The Risk of Grace

Grace is usually described as unmerited favor, but while we often talk about the unearned nature of grace, we don’t usually consider another aspect. As a wise friend once told me during a difficult time in my life: “Grace is inherently risky.”

Extending grace to another human being is a risky endeavor. After all, we humans are fickle.

To paraphrase the Apostle Paul, we have a hard time doing the things we want to do; instead, we do the very things we don’t want to do (Romans 7:15). To quote our pastor emeritus Bob Disher, we are a “colossal collection of moral misfits.”

In that same conversation, my friend also said, “to be human is to be a liability.”

Human weakness is exactly why grace is risky — and why it’s so necessary.

Practicing grace makes us vulnerable. When we extend grace to someone else, there’s always a chance we’ll get burned.

There are few guarantees in life, and there are even fewer guarantees in the practice of grace. We are walking out onto a ledge without a harness. We are reaching for the trapeze without a safety net. But there’s good news.

In the practice of grace, the only guarantee just happens to be the only one we need: the God of grace is with us always, which is of course an act of grace in itself.

Just as giving grace is an act of vulnerability, so is receiving it. And although grace is a great gift — one of which we are all in need — it’s a gift we aren’t always ready to receive. Before we can receive anything, our hands must be both open and empty. To truly receive grace, we must first let go.

Perhaps a life of following Christ truly begins when we recognize our own desperate need for grace. Maybe a good way to describe the Christian life is as the lifelong process of relinquishing our need for control long enough to be open to receiving the grace that God longs to give us.

Openness can be an uncomfortable posture. It’s uncomfortable because it requires submission — and we don’t often willingly submit ourselves to anything.

This posture of openness goes against our self-protective instincts. When we operate in survival mode, it feels risky to release our perceived control on our lives.

The ironic, upside-down nature of the Christian faith is that this very act of letting go is often the exact mechanism God uses to move into our lives — and it is this movement of God that makes us infinitely secure.

When we let go we are able to become far more secure, far more rooted, than we could ever make ourselves, because we are now able to rest in the unfathomable, unending love of God.

We can finally stop striving to make our own way, to control our own destiny, to be our own gods. When we let go, we are released from our own grip and can rest in the strong, capable, loving hands of a sustaining God.

We are finally free to give and receive a radical grace—without fear.

Our faith is built on the promise and practice of grace: this is both made clear and made real in the birth, life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

• The incarnation — God’s choice to become flesh and blood in the person of Jesus — is an act of grace.

• Jesus’ teachings are saturated in grace (read just about any parable, but two that most strongly capture the radical, counter-cultural nature of grace are that of the prodigal son and his brother in Luke 15:11–31 and the laborers in the vineyard in Matthew 20:1–16).

• Christ crucified is the ultimate act of love and grace.

• Through resurrection, Jesus defeated death, showing us Love has the final word.

In his last words recorded in the gospel of Matthew, the Resurrected Christ tells his disciples he is with them always, to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20).

The beautiful thing about the riskiness of grace is that the God of grace is alongside us, taking on the risks­ — with us, and for us.

-Rob Wooten