The Heart of Grace: Love
Christian grace is the undeserved favor of God towards us; we don’t deserve God’s love because of what we have achieved, the good we have done. God loves us because he desires communion with us. In other words, God’s love exists independent of our actions, or even of our awareness of Him. As we respond to this love over time, this becomes our story of salvation. Christ’s death and resurrection was God’s greatest act of love, “for no one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for a friend”(John 15:13). We are the friends of God when we show our love for one another; this is God’s “command” expressed in Jesus’ great command, but more importantly, revealed in his actions. It's not so much "What would Jesus do", but rather "What did Jesus do?"
In today’s reading from 1 Samuel, Nathan, the prophet who succeeded Samuel, helped David face his great sin of abusing his power by taking his loyal friend’s wife as his secret lover while his friend was away at war fighting for Israel. How does one tell a king he is a great sinner effectively? He does it with a story. Likewise, Jesus in today’s gospel tells a story of the Pharisee, Simon. In both instances, a painful truth had to be communicated, and because both King David and Simon had a sense of God’s love, Nathan and Jesus used parable rather than condemnation to reveal the need for repentance.
Jack Kavanaugh, a Jesuit scholar aptly observes that “Our resistance to repentance parallels our resistance to love. If we experience ourselves unable to trust fully that God could love us unconditionally, the indirect method of parables sometimes is the most efficient strategy to help us accept the mystery of our redemption.”
Paul, likewise, recounted his salvation in sharing a story, not providing a scholarly treatise on grace. He recounts God’s love revealed to him while he was persecuting the Church,
"how I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it, and progressed in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my race, since I was, even more, a zealot for my ancestral traditions. But when God, who from my mother’s womb had set me apart and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him to the Gentiles…."
We witness to the truth of God’s love by striving to love one another as God loves us. This is our liberation from the Law. It isn’t that we can just disregard the commandments of God as revealed in earlier times (we can’t simply commit adultery by claiming not to be bound by the Law), but rather we fulfill the Law in loving one another as we have been loved by God.
Our confronting the sinners in this world begins not with condemnation, but with the story of our graced lives. We share our table with sinners because we all have sinned and fallen short of meriting God’s favor. We gather to worship not because we are saints, but because we are sinners striving for sainthood.
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