When visiting someone’s home, it would not seem unusual to see an album of wedding pictures among the various keepsakes and other family memorabilia. There we would likely find portraits of the bride and groom, family and friends, special poses, and significant moments—all representing things to be remembered, cherished, and shared. There would be images of promises made, faithfulness pledged, a covenant entered, and the sense that God is there in the midst of it all, blessing it and pronouncing it very good.

I suspect, however, that we would find quite unusual, and even a bit disconcerting, the discovery of a similarly preserved and cherished album that contains pictures of broken promises, faithless choices, neglected relationships, disregarded covenants, or of bride, groom, family, or friends who may have had helpful or not-so-helpful roles to play in the process. And if we did, I wonder how likely it would be that we would anticipate any indication that anything good was to be expected. Nothing about the painful experiences of unfaithfulness or betrayal tends to resonate with anything inside us or lead us to expect anything else.

Amazingly (particularly with reference to the wedding imagery of this week’s lesson), we find a shockingly candid mixture of both when we peruse God’s wedding album. There we find this thing called grace, in the midst of bewildering and sometimes even horrifying, yet gratefully overwhelming, assuring, and genuinely hopeful scenes. Truly amazing grace. There, in the midst of our utter amazement, God invites us to find our place among the pictures. All of them. As we attempt to do that, we discover that the depth and scope of what we find encompasses so much that throughout eternity we will still be trying to wrap our minds and lives more fully around the richness of what is revealed.

Few things are more rewarding than having the opportunity to see people, particularly those who have come out of contexts where love was often experienced conditionally, grasp what it means to be embraced by a truly gracious God—a realization personally rich, freeing, and transforming! On the level of how we relate to God personally (in spite of it seeming to be too good to be true at times), it seems to me that over the years our church has increasingly focused on this truly gracious God.

But we are a bit slower to grasp the implications of how this plays out in our relationships with each other. Far from emboldening us in rebellion, as some might fear, a genuine realization of God’s graciousness creates the space in which we have room to explore and admit how our own self-interest, insecurities, fears, and more have nurtured unfaithful behavior and poor choices. In fact, this realization makes it possible for us not only to begin to lay aside covering fig leaves and stand unconcealed before God, but also to change the way we relate to those around us. The powerful combination of genuine humility and amazing grace allows us to release ways of relating characterized by self-protection, shifting responsibility, misuse of power, or feared loss of intimacy and security that have cursed creation since the fall. It also ultimately leads to the kind of restoration this week’s lesson contemplates.

On one level, we grasp this rather readily. Once we know that our identity and security are firmly grounded in God’s love and graciousness, we are freer to love others out of a sense of fullness rather than neediness. Even though we have certainly not exhausted all the richness of what that means, we pretty much get that part. But the imagery of this lesson stretches us beyond that realization in a number of ways.

First, it invites us to accept more fully and embrace the reality and extent of our own flawed beings, removing any sense of privilege or entitlement we may think we have over others. Second, it invites us to accept more fully and grasp the scope of God’s embrace, which includes, by the same graciousness on which we rely, even those we may be tempted to regard as somehow less entitled. Regardless of what makes us different and how those differences find expression, it reminds us that the things making us the same are greater than those that make us different.

This is the realization that Jesus calls us to when he says, "You have heard that it was said, ’Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: ’Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you may be sons of your Father in heaven’" (Matt. 5:42–44). This realization fundamentally changes the nature of how we think when, in humility, we come to the place where we understand that in fundamental ways we are just as flawed as those we fear, or from whom we have suffered ill treatment, or whom we may be tempted to make somehow less entitled by assigning them the label of enemy. When we realize that they are as deeply loved by God, it changes the way we relate to them. Although the same flawed tendencies that we see so deeply embedded in us makes this challenging at times, it is the same graciousness so fully expressed in God that makes it possible.

What might happen if we really grasped the richness and implications of a God who loves faithfully and unconditionally, and if we allowed that realization to change us and shape the way we interact with others? What might this mean for our families? Our church? Our community? Our world?1 As we are willing to recognize ourselves and others in the pictures we find in God’s wedding album and listen carefully to Jesus, perhaps we can anticipate that moment when the Creator will look on what has been restored and once again pronounce it very good. What might happen if we discovered that we need not wait until some future moment to begin that work?

Notes and References

1. For some interesting thoughts on how this might look in our world, go to this site and reflect on the strategy suggested there for ending the conflict in Iraq.

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