Confused at His Grace

A sacrament meeting talk I gave on Oct. 13 in Lexington, VA

In Matt. 22, Jesus poses a question to the Pharisees in the days before his crucifixion: “What think ye of Christ?” I have to confess that I find it hard to answer this question. The figure of Jesus Christ has been central to my identity since as far back as I can remember. I was baptized into his church at age of 8, I passed or blessed his sacrament every Sunday while I was a youth, and I served two years as a missionary on his behalf, bearing his name alongside my own on my name tag.

And yet, I have to admit that when I hear the name Jesus Christ, I am as likely to think of an abstract concept as I am a real person. His name might invoke love, or justice, or mercy, or grace, or any number of ideals. Or I might think about his mission throughout the world and across time: his role as God of the Old Testament, his ministry to the people in Jerusalem, his modern-day role as head of his restored church. But about the man himself, and what he means for me personally, I find it more difficult to articulate.

As I have reflected on why I find it challenging to answer Jesus’s question, I have come to realize that at least part of that challenge stems from the fact that the gospel Jesus Christ preaches is hard for me to wrap my head around. Far from being purely comforting or reassuring, I find the message in the gospels challenging, confusing, and perplexing. It seems to challenge every intuition and assumption I have, to go against my natural instincts of what is good and right.

In this talk, I would like to focus on three central features of Jesus’s mission, and why I find it difficult to think clearly about them: his call to righteousness, his eagerness to forgive, and his resurrection.

One reason it is so daunting to think clearly about my relationship with Christ is that I find the demands of discipleship to be, well, so demanding. Throughout his ministry, Jesus called us to live in a higher, holier way than the traditional understanding of the law would expect of us. It is not enough to give alms, He teaches; we must do so without any sense of vanity or self-satisfaction. It is not enough to avoid adultery; we must be totally faithful in heart and mind at all times. It is not enough to love those who love us; we must be ready to love our enemies and turn the other cheek. You have to forgive not just 7 times, but 70 times 7. We, like the rich young man, are eager to report to Jesus about all the commandments we are keeping, only to be staggered when he replies, “There’s still one more thing to do: give up everything—give up your pride, your material wealth, your ego—and then come follow me.”

Following him involves more than just doing better—it requires a wholesale overhaul of our assumptions about what is valuable and respectable. Our default mode in life is to be biased towards the rich, the powerful, the educated, the charismatic, the authoritative. We want their approval, we want their power, we want their popularity, and we want their freedom. Consequently, we value what they value; we honor what they honor, and we prefer what they prefer. We trust the strong over the weak; we care about the rich more than the poor; we prefer the company of those who are popular rather than those who are overlooked.

Time and again, Jesus rips these assumptions to shreds. “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” “Ye must become as a little child, or ye can in no wise inherit the kingdom of God.” “Even as ye have done it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” We seek out the people at the center of the crowd; Jesus attends to the sickly woman grasping at his hem. We surround ourselves with the powerful and the important; Jesus dines with the sinful and downtrodden. We honor the sizable donations of the rich and famous; Jesus cares only of the widow and her mite.

To be frank, I find it difficult to look directly at how radically he wants me to rethink the way I see the world, the way he wants me to set aside my pride and vanity and value my neighbor as myself. I find myself inadequate and shrinking from the task. I feel like the disciple who said, “Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house.” That is, yes, Jesus, I do want to live your gospel—but is there a learner’s edition that I could start with? I can’t help but feel, when Jesus responds, that he must be talking about me: “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”

When I consider Jesus’s teachings, I wonder if my understanding of the world is so incredibly wrong that I would be better of doing the opposite of what I I’m inclined to do. In the TV show Seinfeld, there is an episode where the character George Constanza—a pathetic middle aged man—realizes that the only way to succeed in life is to do the exact opposite of every instinct or impulse he has, a principle that leads him to find love and a good job. I think I would be better off following Costanza’s idea: feel the instinct to speak out of anger and defensiveness? Do the opposite. Find yourself shrinking back from a stranger who is suffering? Do the opposite. Feeling vain and self-satisfied about your superiority to others? Opposite, opposite, opposite.

