Angry Responses To Happy News

It’s the strangest thing how good news causes some people to become angry. One would think that if they learned that God loves them with an absolute and unwavering commitment to them that has nothing to do with how they act, anybody would be thrilled. Not so. Some people actually become agitated at such news. “If you tell people that, you are teaching cheap grace!” I’ve been told. (I usually respond by telling them that it’s even worse than they think and that I don’t teach cheap grace. I teach free grace.)

I’m amazed at the reaction from some people when they hear me say that it isn’t possible to out-sin the grace of God. You’d think that would be the kind of good news that would cause anybody to at least sigh a sigh of great relief if not literally jump up and down with joy. But that often isn’t the case. To the contrary, I’ve been accused of “being soft on sin” and encouraging people to have a careless attitude toward sins in their own lives.

Tell Christians that they are free from religious rules and watch how some people will grimace in pain like they’ve suddenly been struck down with kidney stones. As long and as hard as most of us have tried and yet have failed miserably at living up to the demands of religious rules, you’d think we would all be thrilled to hear this news. To the contrary, some shriek in fear, “You’re giving people a license to sin!”

Grace – it’s scary to the religious mind set. The self-righteous religionist is always afraid of how teaching grace might have the wrong effect on somebody else. Jesus was “full of grace and truth” and He didn’t seem to worry about that sort of thing. In fact, He seemed to go out of His way to offend the hyper-sensitivities of the self righteous religious crowd.

It was Jesus who told the story of the prodigal son and had the Father smother the boy in hugs and kisses before the pig-manure-covered boy could utter a word about being sorry. Jesus didn’t seem concerned that He might give the idea that begging for forgiveness isn’t a prerequisite for actually getting that forgiveness. Couldn’t His story cause people to accuse Him of being soft on sin?

It was Jesus who told the story of the laborers who all received the same pay check at the end of the day, despite the fact that some had worked all day while others had shown up just before quitting time. Jesus didn’t seem to consider that His story might cause some to take the matter of acting responsibly too lightly.

It was Jesus who had it be the good Samaritan who helped the wounded man by the roadside when the churchmen wouldn’t give him a second glance. To cast the story that way was equivalent to a modern day parable where it would be an HIV positive gay man who was the hero while the Sunday School teacher is made to look bad. Jesus didn’t seem to be very concerned about reversing who came off looking like he had the sterling character while the likely candidate looked like a self-absorbed jerk.

Grace – it just doesn’t fit with what seems fair. It doesn’t seem fair because it isn’t fair. That’s why it’s called grace. Prodigals are thrown parties without a single promise from them that they intend to do better. Workers who straggle in at the last minute reap the same benefit as those who were faithful from the start. The social rejects of society get to play the role of the Christ-figure in the Jesus-stories while the religious are made to look bad.

Make no mistake about it – many in the modern church would have been angry with Jesus if they had been there and heard Him speak. He didn’t fit the religious mold then and neither does He fit it today. He doesn’t care what the self-righteous think about His bizarre expressions of grace. (Bizarre because grace doesn’t fit the expectations of the religious mind.)

Jesus cares about people. He cares enough that He came to break down the bars of religious oppression whether it is found in the brutal dungeons of the Muslim world or in the respectable “Club Fed Prisons” of Evangelical and Charismatic congregations. He has come to set the captives free, not only from sin but from ruthless religion too.

Grace is good news whether we like it or not. Grace embraces and includes us all – the unrighteous and the self-righteous. The sooner we accept that fact, the sooner we can become happy about grace.