There is No Math

A Reflection on the Second Reading for June 21st, 2020:
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time

---

Romans 5.12-15

Brothers and sisters: Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, so death spread to all people because all have sinned. Sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.
​

Pause. Pray.

And then read more...

​
Of all the concepts in Christianity, grace is the one I have to learn over and over again. The grace of God is a free gift. It cannot be earned and we cannot add to it. It is so central to who God is. It’s basically the whole thing. But it’s so counterintuitive to who we are as people and to who I am, specifically, as a person. As someone with fairly strong, and somewhat destructive, perfectionistic tendencies this is really hard. I’ve spent a lot of time trying, a lot of time striving, a lot of time checking boxes, and a lot of time working for gold stars. This has often worked for me in some parts of my life. Our society rewards this behaviour. Or, I should say, it has worked for me until it didn't. Life is not a series of check boxes. And more often than I care to admit, I apply this thinking to God as well, as if I thought I could earn God’s favour. But that’s just not how it works. 
 
Unconditional love is an incredibly difficult concept for us humans to grasp. The most beautiful human relationships can come pretty close, but we never quite get there. There is, inevitably, some kind of limit. We’re so transactional in nature. Even the language we use is deeply problematic. We talk about how much we value people, how people deserve our time, how much people are worth to us, etc. We talk like there is some kind of math going on where we work out where we stand with each other. Humans are transactional, but God is not. There is no math. We don’t deserve grace, but, through Jesus, we get it anyway. It’s not a tally—adding up all the good things about us and subtracting all the bad things.


It’s a free gift from God. 

​ 
I’ve been doing this for a while. But I keep coming back to grace, realizing that I don’t fully get it yet. Perhaps that’s the point. In this life we’ll never fully understand what grace really means. But the more this truth is revealed to us, that we don’t earn God’s love, the more God is revealed to us. And with the revelation of this truth, the more freedom we experience as we come to understand who we are in His sight.  
 
His precious children.  
 
Loved and held.  
 
Redeemed not through what we have done, but through what Jesus has done for all of us.  
 
 
Praise God. Thanks be to God.
​



Morgan M.

---