It was a fantastic occasion, a wonderful miracle. But in terms of efficiency, and of wastage, it was a shambles.
I am speaking of course about the Feeding of the Five Thousand - 12 basketfuls of bread left over! What a waste!
Surely Jesus could have calculated things better than that? So why this unnecessary extravagance?
Of course the whole occasion was far more than just a logistical, miraculous exercise in feeding a hungry crowd on a mountainside. It was a sign, a picture. It was a living parable.
Very soon afterwards Jesus went on to teach His disciples how He Himself was the Bread of Life. How to be fully satisfied we need to feed on Him. When He spoke about this the disciples' minds must have gone back to the previous day - how physically Jesus had fed the crowd - how the bread was more than enough for everyone - abundant, overflowing, excessive, - yes, wasteful.
And wasn't this a picture of Jesus the Bread of Life? Abundant, overflowing, generous, more than enough for everyone. Wasn't it, perhaps, a picture of God's grace?
And that's the word I want to concentrate on this morning. "Grace" a small 5 letter word. Yet a word overflowing with generosity and extravagance and lavishness. One could almost say a wasteful word. Grace is God's extravagance.
Grace is G.R.A.C.E. - God's Riches At Christ's Expense.
Grace is God's love poured out, enough and more than enough. Wastefully. Recklessly. Extravagantly. One might almost say, with reverence, foolishly. Amazing grace!
You can't really pin grace down. You can't dissect it, and analyse it, and categorise it. But I suggest 3 ways in which we experience God's grace.
1. Grace in forgiveness.
Have you ever felt about some one that what they have done is so awful that it is beyond the forgiveness of God?
Have you yourself ever done something that you felt was unforgivable? Do you perhaps, even today, live with a guilty conscience?
Well, the first thing to note is that the world does not consist of 2 categories of people: those who are sinners, and those who are righteous. Rather it consists of 2 categories: sinners who admit they are sinners and sinners who deny it. As St Paul reminds us (Rom 3:23) "All, everyone of us, has sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God." All of us. The size of the sin doesn't count. We are all sinners.
So what was Jesus' attitude to sinners? To the woman caught in the very act of adultery He said, looking up from writing in the dust, "Has no one condemned you? Neither do I condemn you. Go now, and don't sin any more!"
To Peter, who had denied and deserted Him, He said: "Do you love Me? Feed My sheep."
In the heat of the agony of the cross Jesus prayed for the very ones who had hammered the nails in, and who were tormenting Him: "Father forgive them. They don't know what they are doing."
"How many times should we forgive?" asked Peter of Jesus. "Up to 7 times?" "No!" said Jesus. "Seventy seven times" - meaning indefinitely.
"Love your enemies!" Jesus said. No - not just your friends. Your enemies! Those you find most difficult and threatening. Those you hate. Think of somebody you hate. Jesus says you are to love them!
Crazy words! Illogical, impossible, crazy words! But then God's grace is illogical and crazy and overflowingly generous. Like the brimming baskets of left-over bread, it's extravagant. Nobody - but nobody - is beyond the reach of God's forgiveness.
Following the collapse of apartheid in South Africa, and the coming of majority rule, there was a huge legacy of hatred and mistrust and unforgiveness. And to deal with this Desmond Tutu set up the Truth and Reconciliation commission. At one of these tribunals a black lady was faced, in the room, by the white former police officer who was accused of murdering her only son, a political activist. He was asked: "Did you torture the prisoner, and finally force him to jump to his death from a high window?"
"I did" replied the white ex-policeman.
"Is there anything you want to say?"
"I want today, in this room, to beg the forgiveness of his mother for what I did."
There was silence in the room.
Then slowly the black lady, the mother of the murder victim, got to her feet, and with difficulty - because she had arthritis - she crossed the room to the white man. And she embraced him. And she said "I forgive you!"
But then she went on: "But I have one thing to ask you. I had only one son. He is dead. Will you now be my son?"
The grace of God's forgiveness - a grace which stretches out its arms to the world. Not condoning sin - but forgiving sin. Not turning a blind eye to sin, but facing up to it, nailing it to the cross, and then leaving it behind.
The theologian Paul Tillich said: "Forgiveness is remembering the past, in order that it might be forgotten." As St Paul reminds us (Eph 1:7): "We have forgiveness of our sins, according to the riches of Christ's grace, that He lavished on us."
2. Then there is the grace of acceptance.
That black South African lady didn't just forgive her son's murderer. She embraced him. Then she took it a step further. She accepted him. She asked him to be, to her, a son.
Throughout the Bible we read, time and again, of the God Who accepts back His erring and straying people.
How many times in the Old Testament did God's people go after other gods, and still He took them back?
"Can a mother forget the baby at her breast, and have no compassion on the child she has borne?" asked God.
"Though she may forget I will not forget you. "See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands!"
The whole book of Hosea is a picture of God's infinite patience and acceptance. Hosea is told by God to take a prostitute as his wife, and then, though she cheats on him and goes off with another man, God tells Hosea to take her back, and love her. It is a picture of God's grace of acceptance of His people. Moses the murderer - accepted by God. Jacob the manipulator and cheat - accepted by God. Joseph the spoilt and arrogant son - accepted by God.
