Читать книгу Surprised by the man on the borrowed donkey: Ordinary Blessings - Denise Ackermann - Страница 7

Surprised and blessed

I remember that morning all too vividly. Sitting at the very end of the nave near the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral, I watched the bishops of the Anglican Communion enter and take their seats under the soaring, ribbed Gothic ceiling of that historic building. Clothed in robes of brocade, silk and even gold lamé, embroidered with indigenous themes, mitres on heads, among them a handful of women, they entered the cathedral with measured tread. I found myself straining forward as the doors closed slowly behind the Archbishop of Canterbury. What was I hoping to see? Then I realised and was surprised by the image that popped into my head. I was looking for “the man on the borrowed donkey”! Where, amidst all this pomp, was Jesus whom I had come to know and love, and who had changed my life?

It was 1998 and I was accompanying Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane to the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Church as a theological advisor. The phrase “the man on the borrowed donkey” has since that time been pivotal to my relationship with Jesus. It is an expression that has a touch of the comical, and that is laced with paradox and incongruity when it is used for the central figure of my faith. Jesus, whom Christians attest is the incarnation of the living God, had nowhere to lay his head, washed the feet of his disciples, and had to borrow a donkey for a bitter-sweet ride that ended on a cross. Jesus, who rode that donkey to a criminal’s death, appeared to his disciples three days later. The paradox of humility and power exemplified in his life calls me to account when I confront my own inconsistencies and wispy faith. It becomes my tool for understanding my life and for assessing my own conduct. It holds before me incomprehensible, all-encompassing love. It gives me hope. It never ceases to surprise me. It is the reality of grace at work in the world. And, as such, it has everything to do with being blessed.

I first encountered Jesus as an historical person in a women’s weekly Bible study that I joined out of no more than a passing whim. Previously he had been a remote figure, largely limited to religious paintings and the illustrations in a children’s Bible – which I did not read. In the Bible study he came alive as we read the gospel stories together. As African New Testament scholar Teresa Okure points out, “The Bible is essentially a community book, written for people living in communities of faith […]. We need to read together to be able to help one another see with a new eye.” And this is what happened. In this group of very disparate women I could question, debate and ponder the relevance for my life of what I was reading. I could not fault Jesus, despite trying to. The more I read, the more I was drawn to the man at the centre of these biblical tales. I found that Jesus then is Jesus now. I was, and still am, challenged by his actions and by his relationships with those who crossed his path.

I had read somewhere that C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), literary critic, essayist and Christian apologist, once said: “Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic or Lord” and so, about two years later, I decided to give Jesus a try. Perhaps he was Lord. This was no more than a sort of show-me-who-you-really-are move. And he did. Despite my feeble, conditional and ungracious overture, my life changed. Looking back, I am deeply grateful that I encountered Jesus, largely unencumbered by the stuff of our traditions, or by different interpretations and claims. I met the man and liked him very much. The freshness of this meeting has stayed with me through the years and has never wilted, notwithstanding my theological studies and teaching. For me Jesus has never been a dogma. Through his life he showed me what it means to be a human being. He left no written testament. He left a life, a life personified in his words: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should love one another” (Jn 13:34). Okure makes the point by quoting Ignatius of Antioch (born c.35-50–died d.107): “Whenever they tell me ‘It is not written in the book’, I tell them, ‘Oh yes, it is written, because our book is a person, Jesus of Nazareth.’ ”

In this book I want to reflect on the surprises I have encountered along the way as I struggle to keep my eyes on the man who borrowed a donkey. I have been surprised by how this struggle, that has been one of “the felt life of the mind”, has morphed into blessings. I am surprised because the richness of blessing is always unexpected; I remain astonished at how often a sense of blessedness happens in the most unlikely, mundane, daily occurrences. The man on the borrowed donkey has, in some mysterious way, given me new spectacles through which to view life, spectacles that I have to clean regularly when they become fogged up with the junk of “self”, yet spectacles that I can no longer live without. In other words, I am finding grace that is both ordinary and extraordinary, but more about this later.

