Grace that won’t let you go

Delayed and cancelled Cape Town trains
are a time bomb waiting to explode.

Grace to you

There are some verses of scripture that are literally bursting with Gospel meaning. They are squeezed full of faith, hope and love. They overflow with justice, mercy and humility. They act as single summaries of all sacred words ever written. They remain ever before us calling us into the depths of living and never to be ticked off the list of completed tasks.

These verses of scripture are more demanding and more haunting than others. Not because they are difficult to comprehend. Rather, because they are so profoundly simple to understand. Their simplicity is what burdens us with the responsibility to act on them because we can’t pretend to not know what they mean. Therefore we have no excuse not to allow them to shape our living. An example of such a verse is when Jesus says: “What you do to the least of these you do to me.” [Matt 25:40].

This verse is easy to understand. It is clear what Jesus is saying: Our action for or against those whom society names or treats as the least is at one and the same time our action for or against Jesus. How we treat the vulnerable and marginalised of society is how we treat Jesus. If we love Jesus and long to honour Jesus we must love the scorned and honour the stigmatised. To ignore the despised is to ignore Jesus. This is true regardless of whether we pray daily with Jesus’ name on our lips.

In response to this we probably need to be reminded of what G.K. Chesterton said about our faith:

“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”

It is difficult! We will need grace upon grace for this journey. Grace that reminds us that we are loved regardless of our struggle to love. Grace forgives our failures inviting us to try and try again. But also the fierce grace that refuses to let us off the hook. As Father Joseph Wresinski writes about grace:

“Grace is God getting hold of you and making you love others to the point of wanting them to be greater than you, better, more intelligent than you. Grace is the love that sees others as equal and wants them to be happier than oneself; that wants others at any price to love fully, with all their heart. It is God who goads us into wanting others to be able to free the world from poverty, and therefore from injustice, war, and hatred. God leads us where we do not want to go. Grace is “more”, knowing that we are not just a distant reflection of God, but that the Lord is permanently present and living in us.”

May this grace get hold of us all,
Alan