grace I

here is what i love about grace...it makes no sense. i mean, frankly, real grace is more than a little offensive. the idea that people who deserve something to happen to them because they have done something wrong echoes strongly throughout most of our inner cores. i think the stories of grace are far more scandalous than the ones of revenge or justice. we want the bad guys to get their due...their "come up-ins". especially if the bad-guy is clever or devious or if what he/she did is overtly heinous. we believe in an eye for an eye and all that. it feels right, it feels fair, it feels like the way the world should work.
but the world does not appear to share that conviction. we have always known (or we are shown) that life is not fair. that the bad-guy more often than not gets away and not only avoids the "come up-ins" but even usally comes out looking better than the victims. this is a world of broken dreams, life-ending illness, evil seeming to conquer at every turn. even the people who are not trying to be great, just trying to live a good life are not immune. the world has always been like this: full of beauty and full of danger.
so where do we get this notion of fairness? i think, like c.s.lewis said, the existence of this thing within us lets us know that it really does exist. we are hungry for food because food exists and our bodies know that they need it to live. we crave justice and harmony and order because our souls know it exists and that we cannot live without it. we crave justice because justice exists. that might be why so many of us like it when the bad guy meets their end. it fills us with a certain type of "soul food". in fact, one could think that this need to see a balance in a world that has never demonstrated such a balance is a good argument for the existence of a place that thrives on such a thing...possibly even a heavenly place?
it is into this world that craves justice but sees only injustice that one man named jesus stepped. thought to be a warrior or someone who was going to set everything straight, he constantly fought against this idea for something even more scandalous. he taught and showed tha fairness and justice do not matter on earth as much as we think they should because they do not matter to god as much as we think they should. apparently we have a god who thinks more of love and grace than of justice and revenge. we have a god who is negligent with his judgments and does not do to others as they would do (and did) to him. so where does that leave us? as sheep among the wolves? as defenseless among the armed? as fools among the cunning? as doves among the snakes?