* * *

Giving Jesus “a try” was the beginning of a bouquet of surprises. To begin with I was filled with wonder at just how very human the man on the borrowed donkey was. He taught, healed and suffered as a human being. He got tired, exasperated, hungry and thirsty. He probably had times of feeling unwell. He shed tears and he could get angry. I saw that to deny his full humanity would be to deny what his life, his teaching, his compassion and courage offer us. It is difficult to imagine what an impression he made in an age when conformity was the test of truth and virtue. The great learning of the scribes did not impress him. He did not hesitate to question tradition, and no authority was too important to be contradicted. He did not act like a person who rebelled for rebellion’s sake; he appeared to bear no grudges against the world, but he was not afraid to lose his reputation and even his life. I saw that to deprive this man of his humanity was to deprive him of his greatness.

What struck me next were the kind of people who claimed Jesus’ attention: the poor, the hungry, the miserable, the oppressed and marginalised, lepers, cripples, the blind and the sick, children and those possessed, social outcasts, tax collectors, disreputable people and women from both inside and outside Jewish society. This ragtag band of people seldom allowed him time to be alone. These were people with no rights, people who lived at the bottom of the social structure with no remedies for their needs. It struck me too that the people Jesus chose to be with were, in fact, like the majority of people in my country. He himself came from the artisan classes, although by birth and upbringing he was not one of the very poor. He may, however, have suffered a slight disadvantage of coming from Galilee, since the Jews in Jerusalem tended to look down on Galileans.

When I realised that Jesus was a radical, I loved his freedom to break conventional barriers in his relationships with a variety of women. He was courageous and unbowed by the powerful religious and political forces that opposed him: he enjoyed being with all kinds of people, and combined remarkable humility with true authority. He spoke for himself, and emerges as a man of extraordinary independence and unparalleled authenticity – a man whose insight defies explanation. I was surprised and then hooked. This was someone I wanted to know – understand, fathom, plumb – more closely.

This longing to “know” led me to become aware of the grace of blessing. As I pursued my quest, Jesus’ promise of abundant life (Jn 10:10) became more real. I found a new intensity to my life. I felt blessed. I am aware that claiming to feel blessed has an overtly pious ring. As I wrote of the blessings that follow in this book, I struggled to find similar words that sounded less “religious”, words like “happy”, “privileged”, “favoured”, and so on. However, in the end I decided that “blessed” actually says it all, but does need decoding. To explore blessing is in essence to find out what it means to be a fully free human being. Feeling blessed is not an uninterrupted good feeling. It is not financial security, nor physical well-being. It is not lasting pleasure, nor happiness, nor an unendingly cheerful mood. Being blessed is not some abstract faith concept of spiritual well-being. Being blessed does not mean that life becomes an easy ride. A sense of blessedness is challenged by the exigencies of life. Can one feel blessed if one is in a wheelchair, if poverty or oppression are daily realities, or if one has known depression? I cannot speak for others, though I do know human beings who have risen above pretty awful circumstances and still felt blessed.

The wonder is that by being blessed we are offered the possibility of being like Jesus. I am struck by the well-known words of Irenaeus of Lyon (late second century) that “[t]he glory of God is the human person fully alive”. I have found that when I keep my eyes on the man who borrowed a donkey, I taste something of being “fully alive”.

Being blessed is not an abstract theological concept. It is a practice, a way of living, not an esoteric truth. There is nothing majestic or mysterious about being blessed. It is about living in a way that makes the promise of abundant life possible, even in daunting circumstances. Being blessed is expressed practically in prosaic matters such as affirming another with a loving word, feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger and caring for those in need as Jesus told us to do (Mt 25:34-46). Terry Eagleton, the Marxist Christian critic writes:

Eternity is not in a grain of sand but in a glass of water. The cosmos revolves on comforting the sick. When you act in this way, you are sharing in the love which built the stars. To live in this way is not just to have life, but to have it in abundance.

As we look to the man on the borrowed donkey, hear and obey his words, our prayers and our deeds dissolve into one another and we know blessing. There is nothing glamorous about this rock-solid sense of blessing; “Just go and do as I tell you,” Jesus says. The more I try to respond to this, the more I find new purpose, and discover a point of reference by which to measure my actions and desires. Stirred, sometimes fulfilled, sometimes failing, yet always invited to a new way of being truly human, I have found ways to deal with my persistent question: “What makes life worth living?” In the life and teaching of Jesus I am learning about love and finding the courage to hope. In this I am blessed.

