I recently watched Night and Fog, a French film about the Holocaust, for my World Religions class. I'll spare you the worst details, but the part that really got to me was when the film showed images of the absolutely evil and depraved experiments that Nazi 'doctors' conducted on prisoners in the name of their twisted racial science. And yet, my religion demands that I accept that the people who did those barbaric, downright satanic things have the exact same opportunity to be saved that I have been offered.
It's an old argument, an argument so basic you probably heard it discussed in Sunday School: "You're telling me that a murderer can go to Heaven by saying a prayer, but a person who has been good their whole life will still be sent to Hell if they don't?" The thought that one act of repentance can erase any crime galls us.
Why? Because it isn't fair. And that's exactly right. Salvation is cheating on a cosmic scale. Grace is scandalous. As a pastor's kid, I had heard the term 'scandalous grace' plenty of times, but I never really understood it. Then, a website about the art of storytelling, a M-rated video game, and an Italian witch made it all click.
Tvtropes.org is a website dedicated to discussing various 'tropes' or commonly used storytelling tricks. (Warning, if you go there you will lose your entire evening... and probably your whole weekend) One of these tropes is the 'Karma Houdini': this is when a villain does some good act that is small compared to the amount of evil he has done, but still manages to get off scot-free. This is generally considered bad writing. Why? Because we HATE the thought of somebody getting to enjoy the fruits of goodness with such little effort. We want characters to EARN their rewards, not cheat their way to Paradise.
And let me be clear, being saved is always cheating. We may pride ourselves on our moral superiority, but our personal moral ranking systems (that invariably give us passing grades) are meaningless because the only standard that matters is God's absolute goodness. James 2:10 tells us that all sin is equally sinful and to break one of God's laws is to break all of them. Certainly, there are people who are more moral than others, but let us not delude ourselves into thinking that we are more deserving of our salvation. Jesus didn't die on the cross to give a little boost to the already nice people, He gave us the only chance we could ever have.
To illustrate this point, let me use an example from the video game Red Dead Redemption. (*WARNING* SPOILERS) Yes, I'm probably going to lose PK points by admitting to playing a game with a rating box as full as Red Dead's, but here we go. The protagonist of the game is John Marston, an ex-outlaw who trying to go straight and simply be left alone, but keeps being coerced into undertaking missions for a pair of despicable government agents who use the threat of punishment for his past crimes as leverage. Whenever John acts like he's paid them back, they refuse to let him go free, sarcastically responding that John must be nuts to think a few good deeds can balance out all the horrible things he did years ago. The agents may be the scum of the earth and deserve to have their heads shoved into jet turbines, but they do have a point. In the end John cannot outrun his crimes and his sins seek him out... at muzzle velocity. Redemption by human means is a pointless endeavor, there is no way to balance the scales.
Finally, the Italian witch. She spoke at my World Religions class a while back and said that what she really likes about Christianity is how it spits in the face of karma and cause and effect. Think about it, how many other religions so blatantly go against our ideas of justice? How many other religions freely admit to such 'low' standards for salvation? Judaism and Islam teach that when you die the good and evil deeds you did in life will be weighed out. Hinduism and Buddhism have the concept of Karma, where things done in past lives can help or hurt you in this one, and the things done in this life will have equal effects on your next one. It's all on a 1:1 system. You need an equal amount of good to balance out evil. There is no way to cheat in such a fair system... but there is also no way to win.
Next time we think God is giving someone an 'easy way out' with His mercy, let's remember we're cheating too.
"But the beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair" -Relient K, 'Be My Escape'.
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