say among themselves, “Who is this, who even forgives sins?” And he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” (Luke 7:40–50)

Three sentences. One question. Complete annihilation. Neither debtor was able to repay their debt. So the debt, if it was to be addressed at all, had to be cancelled via the generosity of the moneylender. It is as if the Lord said, “Simon, you’re the primary debtor here. I have cancelled your great debt, but your love for me is paltry, because you don’t think you owe me much. And when it comes to real righteousness, true obedience, you, a student of the Law, know that love from the heart is all that ultimately matters. What you do not understand is that right now, this immoral woman is more righteous than you are, because she loves and you don’t.
You need to learn from her.
”

Learn from
her
?
On this side of the story, it’s nearly impossible for us to understand the shock and offense that Simon must have felt. Simon’s discomfort at this point was obvious by his equivocating answer: “Well … I suppose … the one who had been forgiven for much loved much.…” This man, who just one moment ago thought he had all the answers, was now hedging.

But once Jesus had begun, he wouldn’t stop until Simon was completely undone. In lawyerlike fashion, Jesus proceeded, point by point, through all of Simon’s breaches of hospitality. Simon hadn’t been gracious with Jesus, because he had a falsely high view of himself. Perhaps he thought Jesus should have been grateful! Simon did not know himself. He thought he had no need of grace. He was enamored with his own “righteousness.”

Then, in case Simon thought he should have just been a bit more courteous to his guest, Jesus forgave the immoral woman’s sin. This act left Simon completely speechless. The Bible doesn’t tell us anything more about Simon, but one thing we can safely assume is that he was never the same. The rescue project had begun. Perhaps he found rest for his troubled conscience in the grace of the Savior who welcomed the kisses of both harlots and Pharisees, or perhaps he spent his days in despair and self-recrimination. I pray it was the former.

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

There is nothing harder for us to wrap our minds around than the unconditional, noncontingent grace of God. As it did with Simon and Javert, one-way love upends our sense of fairness and offends our deepest instincts. We insist that reality operate according to the predictable economy of reward and punishment, especially when it comes to those who have done us harm.

Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult
not
to put conditions on it when we try to communicate it to others—“Don’t take it too far; keep it balanced.” As understandable as this hedging tendency may be, a “yes grace, but” posture perpetuates slavery in our lives and in the church. Grace is radically unbalanced. It contains no but: it is unconditional, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and undomesticated—or else it is not grace. As Doug Wilson put it recently, “Grace is wild. Grace unsettles everything. Grace overflows the banks. Grace messes up your hair. Grace is not tame. In fact, unless we are making the devout nervous, we are not preaching grace as we ought.”
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The truth is, we all have a bit of the self-righteous older brother in the parable of the prodigal son inside us. Remember the elder brother? The one who worked for years and never outwardly disrespected his father but was incensed when his father welcomed his wayward younger brother back to the fold. The elder brother’s reaction revealed that he had more in common with his sibling than he realized: neither of them loved the father. When the elder brother saw the father giving away part of the inheritance he thought he deserved, his true motivations became evident. “You welcome this prostitute-visiting, decadent louse home with a fattened calf, but you never once gave me even a goat to party with!”

Of course, we might ask why the son never asked for a goat or a calf or a party. He did not ask, because he thought of his father as an employer, and no good employee asks their boss to throw a party for them. In the end, of course, the prodigal son was welcomed home while his older, self-righteous brother stood alone in the courtyard, fuming with bitterness. His offense at the grace his brother received stranded him out in the cold, away from the joyful celebration inside, which is where the story leaves him.

So it often is with us. The storm may be raging all around us, our foundations may be shaking, but we would rather perish than give up our “rights.” We have worked too hard for that! Gerhard Forde puts it like this:

You see, we really are sealed up in the prison of our conditional thinking. It is terribly difficult for us to get out, and even if someone batters down the door and shatters the bars, chances are we will stay in the prison anyway! We seem always to want to hold out for something somehow, that little bit of something, and we do it with a passion and an anxiety that betrays its true source—the Old Adam that just does not want to lose control.
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I wish I couldn’t relate. Recently Kim and I were reflecting on our current season in life, which often feels like a grind. We are raising three children, two teenaged boys and a girl who will be a teenager soon—meaning, we are in the thick of it. In just a few short months, our eldest son, Gabe, will be off to college. In the midst of the sometimes-overwhelming complexity of everything we are facing, I found myself wondering,
Why, in the midst of all this pressure, in this crucible of such challenge, am I still so opposed to grace? Why?