* * *

I can think of nothing more appealing that Jesus’ promise of “abundant life”. The phrase itself is fulsome, affirming and redolent with promise. My understanding of abundant life comes from my experience of a relationship with Jesus and is encapsulated in three words – compassion, love and hope. Jesus lived out compassion because he loved and his acts of love gave hope to those whose lives he touched. Jesus then is Jesus now, offering this triad of compassion, love and hope to us today. This is cause for wonder.

Why did Jesus spend his earthly ministry with those not of his class, and become an outcast by choice? The answer in the gospels is quite simple: compassion. Matthew 14:14 tells how Jesus tried to be by himself, but the crowds stuck by him “[…] and he had compassion for them and cured their sick”. He did not begrudge their intrusion on his need to be alone. He was moved by compassion for the plight of the widow of Nain. “Do not weep,” he said to her (Lk 7:13) He had compassion (“moved with pity”) for a leper desperate for healing (Mk 1:41). The word “compassion” comes from two Latin words, “suffer” and “with”. To show compassion means to suffer with someone, to enter into a person’s situation and become involved in that person’s suffering. But this is almost too tame an understanding of the feeling that moved Jesus. The Greek word for compassion describes an emotion that comes from the intestines, the bowels, the entrails or the heart. It is a word that describes a welling up from the gut – a gut reaction. Expressions like “he felt sorry” or “he was moved with pity” do not capture the deep physical and emotional flavour of the Greek word. Only the deepest compassion could have moved Jesus on the cross to pray for his persecutors: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Compassion is never a theoretical attitude. It is about doing, not just thinking or saying. It is more than the mere desire to relieve a person’s suffering; it is expressed in actions to do so. Compassion is practical. Compassion moves us to alleviate suffering and to oppose injustice, because we are able to stand in the shoes of another. Compassion is concerned with the dignity and worth of all people without exception. It is by doing that we seek justice, equity and respect, and it is by doing that we express love. Jesus, the man, lived a life of supreme compassion. He showed us the way by doing. There is no doubt that his actions were very unsettling to the authorities, that his actions broke barriers, and that his acts of compassion, immersed in love, changed lives. They changed mine. I now know that love and hope are real and cannot be defeated.

* * *

I cannot separate compassion from love. Sagely, the Dalai Lama commented: “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.” I agree, yet when Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians (16:14) “[l]et all that you do be done in love”, I quake. This is a pretty tall order. Is it possible to do everything in love? I fear I cannot meet this demand, but does my falling short negate being blessed? I think not. Paul seems to be setting a goal and in striving to reach it he uncovers a wondrous truth: when we stumble, God’s patience and forgiveness are endless. There is no condemnation.

The truth is we are able to love because God first loved us. The Taizé refrain: Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ubi est (Where charity and love are, there is God) affirms the truth that God is love. The foundation of love is God’s love freely given. We are loved and this awakens our ability to love in return. To be loved is to experience ourselves as affirmed, desired and accepted. I often wonder why this central truth about our relationship with God is missing from our creeds. We affirm our faith in a litany of events without a single word about the central truth of our faith – God loves us.

Love or agape is not about feelings of affection, or the erotic, or personal intimacies, or specific preferences, as valid as such feelings are. Love (like hope) is a practice or a way of life, often fraught with difficulties, sacrifice, frustrations and the like. In Eagleton’s words, it is “[…] far removed from some beaming bovine contentment”. In Jesus’ actions, love of God and love of neighbour converge. He is unconditionally committed to the well-being of others; he does not discriminate between people, and his love culminates in self-sacrifice – truly a hard act to follow. After relating the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus says to the lawyer, “Go and do likewise.” So the practice of agape is mandatory, while at the same time it is a gift from God, who first loved us. Agape is for the flourishing of creation – all of it. It is part of living as a moral person, and is expressed in our actions and their relational consequences. God’s love is not only faithful but also forgiving; all that we have to do is accept this truth. If this were not so, there would be no hope of love covering our “multitude of sins” and forgiving them.