But like the disciples, I find myself saying of Jesus’s teachings, “This is an hard saying; who can accept it?” It is painful to feel inadequate to the commandments of the God whom I claim to worship. These feelings of inadequacy can be discouraging. As one of my daughters said recently, after feeling like she was getting blamed for everything, “I hate feeling like I’m the bad guy.”

Which is why, as daunting as Jesus’s teachings make me feel, I am equally astonished at how eager he is to save me anyways. For as impossibly high as he sets his standard of righteousness, he also offers salvation far sooner than it is deserved. If his disciples are discouraged at how much he expects of them, they are equally shocked to realize how quickly he is to forgive their shortcomings. In one of his first miracles, a man stricken with palsy is presented to him; before he heals the man, he assures him that his sins are forgiven. A woman comes to him while he dines with Simon the Pharisee with the sole purpose of honoring him by washing and anointing his feet. He responds by forgiving her of her sins. Even on the cross, moments before his death, he assures one of the criminals he is being crucified with that he will see him in paradise, and pleads to God that he will forgive all those who know not what they do. Even though—or perhaps because—his commandments are far beyond our abilities, Jesus is eager to heal and save us all the same.

This eagerness to forgive can be difficult for us to understand. We expect salvation to take far more work and time than Jesus seems to require. Jesus anticipated this confusion when he taught about his Atonement through parables. Jesus’s parables often include two sets of characters: those who received more than what they deserve, and those who are confused and upset at what they see as a miscarriage of justice. In the Parable of the Laborers, for example, we see the lord of the vineyard anxious to hire as many workers as he can, even if the working day is almost over. When it does end, and every laborer, no matter how long they worked, receives a penny, those who worked the longest “supposed that they should have received more.” Or in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the older son is angry to discover that his father has thrown a party for the son who has returned after wasting away his life and his inheritance. The older son refuses to join in the festivities.

I see these characters as emblematic of myself. I too am inclined to assume that our works must matter, that salvation has to be at least partially earned, that there must be some advantage to being righteous. But Christ does not seem interested in our obedience as a way for earning salvation. That does not mean that obedience does not matter to him at all. He wants us to keep the commandments because that is the way we come to experience his love and joy. He wants us to be obedient so that we can live a life of holiness as he does, and so that we can share that divine joy with others. He does not need our obedience; he wants to obey for our own sakes.

This doctrine cuts against our assumptions that we must somehow pay a price to be worthy of heaven. Consider the prodigal son again. We should be clear up front how deeply the younger son has insulted and denigrated his father. By asking for his inheritance while his father was still alive, the son was, in essence, telling his father that he wishes that he were dead, and that he was going to treat him as such. The parable emphasizes that this son is about as selfish and wicked as any of us could be. However, that son comes to realize, as he is starving and wishing he could eat pig slop, that wickedness never leads to lasting happiness. Broken-hearted, he wants to return home. But he is ashamed and scared of his father. He has spited him and wasted his money. He believes that he is no longer worthy to be considered his son. So he decides that he must work his way up to return to his father’s good graces by offering himself as a servant in his father’s household.

The younger son and the older son are thus more similar to each other than they might appear—and, I should add, they are also more similar to me. Even though they have lived very different lives—one of righteousness, the other of wickedness—they both assume (as I often assume) that their standing with their father is dependent on the work that they have done, that they must earn their place in their father’s kingdom. But, to the bewilderment of one and the anger of the other, they discover that their father is not interested in their labors as a means to merit his love. The father’s love reaches the younger son before that son has even fully finished his journey home. In the parable, it says that while the younger son was still a great way off, his father saw him and ran to him, reconciling with him right away. And instead of requiring his son to enter his house as a servant, the father honors him with a robe, a ring, and a fatted calf. The younger son is immediately reinstalled to his original position—not by working his way up,  not by paying back the lost inheritance, but simply by returning home. In the end, that was all the father wanted or needed: not the son’s efforts, not perfect obedience, but just to come back home.