David the adulterer and murderer - accepted by God. Paul, who had persecuted Christians, and watched with approval the stoning of Stephen - accepted by God.
Think of the story of the Prodigal Son. That young upstart was greedy, wanting his inheritance long before his father was dead. He was irresponsible, erratic, self-centred, wilful, wild, immoral - in other words everything that would make a father ashamed to own him. So when he finally was forced to come to his senses by starvation was it a grovelling apology that won his father round? Not at all! When he was still far off, and before the son had a chance to say a word, the father ran to him, and hugged him, and kissed him, and welcomed him home.
That is the grace of acceptance - illogical, crazy, undeserved, overflowing.
So many of Jesus' parables are to do with crazy, lavish acceptance. They are not neat, tidy stories with predictable outcomes. The Samaritan of all people risks everything for a mugged Jew. The shepherd leaves 99 sheep at risk on the hillside to search for the one lost one. The vineyard owner pays the upstart who turns up at the last moment exactly the same as those who have slogged all day.
There is nothing fair or logical or sensible about grace. It's just poured out, lavishly. Like the ointment Mary poured over Jesus' feet. Worth a year's wages it was - £24,000 in today's terms of an average wage. As Judas said at the time " Crazy! Wasteful! Stupid!" But then Judas didn't understand too much about grace!
As Philip Yancey says in his excellent book "What's so Amazing about Grace?" - he says "Grace has about it the scent of scandal."
So often we want to be neat and tidy about who we accept, who we welcome - whether into our church, our fellowship, our homes or our lives. But with God there is no neatness and tidiness and logic - just a generous, warm-hearted, open-armed messiness.
You know, I think we are going to be very surprised at who we find in heaven!
Grace in forgiveness.
Grace in acceptance.
3. Grace in restoration.
God, in His grace, His amazing grace, In His love which is vast as the ocean, God wants to restore us.
He doesn't only want to forgive us - though He does, with arms outstretched on the cross.
He doesn't only want to accept us - though He does, with arms wide open in welcome.
He also wants to restore us.
He is the God of new beginnings. The God of hope and possibilities.
Sometimes I think people get confused about the business of acceptance. We are told, fingers wagging at us, that the church in today's society must be "inclusive" and that word seems to imply that God accepts everyone just as they are (which surely He does), but that then nothing about them need change.
Whatever a person's beliefs, whatever their lifestyle, whatever their values - that's OK with God, and should be OK with us. That's a very superficial and woolly understanding of the Bible. Yes, God accepts people as they are.
Yes, His arms are wide open to all - to you and to me, and to all. But He accepts us in order to restore and reshape us.
Isaiah says "We are the clay. You, O Lord, are the potter" God wants to gently mould us, and reshape us, and to make something beautiful out of us.
In the Old Testament each time God forgave and welcomed back His erring people it wasn't with the idea that they carried on worshipping idols and chasing after foreign gods just as before. It was with the intention that they would change. That they would be restored. "Choose this day who you will serve!" said Joshua to the people.
Nowhere does the Bible condone Jacob's deceit or David's adultery. When Jesus forgave the woman caught in the act of adultery He didn't say: "Neither do I condemn you. Now run along, and carry on as before!" No! He said: "Neither do I condemn you. Go now, and leave your life of sin!"
Part of God's grace is that He longs to restore us, to change us, to make us into the people he intended us to be.
Forgiving is not the same as condoning. Forgiveness and acceptance lead on to restoration.
The writer Walter Trobisch says: "Christ accepts us as we are, but when He accepts us we cannot remain as we are."
If a person's hands are already full, then they cannot accept a gift. First they have to lay down whatever they are carrying. Then they can receive the gift. Likewise when we come to Christ - or when He comes to us - we have to empty our hands of all that we have been grasping.
"Nothing in my hands I bring,
Simply to Thy cross I cling.
Naked, come to Thee for dress.
Helpless, look to Thee for grace."
Grace is a gift that can only be received by empty hands. Repentance empties the hands - we lay our sin, our past, our preoccupations, our priorities - at the cross. And we receive the grace of the Lord Jesus, Who wants to change us, to restore us, to make us into the people that He intended us to be.
In that room in South Africa, at the Truth and Reconciliation tribunal, the white policeman and the black mother put the past behind. They forgave, they accepted, they grasped the future. Nothing for either of them would ever be the same again. All his racism had to go. All her bitterness had to go. A new, radical, stunningly different relationship came about.
That's what grace is all about. Untidy, illogical, overwhelming, all-embracing, life-changing. Amazing grace!
2 weeks ago Rosemary and I were at Hill 62, a World War 1 battle site in Belgium where there was huge carnage.
It's not far from the place where Rosemary's own grandfather died in battle. Still today the ground is pock-marked by shell holes. A maze of trenches runs among them. As we stood, imagining the scene as it must have been in 1917 - trees shot to pieces, deep stinking mud, blood and guts spattered, a hell-hole - as we stood in silence imagining what it must have been like, suddenly and unexpectedly a lone bagpiper emerged through the wood, playing the tune "Amazing grace".
Our lives can be like hell holes. And into that mess, that confusion, God plays His tune. "Amazing grace"
Grace that brings forgiveness.
Grace that accepts us as we are.
Grace that restores and changes us.
David Webster
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