Sadly, “love” is an overused word. “I love chocolate” or “I love Ella Fitzgerald’s singing” are hardly what Paul has in mind when he says: “And now faith, hope and love abide […] and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13). Love is easily corrupted when we lose Dante’s vision of that “love which moves the sun and the other stars” and settle for paltry substitutes. Our unwillingness to let go of our selfish needs, our greed and arrogance make for a pretty miserable world. But it can be different. To love another person means loving another not as an object, but as a subject. As a woman, I know about the struggle for subjectivity. I know that considering “the other” as a subject means loving others for who they are, and not simply for what they are to us. It is also a corrupt form of love to love only those we deem worthy of love. This is not Jesus’ way. For him all humanity is worthy of love. Another pitiful subterfuge is to think that loving Christ is unrelated to loving our neighbour. We end up trying to love Christ instead of our neighbour, and not Christ in our neighbour.

I can understand love only in terms of the relational. Love is about how I relate to God, others, myself and to the world in which I live. To love is to risk trust and commitment. Love means creating space for another in which she can flourish, while at the same time she does the same for me. This is love that is mutual – my desire for the well-being of the other is related to her desire for my well-being. Her fulfilment is my fulfilment. When love for the other is taken to the point of sacrifice, it is truly a human achievement. In Old Testament neighbour usually meant those who shared one’s religion. Jesus, however, broadens the meaning of neighbour. In the tale of the Good Samaritan, one’s neighbour is no longer simply the person who shares one’s religion, culture or nationality, but is the stranger one meets along the way. A further tweak is added to the practice of love when we are also told “[…] to love your neighbour as yourself” (Mk 12:31). Loving oneself is particularly stringent for it means that we should treat others as we would want to be treated ourselves.

In the face of these formidable demands, I like to think that we are made with the need to love and be loved; that it is in our divine DNA that stamps us as made in the image of God, enabling us to love God, others and ourselves. “Religious experience at its roots is experience of an unconditional and unrestricted being in love. But what we are in love with remains something that we have to find out,” says Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan. The process of finding out leads us into strange places that are not found on religious maps or in theological tomes. Early in the Gospel of John (1:38) Jesus asks prospective disciples, Andrew and Simon, “What are you looking for?” They respond: “Rabbi … where are you staying?” Jesus replies: “Come and see.” We enter unknown territory, brimming with surprises, because we want to “come and see”.

Our vocation to be daughters and sons of God means that we have to learn to love as God in Christ loves. Love is our only salvation. The love of God gave Christ to the world. The love of the Son for humanity, and our response to this love, is our salvation from meaninglessness. Love is the key to our existence. Love gives meaning to God’s entire creation. Dante’s vision is our call – to participate in that cosmic love that moves “the sun and the other stars”.

In Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton’s (1915–1968) words: “To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.” I am perpetually surprised by moments when I feel drenched with that love that knows no end and enables me to love in ways I would not have thought possible. Paul knew this: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). In the words of the classical statement of Christian faith, we no longer live but Christ lives in us.

* * *

To have faith is to have hope. Yet this statement is often taken to mean hoping for the end times when all will be made new. Hope, however, is a lived reality in the life of faith, here and now. It is not easy to hope in a world that appears increasingly to be on the cusp of implosion. While I was writing this book, the United Nations hosted yet another large gathering to debate what can be done about climate change. The world’s economy is in dire straits. Hunger, violence and disease are decimating the lives of millions on our continent. What does it mean to hope in today’s world?

Through the countless dark moments of apartheid I had hope. I believed it would end and that justice and equality would eventually prevail. I devoured the banned writings of Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela; I chose to oppose the injustice of apartheid mainly through Christian institutions. I found a home in the Christian Institute, the Institute for Contextual Theology and later in the secular Black Sash. At no time did I feel completely without hope. Right would prevail. I learnt the power of political and social analysis; I embraced liberation theologies and I focused on the connections between oppressive modes, such as sexism, racism and homophobia. Those times shaped my story – a story of hybridity because of my mixed cultural origins, and a growing sense of marginalisation in parts of my own community, contrasted with a deepening involvement with the story of Jesus of Nazareth and what it meant in my context. I hoped because of him. And I learnt about what hope is and is not.

