One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (11 page)

I know what you’re thinking. If the key to inspiring altruism and moral behavior and general well-being is fostering an “attitude of gratitude,” and gratitude is the natural response to the good news of the Gospel, why don’t more churches preach grace every week? The common misunderstanding, especially in the church, is that moral compliance comes through responsible instruction and exhortation, that in order to ensure good behavior in our fellow man, we need the law. One of the church’s main tasks, therefore, is to tell people what to do. But that’s not what we see in the story of Zacchaeus, and that’s not what we see in our own lives either.

Christians often speak about grace with a thousand qualifications. They add all sorts of buts and brakes. Listen for them! Our greatest concern, it seems, is that people will take advantage of grace and use it as a justification to live licentiously. Sadly, while attacks on morality typically come from outside the church, attacks on grace typically come from inside the church. The reason is because somewhere along the way, we’ve come to believe that this whole enterprise is about behavioral modification, and grace just doesn’t possess the teeth to scare us into changing, so we end up hearing more about what grace isn’t than we do about what grace is. Some would even say that “Yes grace, but …” originated with the Devil in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3), that the biggest lie Satan wants the church to believe is that grace is dangerous and therefore needs to be kept in check. Sadly, the church has believed this lie all too well.

Where disobedience flourishes, it is not the fault of too much grace but rather of our failure to grasp the depth of God’s one-way love for us in the midst of our transgressions and greed. Grace and obedience are
not
enemies, not by a long shot.

Imagine for a second that your dear little four-year-old daughter has just fallen off her bike and is lying by the road, scraped up, bleeding, hurt, and crying. As a loving parent, you don’t stop to ask, “What should I do here? Maybe I should just let her bleed a little more so she learns to ride better,” do you? No! You instinctively run to help! You don’t think, philosophize, or theologize. You just run. Your feet start moving because you love. That’s the way love responds. That’s the kind of spontaneous goodness that grace draws from us.
Real Christian growth is like learning to drive: the need for constant instruction should slowly give way to instinct.
This is precisely what we see so remarkably and clearly in the story of Zaccheaus.

NOT EVERYONE IS THRILLED

Zacchaeus’s response is not the only one we find in the passage. We also read about the crowd that witnessed the interaction. Luke 19:7 tells us, “And when they saw it, they all grumbled, ‘He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.’” The crowd was scandalized. They were upset. Jesus had decided to associate himself with the most despised man in the city. The last person he
should
be associating himself with, at least if their conception of what it means to be a holy person had any basis. By doing so, Jesus had become the object of scorn and ridicule himself. The hatred and suspicion that had been focused on Zacchaeus was now leveled at the Lord as well. This is what we commonly call “guilt by association.”

It’s easy for us to look back on this episode from our comfortable present-day perch and deride the crowd for their self-righteousness, limited vision, and uncharitable spirit. But that is only because we’ve got the privilege of hindsight. Like Robert Downey Jr.’s speech, this story should violate our deepest beliefs about fairness and justice and reciprocity. Make no mistake: if we had been part of the mob that day, we would have reacted the same way they did. Jesus was consciously disregarding the accepted pecking order—upending the
God-given
scale of righteousness and deserving. The only people who wouldn’t have felt threatened by such a move would have been those who didn’t understand what he was doing.

The crowd, like us, would have assumed that God cares about the clean and competent. They were operating from the same transactional, conditional mentality that we do, the same system whose motto is that irrepressible but utterly nonbiblical slogan “God helps those who help themselves.” (Believe it or not, a survey in 2000 showed that 68 percent of people in the church believe that’s a verse in the Bible!
4
)

This misapprehension is so prevalent because it is the natural instinct of people everywhere who are addicted to their own sense of control, religious or not. It is what we desperately
want
to be true about God—that He is beholden to our hard work and moral effort. Under the spell of a sense of entitlement, we turn the Gospel into just another narcissistic self-help program. We attend and promulgate churches that preach “humanity and it improved” rather than “Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).

The ridiculous way some have taken this story and made into just such a program—Zacchaeus climbed his tree; have you climbed yours?—only proves all the more that, apart from God’s work, we hate grace as much as that crowd did.

Fortunately, Jesus made very clear what his mission was. The story ends with him saying, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:9–10). I’m not sure how he could make it any plainer! Jesus is not being cavalier about wrongdoing or suggesting that greed, and its fallout, is not a big deal. He shed tears over our sin; he came to suffer and die for it. No, this is Jesus identifying with the sinner and loving those who least deserve it. He knows that the only way to break the cycle of retribution and oppression and heartbreak is to demolish the ladder of deserving altogether.

It is no surprise that this story comes right on the heels of Christ’s pronouncement that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:25). Zacchaeus was just such a man. But Jesus did not come for the “good people” who need a helping hand. He came for those who are completely hopeless without him! In other words, God doesn’t select His team the way the NFL does in the April draft. He isn’t looking for the best athletes around, or even those with the most potential. In fact, the apostle Paul said exactly the opposite:

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. (1 Cor. 1:27–29)

God lavishes His grace on the foolish, the weak, the despised, and the nothings so He alone will get the glory. What would we think of grace if God pursued the guy who had been voted Most Likely to Succeed in his high school yearbook? Such an endorsement would only affirm the law-driven conditionality that is already firmly entrenched in our hearts. Instead, He pursues those who are not confused about their need, the Zacchaeuses and Bernie Madoffs and Mel Gibsons of the world. Which is profoundly good news to those of us whose lives have been more marked by failure and self-induced ostracizing than by success and belonging.

