“Is he safe?”

Grace crushes. Grace drags you out into the middle of the woods and kills you. Grace will make you absolutely crazy. 

When I was first introduced to Flannery O’Connor my second year in college, I would generally leave the literature class disturbed, often in tears. This wasn’t some Christian college with a short worship set at the end of every class. This was a 2nd year class at the U.S. Naval Academy. It was taught by a rather severe professor who fit the ethos and aesthetic of the military quite well. But for those two weeks I encountered the harsh and devastating reality of grace. O’Connor’s writing is dark, grotesque and designed to disturb. She writes to her neighbors in what Ralph Wood has called the Christ-Haunted South. A community with a neat and comfortable understanding of salvation, a cozy vision of God, and a remarkably nice Jesus. O’Connor’s stories aim to violently lay waste to such haunting. She presents grace in far starker and more biblical terms: Grace comes through death and blood and the end of all niceties. 

After reading O’Connor I never read the Gospels the same way again. 

I discovered a Jesus who will hurt you. One who will roughly disturb and unsettle you. A Jesus who will demand from you one of two responses: kill him or fall down on your face in worship and obedience. 

It has been observed by a litany of commenters that “abuse” has been reduced in our day to anything which causes emotional unpleasantness. We speak of people hurting others not in absolute terms but in relative ones. Our good is that which avoids upsetting our general emotional equilibrium. Love is that which promotes the general pleasant feelings of non-distress. We Christian folk then approach the gospels and Jesus more generally as the source of all pleasant feelings and encouragement. We forget that Jesus was killed for a reason. He wasn’t put to death for being a nice guy who was well-liked. The Judean crowds did not demand his death because they felt deeply affirmed by Jesus. The oppressed peasants in Galilee did not walk away from Jesus in John 6 because he kept affirming their self-worth and best efforts. Jesus was killed, hated, and rejected because to encounter Jesus was to encounter the crushing majesty and terror of grace. Grace that convicts and kills and then, and only then, makes alive. To encounter Jesus was to encounter the horror of the holiness of God, the weight of the very Word of God - a Word that always divides the world. Grace is not the divine affirmation of your individual worth. Salvation is not a self-improvement project. Jesus is not your life coach. Grace brings death. It is, to be sure, a death that gives way to life. But don’t sugar coat the death part. Jesus speaks a word to each of us, and that word is a sword which kills, and breath that gives life. 

Our world has become bored with Jesus. Christians have become blind to Jesus. And uncomfortably often, we Christians like it this way. For if the wild and uncontrollable Jesus were to be let loose on the world - well, what would everybody think? If we were to see him as He actually is - well, that would expose our lukewarm-ness, our uselessness, our tepid obedience, our faithlessness. He would expose our obsession with being well-received, well-thought-of, with winsomeness. Make no mistake, Jesus was not winsome. No real prophet or apostle ever was. Jesus spoke a word intended to provoke a response. He was the least boring person who ever lived, and we must recover this Jesus - he is the only Jesus there is. 

Grace crushes. Grace drags you out into the middle of the woods and kills you. Grace will make you absolutely crazy. 

As we turn our attention to the final week of Jesus’ life in this season leading to Good Friday and Easter, may we see him anew. May we leave our Sunday worship disturbed and intrigued and perhaps, offended. May we leave our bible readings in the gospels troubled by a renewed and faithful vision of Jesus as he actually is: the Grace that kills and makes alive, the Salvation that destroys and remakes, the living Word of God.