To listen to the whole unabridged class: The Beautiful Folly
Loved as we are, not as we should be
Beyond Sunday School: The Ragamuffin Gospel, chapter 11 and A Word After
We have come to the end of The Ragamuffin Gospel, and chapter 11, “A Touch of Folly,” is the right ending. Because after ten chapters, Brennan Manning wants us to admit what normal people have always known about grace.
It is ridiculous.
You do not get anything free in this life
Years ago, when I was on staff with Campus Crusade, I sat in a dorm room at Illinois State talking through the gospel with a college student. We got to the end, and I asked if he wanted to receive Christ.
He said, “Let me get this straight. I do not have to do anything? God will just forgive me if I ask?”
That is how grace works, I told him.
“You do not understand. I have done some really, really bad things.”
I said I understood, and that he was not in prison, so the bad things could only be so bad. He said, “Maybe I have not gotten caught.”
Fair enough.
He kept circling back to the same objection. He was not a good person. God had to be angry with him. He needed to do penance. He needed to do a lot of things to even the scales. I told him he would never even the scales, and that is why all he had to do was ask for forgiveness.
“Nope,” he said. “You do not get anything free in this life. I cannot believe something like that.”
And that was the end of our conversation. I never saw him again. Maybe a seed was planted. I hope so.
But he understood something that many of us who grew up in church have forgotten. Grace is folly. Unconditional love and mercy sound absurd to a world that runs on scales and ledgers.
Manning opens the chapter with an old Russian proverb: Those who have the disease called Jesus will never be cured.
When grace truly takes hold of your mind, your heart, and your soul, you cannot escape it. It changes you. You spend the rest of your life happily incurable.
As we are, not as we should be
Manning tells of being seized by the power of a great affection, and he connects it to a Down syndrome Amish boy named Elam, and to the Iroquois, who gave children like Elam an honored place because in their unselfconscious freedom they were a transparent window into the heart of Jesus Christ, who loves us as we are, not as we should be.
That may be the summary statement of the whole book. Jesus loves us as we are, not as we should be. In the state of grace or disgrace, beyond caution, boundary, regret, or breaking point, in a world that is torn and tearing, it takes a touch of folly to believe that even when our choices are destructive and their consequences hurtful, God’s love remains unwavering.
Now, Manning would be quick to add that this does not mean we stay as we are. The Spirit of God moves in and dwells in us, and the Spirit changes us. We do not start trying to do good things to earn anything. We are so changed by grace that we begin to do good things.
Think of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables. Fresh out of prison, he steals the bishop’s silver and gets caught. The police drag him back, and the bishop says, in effect, My friend, why did you leave the candlesticks? They are worth so much more. He puts the candlesticks in Valjean’s bag, and after the police leave, he tells him: I have bought your soul. Now go and live as a good man.
The bishop met Valjean as he was. Not as he ought to be. And that grace transformed his life.
Ridiculous enough to be Christianity
Someone in our room underlined a line near the end of an early section: if you think it is ridiculous to believe that life will triumph over death, then do not bother with Christianity, because you cannot be a Christian unless you believe it.
That is kind of it, is it not?
We talked about how foreign simple assurance sounds to people. Someone remembered a class years ago where the minister asked, “If you died tonight, would you go to heaven?” Her honest thought at the time was: how could anyone be arrogant enough to say yes? It cannot be that easy.
We keep hearing versions of “I hope I am good enough.” We heard it recently in a televised interview, from a man surrounded by Christian leaders, and it was heartbreaking. Not because he is uniquely bad, but because you can be surrounded by religious words your whole life and never actually be shown grace. People can be in relationship with us, hear us use all the vocabulary, and never be invited into unconditional love and forgiveness.
One of us shared a harder version of the same story. Her cousin spent his whole career as a youth minister in the Catholic Church. Dying of ALS, he told a visiting nephew that he hoped he had done enough to get into heaven. A lifetime of ministry, and at the end: I hope I have done enough.
That is what a grace less gospel does to a person.
Why folly?
Wendy asked the question that unlocks the chapter: why did Manning choose the word folly?
Because Paul chose it first. In 1 Corinthians, Paul says the gospel is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks. Folly is foolishness. It is madness. These people are mad.
But here is the real madness, and Manning knows it. There is a scene in the film Amistad where the enslaved Africans, kept in prison, piece together the gospel from a picture Bible someone has given them. One of them finds the picture of the risen Jesus and says, in effect: this is who they say they worship. He was just like us. Arrested, stripped, beaten, killed. And then this God of theirs came back to life.
The other man answers: that cannot possibly be true. Otherwise, they would not be so sad.
Outside the prison, the church people of the town had come dressed in black, singing dirges.
