Author: Philip Yancey
Book: Christianity
Year of Release: 2002
"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me…." Such goes the first line of one of the most popular, if not the most popular, hymns of all times. While many wonder, few would ask aloud, "What IS so amazing about grace?" Author Philip Yancey explores the answer to this by defining grace in an unconventional but exquisite way. Instead of a doctrinal explanation one would understandably expect, the author interestingly illustrates what grace means through a compilation of stories from books, movies and biographies of diverse personalities from different nations, cultures, religions and eras creatively interwoven with personal anecdotes that give it an intimate touch.
Grace. A term casually used at the dinner table, at gatherings and most commonly at church, somehow carries a religious undertone. Being so, one would expect to find it there most abundantly. Sadly, however, reality shows otherwise. While it should be closely associated with Christianity (and Christians at that), Yancey tells of how people who have made mistakes of various degrees experience unkindness, discrimination and condemnation by the very people who call themselves followers of the God of grace. A culture of ungrace where one must earn his way up, where everything has to be worked for, and where there is hierarchy both of people and of sin, makes it all the more unnatural to exhibit grace while creating peoples who cry out for it in indiscriminate ways. “The best gift Christianity can offer the world” is often withheld from those who need it most.
“Babette’s Feast”, a story of how a refugee who wins in the lottery spends all her winning to prepare a feast for two sisters for whom she has served, illustrates how grace “costs nothing to the recipient, but everything to the giver”. The recipients, being unfamiliar with the menu, were unappreciative, until they found out it cost Babette everything. The author thus sums the meaning of grace in this statement: “There is nothing you can do to make God love you more; there is nothing you can do to make God love you less.”
A concept closely associated with grace is forgiveness. Found at the center of the prayer that Jesus taught and a prerequisite to religious sacrifice, Jesus calls us to forgive however unnatural, because that is how God has extended Himself to us. Stories of the holocaust and scenes from Les Miserables and The Count of Montecristo show both the utter difficulty to forgive heinous transgression by the offended and the deep craving for grace by the offender. While vengeance seems to be the appropriate and logical response, grace has a power in and of itself. Transforming and supernatural, forgiveness puts a halt to the cycle of retribution and liberates the offender of guilt. Gandhi is quoted to say, “If everyone followed the ‘eye for an eye’ principle of justice, eventually the world will go blind”. Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Pope John Paul II, Mother Theresa—these are figures who have defied the natural law of ungrace, and unsurprisingly, their names will be unforgotten by history. By being quick to answer against using such grace as license to continue sinful lifestyles, Yancey has veered from moving towards the extreme end of the spectrum that overemphasizes grace and demeans the holiness and justice of God.
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