Grace All the More--February 23, 2022

Grace All the More--February 23, 2022

"Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, 'God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us'? But he gives all the more grace; therefore it says, 'God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble'." [James 4:5-6]

God doesn't give up.  Not on you.  Not on anybody.  Ever.

Look, these verses from James are dense.  If they seem difficult to wade through in English, trust me, it's even trickier to make sense of in the Greek.  There are a handful of very different ways verse five can be translated, and they each would mean very different things--digging into them is probably a separate conversation for another time, and probably only for folks who are interested in the inside baseball of biblical translations.  So if that's your burning desire, send me a message and we can unpack the exegetical stumbling blocks of these verses.  But in the mean-time, for the rest of us, let's make sure we don't miss the forest in all these trees.  For all of our wayward stumbling after other loves and other allegiances, God doesn't give up on us, and instead gives grace all the more in the pursuit of bringing us back home.

In yesterday's passage, we saw how James used the image of us being "adulterers" in our dalliances with the world-system and its "What's-in-it-for-me?" mentality. That was actually putting it delicately (James is a bit more provocative in the Greek he uses--again, inside baseball), but the idea was that when we go chasing after the world's agenda of self-interest and deal-making, it's like we're cheating on God.  We're made for a good relationship of faithfulness and love with God, which also expresses itself in the ways we relate to our neighbor.  But when we break those relationships in the quest for "more," we break God's heart like a jilted spouse who has been left for a younger replacement or a causal fling.

If it surprises you that we could break God's heart like we're cheating on God, it's worth remembering that the Hebrew Scriptures often depicted the relationship between God and the people as a marriage--one in which the covenant people kept running off with literal idols, love-affairs with whatever powerful empire was on the scene, their wealth, their power, and their own weapons.  Over and over again, it was the people who kept breaking faith with God... and over and over it was God who kept seeking the people out again and saying, "I love you."  Over and over again, the people realized they had ruined a good relationship in their quest for something else, something "new," or something more glamorous.  And so it was, time and again, that the ancient people of Israel and Judah came to learn that God doesn't give up.

The followers of Jesus see that same amazing idea going even further in the cross--that it is in the cross of Jesus that God goes all the way to death for us.  In the crucified Christ, God literally gives it all to seek after us, with a fierce love and what Brennan Manning termed "the relentless tenderness" of Jesus.  So even when we blow it by chasing after other (lesser) loves that will never really love us back, there is the presence of God, right at our side, like a welcoming father welcoming home a lost son, like a spouse with open arms ready to start over, giving grace to begin again.  Like the repeated refrain from the song "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, God keeps calling out us, "Wait--they don't love you like I love you." And even after we've learned the hard way and gotten our hearts broken (and broken God's in the process by leaving), God "gives all the more grace," because God just doesn't give up on us.

What can you do when you've been met with a love like this?  What can any of us do but see ourselves, not in our worst moments of failure and unfaithfulness, but as beloved all the same, and to let ourselves be loved, be forgiven, be claimed once again?  What can we do but let such Love take hold of our hands and lead us away from the dead ends we kept wandering into?

Like another wistful anthem once put it, "True love will find you in the end--don't be sad (I know you will), don't give up until... true love finds you in the end."  Maybe we can just stop running today and look up to discover the unexpected reality of grace: God has been seeking after us all along.

And God doesn't give up.

O Lord, your love keeps seeking us.  Give us the courage and grace to take your hand.