The last way that Jesus Christ confuses and confounds me: the Resurrection. For the Resurrection radically transforms the meaning of the defining experience of mortality: death. As human beings, there is nothing that we share in common with others—across time and culture—so much as the awareness and reality that our lives will someday end. Everything from our biological instinct for food and family and our selfish desires for wealth and material goods is oriented towards preventing, avoiding, or ignoring, for as long as possible, this eventuality. [sorry for the dark turn—can you tell I just turned forty?]

But Jesus’s Resurrection calls us to rethink this approach to life, an approach that  focuses entirely on this mortal experience. Through the power of the resurrection, death is not the end of life but a passage into a different kind of life, and that means living our life today in a different sort of way. Here it is Christ who seems confused with us. In a parable, he describes a man whose response to a bounty of wealth is to build bigger barns to hold more stuff, all so that he can say to his soul, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” But this way of living, always trying to secure yourself against death with money and pride, is a dead-end. [literally!] “Thou fool,” Jesus says to the man, “this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be?” Jesus is bewildered at our short-sightedness: we know that we are going to die someday, that all our temporal wealth and status will be worth nothing, and yet we fixate on it all the same anyways.

Knowing that life continues after death, we have to learn to give up our fixation on earthly matters and to aspire after what Jesus calls “treasures in heaven.” Jesus’s resurrection requires us to orient our lives differently. We have to remind ourselves about what really matters, what is truly lasting—our relationships, our knowledge, our goodness—and learn to let go of the trivial and fleeting. We are not alone in finding this way of thinking difficult; Jesus’s disciples also had a hard time understanding the meaning of the resurrection. He prophesied of the temple being destroyed and then raised up in 3 days—and they didn’t understand that he was referring to his body. When he tells his apostles that he will be crucified and then resurrected three days later, Peter tells him, “Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee,” which Jesus has to rebuke him for. Even when they do understand the significance of the resurrection, they have a hard time not thinking about it in earthly terms. At one point, Jesus prophesied of his death and resurrection—and James and John respond by asking him to guarantee them a spot on his left and right hand in heaven, much to the annoyance of the other 10. Even the apostles, Jesus’s closest disciples, are fixated on their status and ranking. As Jesus has to explain, they know not what they ask because they focus only on earthly ideas of greatness. He teaches them, “whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister. And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all.”

To be clear, I don’t believe that the doctrine of the resurrection means we are not justified in feeling deep sadness when we lose a loved one, or that mourning is a sign that we lack faith in Christ. In fact, D&C 42 basically commands us to grieve when we lose our loved ones: “Thou shalt live together in love, insomuch that thou shalt weep for the loss of them that die.” It is not the way we feel about others’ death that we have to think differently about, but the way that we live our own lives. The resurrection gives purpose and meaning to our pursuit of love, truth, beauty, and justice. It assures us that all good efforts do not go unappreciated, and that all evil will ultimately be done away with. It encourages us to put our trust in God and his plan, for it will outlast all the earthly plans and goals we can set for ourselves. And yet, it is so hard for us to fully appreciate this truth that we have to remind ourselves of it constantly, striving to live our life not just until we die but in preparation for the eternities.

In sum, I find it hard to think clearly about Jesus Christ and the message of his gospel. It does not fit my baseline, natural-man assumptions about who I am, how the world works, or what I should value. It is both too hard and too easy at the same time. It requires me to rethink my values and priorities in ways that are difficult and frustrating. I cannot claim to understand it, but I have faith in it. I believe it is true, and I believe it is the source of all the joy in my life.

I would like to close with the lyrics of a hymn that communicate this bewildered joy that Jesus inspires in me:

I stand all amazed at the love Jesus offers me

Confused at the grace that, so fully, He proffers me

I tremble to know that, for me, He was crucified

That for me, a sinner, He suffered, He bled and died

Oh, it is wonderful that He should care for me

Enough to die for me

Oh, it is wonderful, wonderful to me

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.