The answer—surprise, surprise—has to do with control. I feel like I have got to maintain control of things. I’ve got to keep everything in order, because if I don’t, things are going to spin into chaos. What a faithless and hypocritical way to operate!

As much as I sometimes wish it were not the case, this is not some abstract truth I am trying to convey. I experience the struggle between control and grace every day. Believe me, there are many days when I would prefer to have a to-do list. Like you, I long for the comfort that a checklist brings, something to assure me that everything will work out the way I want it to—if I can just do what is asked of me. I want protection from self-doubt. I yearn for power over others, myself, and yes, even God. Ultimately I want to be my own rescuer, to save myself. The law allows me to keep help, deliverance, salvation, and rescue right where I want them: on my own keyboard, within reach. So I resist the Gospel, because I don’t want to give up control; indeed, because I can’t. Like a hostage suffering from Stockholm syndrome, I am in love with the very thing that is keeping me enslaved. As The Replacements once sang, “Someone take the wheel”!

There is no way around it: God’s one-way love is deeply offensive. Frightening even. So much so that if you’re not offended by it, you probably haven’t encountered the real thing.

Grace turns our world upside down. It disrespects our values, pops the bubble of our self-righteousness, suspends reciprocity, and introduces chaos. It throws our to-do lists out the window. But perhaps the scariest and most offensive part of all is the question it asks. It is a question we spend a good amount of time and energy running away from, one whose answer most of us have long since abdicated to our idols. Listen closely or you’ll miss it: now that you don’t have to prove anything to anyone, now that your self-regard and self-respect have been unassailably secured, now that your actions have been unhitched from their utility in the courtroom, and you have been fully justified in the sight of God … What do you
want
to do?

What are you going to do now that you don’t
have
to do anything?

I’m serious. Think about it, if only for that brief moment before the voices of responsibility kick in and dismiss your freedom as a flight of fancy or something too dangerous to be embraced. My suspicion is that once you realize that you don’t
have
to do anything for God, you may find you
want
to do everything for Him.

NOTES

CHAPTER 9

OBJECTIONS TO ONE-WAY LOVE

For many Americans of a certain age, the college admissions process is an oppressive and extraordinarily stressful area of life. It is performancism writ very, very large. One’s entire worth and value as a person is boiled down to a short transcript and application, which is then judged according to a stringent and ever-escalating set of standards. High school seniors are called upon to justify themselves according to their achievements and interests, and as the top schools have gotten more and more competitive, so has the pressure under which our top students place themselves. Watching the students at our church go through it, not to mention my own kids, it’s hard not to sympathize. They feel that their entire lives are hanging in the balance, that where they go to school will dictate their happiness for years to come.

A couple of years ago, I watched as two best friends, Wayne and Dave, applied for early admission to the same college. That December, Wayne was accepted and Dave was deferred. The next four months, during which Dave waited for the final ruling, looked very different—and very similar—for each of them. They both took basically the same classes and had the same homework load. They spent time with many of the same people socially. But there were also a couple of key differences. No longer under the watchful eye of the all-important transcript, Wayne decided to branch out in his extracurricular activities. He started a band and got into rock climbing. He even pioneered a program teaching underprivileged kids in the community how to climb. The program still exists, more than ten years later. Meanwhile, Dave got involved in a bunch of extracurriculars he had never been involved with before, stuff that he thought might boost his chances at getting into his dream college.

By the end of the semester, Dave was exhausted, and Wayne was full of energy. Although Dave did well and kept up his GPA, Wayne got the best grades of his high school career! Freed from having to play it safe, he wrote his papers about topics he was genuinely interested in rather than the ones he thought the teacher would appreciate, and it showed on the page. Their paths may not have looked very different to the outside eye, but one of these guys was carrying a burden of expectation and one wasn’t. No wonder it felt like such a slog.

The fruit of assurance in Wayne’s life was not laziness but creativity, charity, and fun. Set free from the imperative to perform, his performance shot off the charts. Set free from having to earn his future, he enjoyed his present. Set free from the burden of self-focus, he was inspired to serve others—and without being told he needed to do so! This is very similar to the dynamic we saw at work with the apostle Peter and with Zacchaeus, the same one we see with many of those that Jesus heals.

The message of God’s one-way love for sinners naturally meets resistance from law-addled hearts. It produces objections in those who are wired for earning and deserving, which is all of us. Sometimes these objections are rationalized forms of the emotional offense that we looked at in the last chapter. When our sense of pride is attacked, it defends. Sometimes these objections are projections of fear about what might happen if people actually believed the message. Sometimes the objections to grace are simply honest rejoinders to a word that can be very hard to swallow.

Two of the most frequent objections I encounter—and I encounter them a lot—are that grace makes people lazy and grace gives people license to sin and/or indulge in their self-absorption rather than serve their neighbors. While by no means exhaustive, this chapter seeks to shed some light on both of these strands of protestation.

DOES GRACE MAKE YOU LAZY?

First, the laziness accusation. If it is true that Jesus paid it all, that “it is finished,” that my value, worth, security, freedom, justification, and so on is forever fixed, then why do anything? Doesn’t grace undercut ambition? Doesn’t the Gospel weaken effort? If we are truly let off the hook, what is to stop us from ending up like George Costanza in the “Summer of George” episode of the sitcom
Seinfeld
when he received an unexpected severance package and vowed to take full advantage of his freedom only to sit around in sweatpants, watching TV, reading comic books, and eating “a big hunk of cheese like it’s an apple”? Or, as Billy Corgan, lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins, is reported to have once pondered, “If practice makes perfect, and no one’s perfect, then why practice?” Understandable question.

To be perfectly honest, in the short term, this message often
does
inspire the kind of sighs of relief and extended breathers that look a whole lot like nothing. But if a person can be given the space to bask in the Good News for a while (without being hammered with fresh injunctions), we just as often find that the Gospel of grace, in the long run, actually empowers risk-taking effort and neighbor-embracing love. It doesn’t
have
to, of course, which is precisely why it does. Think about it: what prevents us from taking great risks most of the time is the fear that if we don’t succeed, we will lose out on something we need in order to be happy. And so we live life playing our cards close to the chest … relationally, vocationally, spiritually. We measure our investments carefully because we need a return—we are afraid to give, because it might not work out, and we
need
it to work out.

The refrain repeated throughout this book is that everything we need, we already possess in Christ. This means that the what-if has been taken out of the equation. We can take absurd risks, push harder, go further, and leave it all on the field without fear—and have fun doing so. We can give with reckless abandon, because we no longer need to ensure a return of success, love, meaning, validation, and approval. We can invest freely and forcefully, because we’ve been freely and forcefully invested in. Perhaps this is part of why rates of charitable giving are so much higher in places where people go to church. Perhaps not.

The Gospel breaks the chains of reciprocity and the circular exchange. Since there is nothing we ultimately need from one another, we are free to do
everything
for one another. Spend our lives giving instead of taking; going to the back instead of getting to the front; sacrificing ourselves for others instead of sacrificing others for ourselves. The Gospel alone liberates us to live a life of scandalous generosity, unrestrained sacrifice, uncommon valor, and unbounded courage.

This is the difference between approaching all of life
from
salvation and approaching all of life
for
salvation; it’s the difference between approaching life
from
our acceptance, and not
for
our acceptance;
from
love not
for
love. The acceptance letter has arrived, and it cannot be rescinded, thank God.

I remember reading an article about Netflix, the wildly successful video rental and streaming company, a few years ago that pointed to what we are talking about here. Netflix, it turns out, has no official vacation policy. They let their employees take as much time off as they want, whenever they want, as long as the job is getting done. The article quoted Netflix’s vice president for corporate communication, Steve Swasey, as saying, “Rules and policies and regulations and stipulations are innovation killers. People do their best work when they’re unencumbered. If you’re spending a lot of time accounting for the time you’re spending, that’s time you’re not innovating.”
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Their policy, or lack thereof, has not resulted in the company’s going out of business, which many of us would fear it would. In fact, just the opposite. Freed from micromanaging bosses, their employees work even harder. Now, obviously, this is not the same thing as the assurance we have in Christ, but perhaps it is not so different either.

DECONSTRUCTING MORALISM (AND ANTINOMIANISM)

All right, so perhaps one-way love doesn’t promote laziness, but if you are telling people they can do whatever they want, won’t they … do whatever they want? Won’t they indulge in all sorts of debauched behavior? There seems to be a fear out there that preaching grace produces serial killers. Or, to put it in more theological terms, too much emphasis on the indicatives of the Gospel leads to lawlessness.

Again, the formal name for the objection of lawlessness is
antinomianism
—preaching in such a way as to imply that the Law is bad and/or useless. If the control and laziness objections tend to come equally from the religious and nonreligious world, then the antinomianism objection comes almost exclusively from the religious sphere. After all, since our culture is already so permissive and morally lax, if we Christians don’t stand up for God’s standards of moral righteousness, His Law, then who will? Is more grace really what this culture needs? That doesn’t make sense. It seems backward and counterintuitive. Unconditional pardon is probably the last thing lawless people need to hear, right? Surely they’ll take advantage of it and get worse, not better. After all, it seems logical that the only way to “save” licentious people is to show them more rules, intensify the exhortations to behave.

