Grace: A Good Friday Meditation

Years ago I was talking to a Muslim teenager in a schoolyard in London England. It was June of 2001, and I was in London on a mission trip, giving out copies of the Jesus film in multiple languages in a neighborhood dominated by refugees from the middle east and Eastern Europe. I asked him what he believed happened to us when we died.

He said, “On the day of my death I will stand before Allah. And He will weigh my good deeds against my bad deeds. If my good deeds outweigh my bad deeds, and if Allah is merciful on the day of my death, I will enter paradise.”

I said, “But only if Allah is merciful? You don’t know for sure?”

This earnest, friendly young man turned very serious. “No one can be sure,” he said. “It is arrogance for any man to believe he can know the mind of Allah. The only way you can know for sure that you will enter Paradise is to die for the faith.”

I would think about that, three months later on September 11, 2001.

I asked him and his friends that were with him, “Have you ever heard the word grace?” They became teenage boys again. “Oh yes,” they smiled. “Grace is like when you see a beautiful woman dancing. You say, “Oh, she has a lot of grace.”

I am thinking about that too, this morning of Good Friday. I’m thinking how the word grace can be applied to a runway model and a crucified Jew. I’m thinking about the paradox that the word grace is used both of a hill called Mt Calvary, but also Dancing With the Stars.

I’m thinking of people who have been deceived into believing you can find grace by flying an airplane into a building, but not at the foot of a bloodstained cross.

So, with apologies to Bono, who first suggested that “Grace is the name of a girl, but also thought that changed the world,” I wrote this poem as a Good Friday meditation. I pray it blesses you.

Grace is a ballroom dancer on a polished floor
The dark-skinned model on a Kingston beach
The prima ballerina in perfect form
Reaching out, but always out of reach

Grace is the pencil with the big eraser
The open book test where you don’t use a pen
The blue lined sheet of the blank white paper
The patient coach who says, “Try again.”

Grace is the gazelle escaping the lioness
And the patient lioness that stalks the gazelle
It’s the nail-pierced hand that holds my forgiveness
It’s the word that douses the flames of hell

Grace is the hammer but its also the nails
The thorny rose and the crown of thorns
The rolling stone, the ripping veil
"Behold the Man" and "a baby born"

Grace is brutality and grace is beauty
Grace is the cradle and grace is the cross
Grace is reality that still can elude me
Grace is my gain, and grace is His loss. 

Grace is His gift to meet my need
Grace is the dancer and grace is the dance
Grace for my actions, grace in His deed
Grace is God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense