A Twist of Grace

A Twist of Grace--April 4, 2019

"Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, 'Truly this man was God’s Son!'” [Mark 15:39]

One of the ways you know the Gospel is true is that you never would have seen it coming the way it all works out.

The old church father Tertullian once said something along those lines, and I think this surprising turn shows he was right on the money.

The scene is so unlikely, so hard to imagine, and so steeped in God’s upside-down grace, that none of us would have come up with a moment like this if we were coming up with a plan to save the world. Right off the bat, the idea of God rescuing us by getting nailed to a cross and looking like someone in need of being rescued seems absurd to our ears.  And then, that the definitive moment when someone recognizes Jesus, really recognizes who he really is, is the moment Jesus dies—well, that’s something you never would have seen coming, either.

But the coup d’ grace of it all, the capstone of God’s wonderful surprise at the cross, is that the one who does recognize Jesus at the cross is the centurion, one of the soldiers responsible for crucifying Jesus.  One of his tormentors, one of his executioners, one of his enemies, is the one who at long last really gets it who Jesus is.  That is a twist of grace that nobody was prepared for.

All through Mark’s Gospel, you'll find people asking—and answering—a single repeated question:  “Who is Jesus?” It's the driving question from the beginning, from Mark’s opening verse that Jesus is “the Son of God, the Messiah.”  And along the way, there is God the Father’s voice confirming that (at the baptism in the Jordan and at the Transfiguration). Meanwhile, demons wince at the fact, and a bunch of half-hearted disciples blurt it out without understanding what they are saying.  And along with all of them there are a bunch of doubters, scoffers, and skeptics (often respectable religious professionals who were dead certain they knew what to expect out of the living God), who refused to recognize the truth about Jesus.  They want to dismiss him as a crazy man, or put him away as a trouble-maker, but they cannot see what has been staring them in the face all along: truly, this man Jesus is God’s Son.

And they all miss it. Those well-trained, spiritually-disciplined, ritually-accurate card-carrying members of the Respectable Religious Crowd miss the truth about Jesus, and instead, the one who “gets it” is the enemy--the centurion who nailed him up on the cross.  Say what you like about the bad sense of humor of pastors, but God’s flair for comedy is simply divine.

Saint Paul, of course, would later say something very similar about God’s clever plan: that “while were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son,” and therefore “much more surely, having been reconciled, we will be saved by his life” (Romans 5:10).  Jesus has been teaching his followers about loving enemies throughout his ministry—at the cross he shows he is actually willing to put his money where his mouth is and do it himself.  It is a wonderfully unexpected moment, that the man in the uniform specifically charged by the empire with killing Jesus turns out to realize who Jesus really is, and to recognize it by the way he died. 

And yet it is somehow exactly fitting, too, that this is how someone like the centurion is brought to faith.

It is exactly the sort of thing you would say makes sense in hindsight, given what we know about the table-turning ways of our God.  And yet it is the sort of moment you never would have guessed ahead of time if you tried.

And really, that is what it is to be a Christian: to have your life exposed, more and more fully, with the unexpected, unpredictable plot twists of grace, until the point where you realize that it was God’s ways that were right-side up all along, and the world that had it all upside down.  To be a Christian is to be learning, slowly probably, how to pick up on those sudden left-turns of the Gospel, where the enemy is embraced, the king recognized in lowliness, and the Righteous One identified by his criminal’s death, and then to live like that is true, even if everything else in our minds has to be rearranged in light of that truth.

Today, let us be looking for signs of God’s enemy-embracing, unexpected way of grace toward us.

Lord God, grant us the insight and courage to name the name of Jesus and to recognize him in our midst by his suffering love.