I learnt that to hope is never to surrender our power to imagine a better world, that present unjust arrangements are provisional and precarious, and do not require acceptance. I also leant to be cautious about a false sense of fulfilment that believes that all is well, that promises have been kept and gifts received. If we so believe, we merely hold on mutely to what we have and lose our desire for something better. Just keeping life manageable on our terms is not hope. I saw that refusing to bow to such civility is an act of hope, for it is not satisfied with crumbs. I learnt that to lament injustice is an expression of hope for it calls God to account and rests on the unshakable belief that God will act.

To my surprise, I find that today there are times when I struggle to hope. Racism in many guises continues to flourish, inequality in our country becomes more entrenched as the gap widens between those who have and those who do not. Violent crime casts a dark shadow over the lives of all South Africans. Crude materialism permeates our society: it is encouraged in our media, visible in the lives of our leaders, and imitated in the desires of the young. I want to hope for a better world for my grandchildren. I know that there is no faith without hope. Chastened, I find that I once again need to remember in whom I hope, what I learnt about hope in the “bad old days” and how to live with hope, no matter the circumstances. Emily Dickinson wrote:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches on the soul,

And sings the tune without the word,

And never stops at all.

The song remains. Hope does not stop. True hope is the oxygen of faith. So I remind myself that:

Hope is not optimism. It is not that blithe sense that all will end well (alles sal regkom), because human progress is guaranteed. In the face of dreadful human need and the ever-increasing fragility of the earth, the belief in human progress is at best insubstantial. Neither is hope vested in naïve, upbeat, popular ideologies, which, according to Eagleton, “[…] tend to mistake a hubristic cult of can-do-ery for the virtue of hope”. Hope is not magic, or living “as if”, or projecting what we hope for onto some nebulous future.

Hope is not vested in some future victory. We must guard against the unattractive nature of Christian triumphalism as embodied in the apocalyptic that abandons historical realities while trumpeting exclusive insights into how God will in future break into history to bring about God’s purposes. This kind of triumphalism is no more than a pie-in-the-sky-when-I-die exclusive claim that all will be well with me one day, rather than Julian of Norwich’s universal vision that “All will be well, all manner of things will be well”. Theologian Flora Keshgegian comments: “Once-and-for-all thinking privileges the end over the means; it turns visions into utopias, transforms imagination into wish fulfilment and hope into the eternal embodiment of desire.” This so-called hope robs us of our ability to understand the workings of power entangled in structural injustice, and our roles in perpetuating what is wrong now. It prevents us from coming to grips with our fallibility and the fragility of our world. It chokes true lived hope.

Hope is to be lived. The way I hope should be the way I live. To live out my hope is to try to make that which I hope for come about – sooner rather than later. Not surprisingly, hope is usually associated with the future. Christian hope is too often garbed in language about the end times – we hope in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Certainly hope has future dimensions. We do hope in a future with God, we hold to the coming vision of the fullness of God’s reign on earth. Hope is both present and future. Brazilian theologian and philosopher Ruben Alves says: “Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance it.” I am afraid that I cannot comprehend hope beyond history. I do hope that this world will be redeemed, but my dance of faith happens now. The hope that I find is a hope anchored in the history and presence of the person who at the same time is my hope for the future of all creation.

Hope is risky. It has no guarantees. German Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann speaks of “the experiment of hope” because it can lead to disappointment, danger, as well as surprise. “Hope is an experiment with God, with oneself, and with history,” he writes. Twenty years ago I wrote:

To choose life is to choose risk. As disappointment follows disappointment, we risk losing our vision, we are tempted to despair. The challenge is to dare to hope, and in this daring to wrestle with all that seeks to deprive us of hope or disempower us. Wrestling is risky. Our strength may fail us or we may emerge wounded and scarred. Reminding ourselves that God’s creation was the greatest risk ever taken, we as partners in this venture will have to risk in order to claim our rightful place as agents of history, seeking liberation for the groaning creation.

I have no reason to add anything more today.

