unfathomable, unmerited nature of grace is found when God chooses Isaac not Ishmael, Jacob not Esau, David not Paul, reluctant Jonah, and Peter to be the rock for the founding of the church, with Saul as its first great missionary. Is this not surprising?
God’s grace is for all creation. God’s choices recounted in the scriptures do not imply a lack of grace in the lives of those who are not chosen for special tasks. Scripture tells the stories of leaders. The contributions of millions upon millions of ordinary people responding to grace in the history of our faith remain hidden. Grace is universal, shed on all humanity indiscriminately. Karl Barth describes grace as that “[…] from which the pagan lives, and also the indifferent, the atheist, and he who hates his fellow man whether they know it or not. It is the universal truth, not a ‘religious truth’.” The very fact that we breathe, that the earth continues to spin on its axis, that the seasons follow one another, that communities are kept alive by uncountable, unnoticed, simple acts of generosity and kindness are due to God’s grace, shed upon all creation. It is true that God’s grace resides in Jesus, but not exclusively, for Jesus calls a few to follow him, and the few become many, and the many will eventually become all.
God’s grace pursues us. God’s grace woos us because God loves us and longs for us to wake up to the wonder of godly grace in this world. We cannot escape grace. We may ignore it or deny it, but in the end it will envelop us. As Norris says: “God will find us and bless us, even when we feel most alone, unsure we will survive the night. God will find a way to let us know that he is with us in this place, wherever we are, however far we think we can run.” Fortunately grace is not limited to the church or any religious institution. By permeating the world, grace beckons all unceasingly to an awareness of how it awakens the longing for relationship with the Source of all life.
God’s grace is free, extravagant and transforming. The Barmen Declaration of 1934 (the manifesto or confession of what came to be known as the Confessing Church in Germany) speaks of “the proclamation of God’s free grace”. According to Barth, this does not mean anything other than what Romans 1:1 calls “the gospel of God”. He points out that God’s grace is not some godly property. “No, God’s free grace is God Himself, His most inner and essential nature, God Himself as He is. That is God’s secret, as it is now already revealed in Jesus Christ,” he explains. God gives Godself freely, abundantly and conclusively in Jesus – this makes us God’s business. God does not sweep our concerns, cares and needs under a carpet, but, through Jesus, takes them up and they are transformed. Jesus does not ask who we are, or what we have to offer. He simply accepts us. Acceptance is transforming. Such is the extravagance of free grace. As Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, explains: grace is found “[…] in terms of compassionate acceptance, the refusal of condemnation, the assurance of an abiding relationship of healing love”.
God’s grace enables us to respond to God in Christ. Grace enables us to answer Jesus’ call to “Follow me”. Jesus is the paradigm of a “graced” relationship with God. This cannot be taken for granted. Nothing hindered the Christ event from taking place, but we can resist its demands on us. Our personal perceptions and conditions can render the acceptance of grace difficult, even impede it, but nothing can make its coming impossible. Grace can prepare its own way, and make the impossible possible. Paul’s conversion illustrates this truth. Grace sanctions the forgiveness of sins, restores relationship, and enables love and hope.
I cannot claim to have an uninterrupted awareness of the grace that surrounds us. When the presence of grace does strike me, I am taken aback, surprised at how unaware I have been, and grateful for the sense of being held and cared for. I understand something of what French Jesuit priest and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) meant when he wrote: “Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.” The extravagant, indiscriminate spilling of grace on the world makes me feel blessed.
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Blessings
Daring to write of blessings could be seen as an exercise in chutzpah. After all Jesus Christ, the founder of my faith, gave a sermon to his followers that contained a number of blessings (the beatitudes) that have stood as a moral beacon for all times. Sitting down to speak to his followers on a hill some two thousand years ago, Jesus set out an ethical code in what Augustine (354–430) subsequently called the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:1-11; Lk 6:20-26). In his work entitled The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, he wrote: “If anyone piously and soberly considers the sermon which our Lord Jesus Christ preached on the mount, as we read it in the Gospel according to Matthew, I think that he will find in it, as regards the highest morals, the perfect message of the Christian life.”
Precise yet comprehensive, the beatitudes contain a complete précis of Jesus’ teaching. Their insight into the human spirit is penetrating and full of wisdom. No wonder Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) expressed his delight with this sermon when he said: “It went straight to my heart.” He considered it second only to the Bhagavad-Gita. This sermon changed the life of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). In My Religion he wrote: “As I read these rules, it seemed to me that they had special reference to me and demanded that I, if no one else, should execute them.” However, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) commented acerbically that the Sermon encouraged a “slave morality”!
Throughout the ages, Christians have turned to this text as the embodiment of Christ’s teachings. There are no teachings in the whole of the scriptures that demand more of us than the beatitudes. The exhortations of the prophets, the cautions of the leaders of Israel, the counsel of the psalms or the concealed truths of the parables, as powerful and insightful as they are, cannot strike quite the same chord in the depths of a believer as the beatitudes. All that I have ever wanted to evade, put off, or disregard, because it quite simply asks too much, is found in these blessings.
Is my attempt to write about blessings no more than an exercise in personal hubris? I know that the beatitudes Jesus left us are unequalled in their completeness. I believe that they are intended to guide us on how to live freely and fully. I have responded to their all-encompassing demands on my life in different ways, often with monumental failures along the way, but equally with a sense of being blessed because God’s love and patience are inexhaustible. My attempt to describe different experiences of blessing is merely a further chapter in exploring what has made life worth living, not an attempt to trump the Sermon on the Mount.
What does it mean to be blessed? The Oxford Shorter Dictionary defines being blessed as: “Enjoying supreme felicity, [being] fortunate, happily endowed”. The idea of being blessed is certainly an ancient one. In the Hebrew scriptures, “blessedness” denotes personal trust in God and obedience to God’s will. The desire for blessedness occurs frequently in the psalms and is, in fact, the very first word of the Psalter. “Blessed are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked” (Ps1:1). The idea of being blessed is also familiar in wisdom literature: in the Greek world of those early a blessed person was one in harmony with society and the world.
It is, however, difficult to capture the meaning of the Greek word makarios in translation. As I have said, it means more than being fortunate or happy. It includes a sense of being privileged with divine favour, of being holy, hallowed. It means experiencing gratitude at receiving unmerited grace. It is about a sense of well-being because the goodness of life is affirmed and upheld against the odds. It asserts certainty at God’s presence, mercy and care. God wants to bless us. All that is required from us is to do our best to love God and one another. Then we will be blessed, for God’s love can do no other.
If this sounds easy, we need reminding that it is both simple and challenging. We live, as Williams puts it, in “[t]he disturbing presence of grace and vulnerability within the world of human relationships”. What I have attempted here is to strike the italics key in my life by telling the story of certain blessings that have