Well, let’s lay aside the obvious rejoinder that if the only reason you’re not engaging in sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll is out of fear, if your only motivation for obedience is threat, then perhaps you need to look at your own heart before you think about other people’s. Let’s also lay aside the fact that the Bible makes it explicitly clear that the power that saves even the worst rule-breaking sinner is the Gospel (Rom. 1:16) and not the Law (Rom. 7:13–24). There is another crucial reason why preaching the Gospel of free grace is both necessary and effective at a time when moralism is what reigns supreme: moralism is what far too many people already think Christianity is all about—rules and standards and behavior and cleaning yourself up.

Millions of people, both inside and outside the church, perceive the essential message of Christianity to be “If you behave, then you belong.” The reason they come to that conclusion is because many of us preachers have led them to believe that. We have led them to believe that God is more interested in people becoming good than in them coming to terms with how needy and self-centered they actually are so that they’ll fix their eyes on Christ, “the author and finisher of our faith” (Heb. 12:2
KJV
).

From a human standpoint, this is precisely why many outside the church reject Christianity
and
why so many inside the church conk out: they’re just not good enough to “get ’er done” over the long haul. Of course, there are also those who ignore the Gospel because they have deceived themselves into believing that they really are making it, when in reality they’re not. But everyone peters out eventually, on their deathbed if not before. In his article “Preaching in a Post-modern Climate,” Tim Keller makes this point brilliantly:

Some claim that to constantly be striking a “note of grace, grace, grace” in our sermons is not helpful in our culture today. The objection goes like this: “Surely Pharisaism and moralism is not a problem in our culture today. Rather, our problem is license and antinomianism. People lack a sense of right or wrong. It is ‘carrying coal to Newcastle’ to talk about grace all the time to postmodern people.” But I don’t believe that’s the case. Unless you point to the “good news” of grace, people won’t even be able to bear the “bad news” of God’s judgment. Also, unless you critique moralism, many irreligious people won’t know the difference between moralism and what you’re offering. The way to get antinomians to move away from lawlessness is to distinguish the gospel from legalism. Why? Because modern and post-modern people have been rejecting Christianity for years thinking that it was indistinguishable from moralism. Non-Christians will always automatically hear gospel presentations as appeals to become moral and religious,
unless
in your preaching you use the good news of grace to deconstruct legalism. Only if you show them there’s a difference—that what they
really
rejected wasn’t real Christianity at all—will they even begin to consider Christianity.
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In Romans 6:1–4 the apostle Paul answers the charge of antinomianism (lawlessness) not with Law but with more Gospel! I imagine it would have been tempting for Paul (as it often is with us when dealing with licentious people) to put the brakes on grace and invoke the Law in this passage, but instead he gives more grace—grace upon grace. Paul knows that licentious people are not those who believe the Gospel of God’s free grace too much, but too little. “The ultimate antidote to antinomianism,” writes Michael Horton, “is
not
more imperatives, but the realization that the Gospel swallows the tyranny as well as the guilt of sin.”
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The fact is, the only way any of us ever start to live a life of true obedience is when we get a taste of God’s radical, unconditional acceptance of sinners. The message that justifies is the same message that sanctifies. What makes us think the same generosity that flows from the Gospel of forgiveness won’t lead others to repentance the way it has us?

In chapter 4, we noted that Law without Gospel leads to licentiousness, not the opposite. I know this not only because I read it in the Bible, but because I’ve experienced it in my own life (see chapter 2) and see it in others all the time. The tragic and ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn’t make people work harder, it makes them give up. Make no mistake, in the illustration that opened this chapter, if his deferral had continued indefinitely, poor Dave would have eventually hit the wall and walked away from the college process altogether. Over time, continued exhortations to live up to God’s standard of moral perfection will inspire a “why even try?” response. Moralism will produce immorality, not the other way around. Just think about your own children. Or your relationship with your spouse.

This is not to say the Law is somehow bad—it is doing one of the things it is supposed to do, revealing need and sin! Don’t think for a second that the Spirit doesn’t use both of God’s two words in our lives: the Law as well as the Gospel. It’s just that, as we explored in earlier chapters, they do very different things. The Law
reveals
sin but cannot
remove
it. It
prescribes
righteousness but is powerless to
produce
it. The Law is impotent—it has no creative power, it cannot inspire. It offers us nothing but condemnation and death. The Law apart from the Gospel can only crush; it can’t cure.