HONEST AND FREE

One surefire way to know you’re starting to grasp this message of grace is when you’re finally able to admit that you’re not the good guy—that you never were and apart from grace never will be. In other words, when you finally find yourself being honest about who you are. The freedom of the Gospel is the freedom to stop pretending you are anything but a fellow Zacchaeus, a sinner in need of a Savior.

Nowhere in the Bible is this transparency more palpable than with the apostle Paul. This is the man who wrote a significant portion of the New Testament, planted countless churches, suffered intense persecution for the sake of the Gospel, and eventually was imprisoned. If there ever was a supersaint, it was Paul. But that’s not how he saw himself. At the end of his life, with acute self-awareness, he said, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” (1 Tim. 1:15
NIV
). Paul was not expressing some pietistic form of self-loathing or false humility; this is what Robert Downey Jr. was alluding to when he talked about “hugging the cactus.”

Compassion for others—the desire to serve and sacrifice—flows out of the honest recognition of who we are and God’s love for us in the midst of that. As T. S. Eliot wrote in his
Four Quartets
, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

Paul was a man who was simply no longer hung up on justifying himself, who could embrace and even celebrate his weaknesses in the knowledge that the Son of Man came to seek and save those who are lost. He had been set free from himself.

There’s a great story about an old Lutheran pastor who, on his deathbed, voiced his confidence that he would be received in heaven, because he could not remember having done one truly good work. He meant that he wasn’t trusting in any of his works, but rather in Christ and his righteousness alone. That was a man at peace! He did not go to his grave anxious about trying to prove himself. He had given up on that particular endeavor, only to find that there was One who had already done for him what he could not do for himself.

As a side note, when we no longer look to ourselves for salvation, we are free to not take ourselves so seriously! Self-deprecation, the ability to laugh at oneself, is a fruit of the Spirit as far as I’m concerned.

So whereas self-salvation projects, by definition, require us to lie to ourselves and others in order to maintain our narrative of improvement—remaining ever vigilant (and dead serious) about how we are doing and coming across—one-way love engenders the kind of humility that leads to compassion for others who are in similarly bad shape.

In my own life, I’ve certainly found this to be true: The more I focus on how I am doing—the more I check my spiritual pulse—the more anxious and neurotic I become. The more I obsess over my need to get better, the worse I actually get; I become morbidly introspective and self-absorbed. And because I’m so preoccupied with me—how I’m doing, if I’m growing, whether I’m doing it right or not, spending too much time pondering my spiritual failures and brooding over my spiritual successes—I become less willing and able to notice the needs of others around me and meet those needs.

In fact, you might say that the biggest difference between the practical effect of sin and the practical effect of the Gospel is that sin turns us inward while the Gospel turns us outward, as it did with Zacchaeus. Any version of “the Gospel” or “grace,” therefore, that encourages you to think about yourself and your performance will inevitably be co-opted by what Martin Luther called our curved-in nature (
incurvatus in se
)—whether it’s your failures or your successes; your good works or your bad works; your strengths or your weaknesses; your obedience or your disobedience. We will explore this at more length in the coming chapter’s discussion of self-forgetfulness.

ANY LASTING CHANGE

This entire chapter can be summed up in the following way: Grace inspires what the Law demands. The Law prescribes good works, but only grace can produce them. While the Law directs, the Gospel alone delivers. Gratitude, generosity, honesty, compassion, acts of mercy and self-sacrifice, these things spring unsummoned from a forgiven heart. When Paul Zahl writes that “the one-way love … is the essence of any lasting transformation that takes place in human experience,”
5
he is 100 percent right.

Think about it for a moment in your own life: beneath your happiest moments and closest relationships inevitably lies some instance of being loved in midst of weakness and/or deserved judgment. It could be something as small as a kind word when you were feeling particularly vulnerable, or something as significant as a friend publicly advocating for you despite your obvious guilt. But whatever it was, it made all the difference. These things may not happen every day—indeed, one-way love is both rare and surprising—but when they do, they are indelible. We can trace our patience with our children back to those times when our parents were patient with us, our commitment to our spouses back to a moment of forgiveness, the likes of which we had never experienced before (or sometimes, since). Our confidence in our work dates back to the afternoon our Little League coach decided not to take us out of the game after we’d made a grievous error. We volunteer at a suicide hotline because someone once listened to us, really listened to us, when we were depressed, and it was the beginning of a new lease on life. The list goes on. Grace bears fruit.

Again, this is not to say grace
requires
an outcome—it is one-way! It does not speak the language of results or consequences, which is precisely why such wonderful and exciting things often happen when it is in the mix. In other words, one-way love cannot be mandated, thank God; it can only be experienced. My friend Justin Holcomb tells a story about just such a life-altering instance of grace, one that changed his life forever:

My understanding of unconditional love and its implications germinated when I was ten years old and flooded our next-door neighbor’s home. Our neighbors had moved and were trying to sell their house. One day, I broke in through the back door and closed the drains in all of the sinks and tubs and turned on all the faucets. Then, I just sat and watched water flood the entire house. I let the water run while I went home for dinner, returning a few hours later to turn it off.

I knew what I had done was wrong, and I was even shocked that I had wanted to do something so destructive. When our neighbors found the damage the following day while showing the home to prospective buyers, they came to our house and asked my family if we had seen anyone around their place recently. On top of what I had already done, I lied to my neighbors and my parents.

I felt completely messed up. I was destroying stuff for the sake of destroying and then lying blatantly to everyone. I had heard about asking God’s forgiveness (my dad had taught me the Lord’s Prayer), so I begged God to forgive. I was worried that He wouldn’t. Surely something so deliberate and cruel was just too much to forgive.