Hope recognises the tragic in history. This book describes the blessing of being able to deal with the incongruities of life with humour. This does not mean that I do not honour the tragic in life. Hope must recognise the tragic in history to avoid blind optimism. No happy endings are ensured. History repeats itself with a monotony that would be boring were it not so tragic. The tragic demands that we remember. We acknowledge absence and loss, pain and fear, and that nothing present on earth is either past or finished. We live with the ambiguity of hope: hope for a better life and the stark reality of shattered hopes. When roads fork we are forced to make choices and have no way of knowing what will follow. Tragedy cannot be avoided. God’s presence is found in the compassion that prevents suffering from having the last word, and in resilience that continues unabated. This active hope refuses to be defeated. To inhabit hope despite woeful circumstances is to offer a counter-story that dares us to become involved in making that which we hope for come about.

Hope is learning to wait. Hope requires patience and endurance, and is the opposite of resignation. Hope is expectant, open to being surprised, and willing to ride out the long wait. It is fuelled by a passion for the possible that is realistic because hope cannot be assuaged by instant gratification. Samuel Beckett’s well-known play Waiting for Godot is about two characters who wait endlessly and in vain for Godot to appear. The play depicts the meaninglessness of life. Expectant waiting, unlike waiting for Godot, dares to remind us of the One in whom we hope, of promises made, of assurances given, of unending love and mercy. There is an element of resistance in our waiting because it resists the void of hopelessness, and the derision of a world that wants instant answers.

Hope is nurtured by prayer and community. Prayer is our greatest tool for holding onto hope. Conversing with God about our hopes, lamenting before God about those that are shattered, confessing impatience and moments of hopelessness, petitioning for what seems impossible, and meditating on God’s faithfulness are Spirit-led moments that nurture hope. Whether our prayers are part of our rituals or whether they are spontaneous, whether they are uttered in solitary silence or among a group of believers, they ground our hopes and strengthen our faith in the God who made us. My hope is also sustained and shared within the community of faith. It is nurtured in communal relationships and our common faith in God who acts in history.

God is the ground of our hope. I know in whom I vest my hope. I trust in the God whose truth is found in the man on the borrowed donkey. Eagleton affirms the role of trust: “The virtue of hope for Christianity equally involves a kind of certainty: it is a matter of an assured trust, not of keeping one’s fingers crossed.” My trust is not in some abstract God in the heavens pulling strings on which we dangle as puppets, or some judge doling out favours to the faithful, but a living God who is present in human history and whose divine energy continues to woo us into the fullness of life, now and beyond. Our story with God has no end because it is a story of unending grace.

* * *

I have been surprised by the paradox of grace in the life of faith – it is both ordinary and extraordinary. The word “ordinary” here means “in the order of things”; it does not mean something mundane or unimportant. The Oxford Shorter Dictionary uses the words “regular and usual” to qualify what is ordinary. These words accurately describe what is meant by “ordinary grace” – it is in the order of things, because it is a commonplace reality, flooding the world, there for all, from the beginning of time. But, because paradox runs throughout every attempt to speak about God’s presence and care for this world, grace is also extraordinary. It is extraordinary because it cannot be earned, it is unmerited and utterly abundant, and while it permeates the world, we may also ask for it. However, the very fact that it is all-pervasive also makes it “in the order of things” – ordained by God for all, thus commonplace. To say: “Blessed are those” is to acknowledge the working of God’s grace in our lives.

Tagging grace as “ordinary” will, I anticipate, raise immediate objections. Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) in his acclaimed work, The Cost of Discipleship, writes: “Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace.” He continues in scathing fashion:

Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like a cheapjack’s wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sins and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury […] Grace without price; grace without cost! […] Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system […] Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything remains as it was before.

In contrast, costly grace, according to Bonhoeffer is “[…] a treasure hidden in a field […] [that] must be sought again and again […] asked for.” He continues:

Costly grace is the sanctuary of God; it has to be protected from the world, and not thrown to the dogs. It is therefore, the living word, the Word of God, which he speaks as it pleases him. Costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart.