Sit with that. How often does someone watch the way we speak and act and conclude that the resurrection cannot be true, because if it were, we would not be like this? If we truly grasped grace, our hearts would be overcome with joy and gratitude. Instead, we so often move through the world with entitlement and judgment, expecting people to be different than the people Christ met when he met us.
That is folly too, but it is the wrong kind.
Seized by the power of a great affection does not seem to relate to the real world in which we live. Does it require a fair measure of lunacy to listen to the loony tunes of the Ragamuffin Gospel? Manning’s answer comes in three words: Yes, it does.
The questions that will not leave us alone
The truth of the gospel does not rise and fall on corrupt clergy, the exploitation of the poor, or the fanaticism of dictators. It deserves to be accepted or rejected for what it is: an answer to the most fundamental questions a person can ask.
Is life absurd, or does it have a purpose? Jesus replies that our lives have purpose, and that God has intervened in human affairs to make that purpose clear. What is ultimate reality? Jesus answers that the really real is generous, forgiving, saving love. In the end, will life triumph over death? With unshaken confidence, Jesus answers that the kingdom of his Father cannot be overcome, even by death.
In the end, everything will be all right. No loss is lasting. No defeat is more than transitory. Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement, and death will be part of the journey. But the kingdom of God will conquer all these horrors. No evil can resist grace forever.
And we are not alone in any of it. Christ has walked this way before us, and by his Spirit he walks it with us.
Near the close of the chapter, Manning admits his own limitations and says he is not going to be hard on himself, because the secret of the mystery is that God is always greater. No matter how great we think him to be, his love is always greater. We cannot fathom it.
It sounds like the end of Romans 8. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Nothing.
A diagnostic for the bedraggled
Before the chapter ends, Manning turns country preacher and asks a series of intimate questions about our relationship with Jesus. Are you moody and melancholy because you are still striving for a perfection that comes from your own efforts, and not from faith in Jesus? Are you shocked and horrified when you fail? Are you really aware that you do not have to change, or grow, or be good, in order to be loved?
If the answers are no, he says, you probably belong to the brotherhood of the bedraggled, beat up, and burnt out. You may feel like a charred log in a fireplace, drained of energy and unable to light a fire in yourself.
Then he quotes Louis Savory’s description, and I had twenty faces in my head as it was read: their lives are full of demands from others. They seem to be living at least three lives. Everyone wants a piece of them. They cannot say no, yet they have no time. They invest heavily in relationships and receive little gratitude, feedback, or acknowledgment in return.
Either the questions hit, or the diagnosis does. Both are gifts. A diagnostic lets us check our own hearts honestly, in a season when our inner resources feel exhausted, and remember that exhaustion is not the end of the story.
The scandal of the afterword
In “A Word After,” Manning says the quiet part at full volume. The love of God is simply unimaginable, and preaching it will cost you. Teachers and pastors who go down the rabbit hole of grace discover that people really do not like it. The cross was always a stumbling block and foolishness. Grace is folly. It has never stopped being folly.
Then comes the passage that feels written for this week rather than for the year 2000:
No greater sinners exist than those so called Christians who disfigure the face of God, mutilate the gospel of grace, and intimidate others through fear. They corrupt the essential nature of Christianity. In Eugene Peterson’s forceful phrase, they are telling lies about God. … The North American Church is at a critical juncture. The Gospel of Grace is being confused and compromised by silence, seduction, and outright subversion.
Someone in our room noted the sentence Manning imagines for such people: lock them up for three years with nothing but a Bible. We liked that sentence.
The temptation underneath all of it is to recreate God in our image. To pick and choose until God says what we want him to say. There is a reliable test. If Jesus loves and hates all the exact same people that I love and hate, I have created him in my own image. His love, grace, and mercy are beyond anything I could possibly imagine. They have to be, or I am just worshiping a bigger version of myself.
Open hands
Manning ends the afterword with the paragraph I want to carry out of this whole book:
The confessing church of American Ragamuffins needs to join Magdalene and Peter in witnessing that Christianity is not primarily a moral code, but a grace laden mystery. It is not essentially a philosophy of love, but a love affair. It is not keeping rules with clenched fists, but receiving a gift with open hands.
That is a good place to end our first step into a year long discussion of grace.
C. S. Lewis said we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. That is what this book has done for me. I hope it has drawn you a little deeper into relationship with Jesus, and a little deeper into a lived sense of his grace.
Open hands, ragamuffins. Open hands.
Heavenly Father, thank you for Jesus. Thank you that he met us right where we are. He saved us. He redeemed us. He rescued us from the pit. He did not wait for us to get our acts together. He did not wait for us to show our hope and our desire for him. He came and moved into the neighborhood. He walked among us. He lived, and he died, and he rose again, conquering sin and death. And now he offers grace through love to each of us with no strings attached, simply because that is who he is. Lord, I pray that we might respond to that loving grace, and that our lives might reflect our Savior. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.