Initiatives of Change - Detailed view of For A Change Articles

Home Current issue News Commentaries Featured People Building Trust Reviews Have your say

FEATURES

Volume 12 Number 3

The Last Best Word of the English Language

01 June 1999

American author Philip Yancey teaches Susan Corcoran a thing or two about grace.

'What would grace look like in this situation?' That is a question I often ask myself since reading Philip Yancey's book What's so amazing about grace?*.

Grace is not easy to define but we usually recognize it when we see it. Yancey describes it as 'the last best word' of the English language because in every usage it retains some of the glory of the original. His story-telling style takes 'grace' from a religious context and puts it in the market place, moving it from theological discussion to practical application.

Yancey describes our world as being 'choked with the fumes of ungrace'. But, he adds, 'occasionally a grace note sounds, high, lilting, ethereal, to interrupt the monotonous background growl of ungrace'. Grace comes from the outside as a gift. Grace billows up. Grace happens.

'Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I am one of those people,' Yancey writes. 'I think back to who I was--resentful, wound tight with anger, a single hardened link in a long chain of ungrace. Now I am trying in my own small way to pipe the tune of grace. I do so because I know, more surely than I knew anything, that any pang of healing or forgiveness or goodness I have felt comes solely from the grace of God.'

This book has made me look for the moments of grace, and ungrace. During a phone call to a friend recently I became so angry that I hung up on her. Afterwards I recognized that moment of 'ungrace'. A simple apology meant we could begin the conversation again in a different spirit.

'Grace baffles us,' Yancey writes, 'because it goes against the intuition that everyone has that, in the face of injustice, some price must be paid.... Grace sounds a shrill note of unfairness. Grace is not about finishing first; it is about not counting. We receive grace as a gift from God, not as something we toil to earn. God dispenses gifts not wages.' Recently this became more real for me when a colleague's attitude seemed a stumbling block to an important project. In spite of this the project went forward. At the end my colleague was lavished with praise and thanks while I was given none. I struggled with God to accept this unfairness. I remembered Yancey's words that 'grace alone melts ungrace'. The next day my colleague's attitude was transformed. I could see that the change in the other person was a more important gift to me than the recognition that I craved.

The heart of Yancey's book is about forgiveness. 'Forgiveness alone can alter the cycle of blame and pain, breaking the chain of ungrace,' he tells us. 'Forgiveness offers a way out. It does not settle all the questions of blame and fairness--often it pointedly evades those questions--but it does allow a relationship to start over.'

He is clear that, 'Not to forgive imprisons me in the past and locks out all potential for change.' He quotes Lewis Smeede of Fuller Theological Seminary, 'The first, and often the only, person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness. When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.'

The thought that forgiveness is more about what happens in me than what happens in the other person made me see that I have the power to let go of the past, to be healed, regardless of what the other person does or does not do. I don't have to make sure they understand the wrong they have committed, feel my pain or even apologize. The power of forgiveness is in my heart and I can give it freely without conditions.

Yancey goes on from personal questions to explore whether grace has any relevance in the wider world where force matters most. He concludes, 'The strongest argument in favour of grace is the alternative, a world of ungrace. The strongest argument for forgiveness is a permanent state of unforgiveness.'

He describes Lincoln, Gandhi, King, Rabin and Sadat as great leaders who paid the ultimate price for defying the law of ungrace, but who helped create a national climate that led to reconciliation. He looks at recent history and concludes that authentic forgiveness has the power to deal with the evil in a person's heart, something for which politics has no cure. He quotes Senator Sam Nunn, 'The Cold War ended not in a nuclear inferno, but in a blaze of candles in the churches of Eastern Europe.'

More recently I heard Philip Yancey speak at the National Presbyterian Church in Washington DC about how we learn grace from people who are hard to be around or not as we want them to be. It made me wonder if family life is meant to be more about learning grace than striving for perfection. As we go through different ages and stages, it is in the inevitable personality clashes and collisions, that God can teach us something about grace.

The real division in the world is not between 'good people' and 'bad people' but rather 'failed people who admit it' and 'failed people who deny it', Yancey pointed out. It is our failures and weaknesses that are the fissures through which grace can pass. What better way to teach my children grace than to be willing to admit failure and apologize for my moments of ungrace?

Philip Yancey suggests it is not our task to clean up all the evils of the world, to turn ungodly people into godly people--that is God's job. A concern for moral values alone is not nearly enough: moralism apart from grace solves little. Rather, he suggests, it is our job to dispense grace free of charge.

What is amazing about God's grace is the mercy and generosity with which he 'keeps finding ways to shatter the relentless laws of ungrace'. Yancey's book wonderfully illustrates 'grace's life-changing power' and makes me want to become a 'grace dispenser' in a world that thirsts for grace.

* 'What's so amazing about grace?' by Philip Yancey, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, 1997

Susan Corcoran