Where does this leave “ordinary” grace? Is it cheap? Bonhoeffer is right. We can cheapen grace. If we trade on God’s goodness and generosity, we cheapen the notion of grace. If we claim the fruits of grace without being willing to acknowledge their source with gratitude, we cheapen grace. If we refuse grace’s call to discipleship, says Bonhoeffer, we cheapen it. Why would we cheapen grace? The simple answer is that we are alienated creatures who choose to reject any dependence on Ultimate Reality. We deny our finitude and alienate ourselves from one another, from nature, from history and, in the end, from ourselves, as American Catholic theologian David Tracy warns. Grace is both a gift and a painful revelation of who we are. The story is familiar – we are made from and for God. We are also made to be in relationship with God and one another. The truth is we have become estranged from each other, endangering our existence together. Despite this, God sustains us because, although we are faithless, God is faithful. God speaks a word of forgiveness in Christ that is free, pure, fresh, unmerited, and is effective grace.

But cheap grace is not what I mean by grace being “in the order of things”. I have described grace as ordinary because I have been overwhelmed with surprise at just how prevalent it is, pervading my reality. It is as ordinary as the air I breathe. And I have also been surprised by my inability to have known this truth sooner. But as I said, what is ordinary is also extraordinary. Christians can speak of God’s relationship with human beings only through a constant awareness of the free grace of God, given once and for all in Jesus Christ. What could be more ordinary and extraordinary than a man borrowing a donkey, a man who is Emmanuel – God with us?

Do I recognise the working of grace in my life? At times I do, and at others I am oblivious to its presence, for grace is both simple to see and not obvious. We recognise a grace-filled life when we see it, and we will know moments when grace overwhelms us. However, the very ordinariness of grace defies explanation and tends to cause us to overlook its presence. Trying to describe a plume of smoke drifting through the air to a blind person is as difficult as seeking to encapsulate grace in words. Tracy describes the nature of grace:

Grace is a word Christians use to name this extraordinary process: a power erupting in one’s life as a gift revealing that Ultimate Reality can be trusted as the God who is Pure, Unbounded Love; a power interrupting our constant temptations to delude ourselves at a level more fundamental than any conscious error; a power gradually but really transforming old habits.

In my attempts at making sense of this “extraordinary” process I have found that:

God’s grace is unfathomable and unmerited. Being a recipient of grace does not require perfection or high ethical standards. Grace takes no regard of who and how we are: the schemers, the thieves, the liars, the charitable, those who bargain with God, those who stumble and try again, believers and non-believers are all within the contours of God’s grace. American essayist and poet Kathleen Norris in her book, Amazing Grace, reminds us of the indiscriminate nature of God’s grace. Jacob is a man who has “just deceived his father and cheated his brother out of an inheritance”. God does not punish him. Jacob is dealt with (through his even more scheming father-in-law) so that God can use him for grace-filled purposes. After wrestling through the night with the unknown man, he can say: “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved” (Gen 32:30). God saw the potential in Jacob beyond his scheming ways and made of him a nation. David is both a murderer and an adulterer, yet he is blessed by God. In the story of Jonah the prophet, God calls Jonah to proclaim judgment on Nineveh. This political allegory tells how Jonah absconds – as one of my children’s books said, by “taking a ship that went the other way”. Yet ultimately the story confirms his efficacy in the conversion of all who lived in Nineveh.

Peter’s record as a follower of Jesus is one of continuous ups and downs. Matthew 16:18 recounts how Jesus names Peter’s calling: “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Jesus has barely uttered these words when Peter rebukes him for disclosing his suffering, to the extent that Jesus says: “Get behind me Satan! You are a stumbling block to me …” (Mt 16:23). Later we know that Peter denies Jesus three times in a courtyard during Jesus’ hearing before the high priest: “I do not know this man” (Mt 26:74). Yet, according to the Book of Acts, Peter sets about accomplishing the task assigned to him by Jesus with devotion. Saul persecutes Christians with unseemly zeal. He does not seem a likely candidate for establishing the church in Asia Minor. But we know that Saul becomes Paul who sets about this task with dedication and courage. Evidence for the 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 surprised me along the way. I have been taken aback by both their very ordinariness and their supreme extraordinariness. There is nothing spectacular about listening, feeling grateful, curbing my greed and having a good laugh. I am equally amazed by the extraordinariness of finding promise in paradox, of being confronted with the truth that I am holy, and that freedom from fear is possible even when confronted with mortality. I shall settle for God’s grace being “in the order of things”, because this is God’s world, we are God’s people and grace declares God’s love – and God can be no other than loving. This, the man on the borrowed donkey shows me.