Two Ways to Run From God

When most people picture becoming religious, they imagine a single dividing line. On one side stand the good, moral, churchgoing people. On the other side stands everyone else: the doubters, the partiers, the ones who slept in on Sunday. Crossing from the second group to the first means cleaning up your life, adopting the right beliefs, and working hard at being good. Religion, on this picture, runs on effort. Be moral enough, and God will accept you.

I think that picture is mistaken, and mistaken in a way that matters a great deal, because the most devout believer and the most committed skeptic tend to share it. Both assume that any acceptance worth having is acceptance you earn by being good. The religious person assumes it and sets out to comply. The skeptic assumes it, finds it either impossible or distasteful, and walks away. They are mirror images of each other. The startling claim at the heart of Christianity is that both of them have read it wrong.

Let me sharpen it. A person can keep God at a safe distance by two opposite routes. One route breaks the moral rules and lives however it pleases. The other route keeps the moral rules with enormous care and uses that goodness as leverage, so that God and everyone else end up owing them. The first person says, "I will live my own way." The second person says, "I will live God's way, which obligates him to give me what I want." Each one stays firmly in charge. Each one is running from the real thing. They simply run in opposite directions.

If you have ever met someone technically upright who was also cold, anxious, quick to judge, and exhausting to be near, you have met a traveler on the second route. Their goodness curdled, because underneath it sat a ledger. They kept score with God and resented anyone who had paid in less than they had. Meanwhile the person who threw off every rule usually discovers in time that "do whatever you want" builds its own prison. Desires with nothing above them become tyrants. A room with no walls turns out to be a lonely place. Both roads lead away from home.

Now the message turns strange, strange enough that it deserves a hearing in its own words rather than the secondhand version most of us absorbed somewhere along the way. Christianity says you could never be good enough to earn God's acceptance, and that you were never asked to. Acceptance comes to you as a gift you receive. The word for the gift is grace, and grace is the single thing that sets the Christian message apart from every religion and every program of self-improvement. The usual order runs like this: behave, and then you will be accepted. Grace reverses the order. You are accepted first, and out of that security, with the fear drained away, you become free to live well. Reverse the order, and everything downstream changes.

You might fairly ask: if it is free, does goodness stop mattering? Will people just do as they like? Watch what actually happens inside a person who is loved without conditions. A child who knows her parents' love holds steady regardless of her report card grows secure, and from that security she dares to try hard things. The anxious child, auditioning every day for a love she is unsure of, is the one who freezes. Grace produces generous people, because a person can only give away what she has first received, and someone who has been handed undeserved mercy is finally in a position to hand it on.

You may carry a deeper objection, and it is a good one. If God simply waves wrongdoing away, then he treats evil as trivial. A judge who releases every offender is no friend to anyone; he is unjust, and the victims pay for his leniency. A God who shrugged at cruelty would forfeit any claim on our worship. So how can God accept us freely and still take evil with full seriousness? How can he be just and merciful in the same moment?

The cross of Jesus exists to answer exactly that. The Christian claim is that God waved nothing away. He came in person, in Jesus, and at the cross he took the cost of human evil into himself, absorbing the debt we could not pay, so that justice was honored and mercy could run free. That is why Christians keep returning to one scene: a man dying on a Roman cross, speaking two words over the whole arrangement, "It is finished." The bill was settled. Your account is paid in full, and the offensive, liberating part is that you could add nothing to it even if you tried. The celebrated and the disgraced stand on identical ground at the foot of that cross, because grace was never a prize for the impressive. It only ever reaches the ones honest enough to admit they need it.

So the gospel cuts the ground out from under the religious striver and the skeptic in one motion. To the moral, exhausted rule-keeper it says: lay the ledger down, you were never going to balance it, and you do not have to. To the person who fled religion in disgust at all the striving and hypocrisy, it says: your disgust was warranted. That treadmill was a counterfeit, and the thing you walked away from may never have been Christianity at all.

I am not asking you to be convinced by one article. I am asking you to consider that the version of Christianity you may already have rejected, the one that says be good, earn your standing, keep the rules and look down on those who don't, is a version Jesus himself attacked more hotly than anyone around him. The actual message runs the opposite way. It is good news, and it is aimed squarely at people who are tired of pretending.

If that lands as even a small relief, the chance that you are at once more flawed than you ever dared believe and more loved than you ever dared hope, then it is worth chasing down. Read Luke's Gospel, and watch closely how Jesus treats the two kinds of people in this article, the rule-keepers and the rule-breakers. Notice which group he is hardest on, and which group he sits down to eat with. The answer tends to surprise people raised on the other version.