pardon me
Overnight, the snow fell, blanketing our back yard in pristine white, and as Kevin hands me a refill on my morning cup, steam curling and rising, I notice the new light has gone slightly rose, like the delicate petal of an opening flower. I whisper a prayer that always rises in me when it snows, a prayer borrowed from words of God to me.
Though my sins were scarlet, you have made them as white as snow.
That sky, as though a precious drop of blood has spread through every layer, meandering down through the clouds.
Overnight, chatter rose, the sound of human incredulity like a cacophony of crows. President Trump issued a slew of pardons on his first day in office, and questions fly about his use of presidential authority to offer clemency, that is, his disposition to be lenient or merciful. Those are words few people would ever use to describe him—lenient, merciful. Instead, an outcry against injustice swells, not unlike a similar wave that came when former President Biden pardoned his son just before leaving office.
We believe in justice because of God, though I don’t much like to think of Him in that way, as just, particularly when questions arise about my own qualifications for mercy.
Pardon me; I have none—no qualifications.
Word is God loves justice. Justice, which presupposes a right way and that there should be consequences for departing from it. Justice, which sits opposite any idea that we as individuals should all just be allowed to do as we see fit.
God says of Himself, through the poet:
Your righteousness is like the highest mountains, your justice like the great deep. You, LORD, preserve both people and animals.
I watch a cardinal, an early bird, startlingly red against all that white, hopping in the bare branches of the pear tree in our backyard.
Look at the birds, Jesus said, how they don’t strive; they don’t sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet God feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they?
I can be free of worry, soaring through the sky like a bird, even worry over my own need for justice; even over how justice should apply to me, because God is just and also merciful.
Curious, the way, in that psalm, the notion of preservation, of deliverance, follows the vision of justice as a great, mighty ocean, inevitably powerful, wildly pervasive. My mind conjures an ark, bobbing like a cork on waters flooding the earth.
Though my sins were scarlet, you have made them as white as snow.
I grip my coffee mug with both hands and take a sip, unable to escape the revelation that within that vision, I have just so easily placed myself within the ark, almost hearing the bleating of sheep, almost smelling the disgusting mustiness of all those rescued bodies. It isn’t me though, dressed in the filthy rags.
In any case, it’s important not to try to assign myself a place in the story without thinking about how it is that I could find myself in that boat at all, how I could find myself escaping the flood. It’s a little too easy, at least for me, to forget that grace, apart from Christ’s complete payment of my debt, would be a miscarriage of justice, a hemorrhage of unanswered pain that I have caused. This is, after all, the reason for all the cawing this morning, these last few months, a scarlet river of damage to others, of unrequited suffering. Someone must pay.
It has been said that without justice, there is no love, because how could we believe in the love of One who demands nothing in response to wrongdoing, who would look upon our pain and then look away? If there is justice, then there must be consequences for departing from the Way.
The theologian Karl Barth once said that apprentices to Jesus should live with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, that in other words, history-in-the-making must be interpreted in light of its place in God’s story.
I have been reading all week about Jacob and Laban, the dueling scoundrels whose lives occupy the late twenties and early thirties in the book of Genesis in the Bible. My fingers, just now, as I gaze out across that field of snow, rest lightly on their parting words to each other, Jacob’s and Laban’s, speeches they made that could easily sit next to the kinds of speeches that in modern times pass for political debate. On the page, the two men posture at one another, might as well have their own podiums and honorifics, describing their own morality, their own mistreatment at the hands of the other, while twisting the facts to suit their own slant on the situation. Meanwhile, the irony appreciated by the reader is the clear understanding that each man has deceived and manipulated and thieved something from the other, and that the only difference between the two is the grace—the completely unmerited favor—of God.
Pardon me, but every time I encounter Jacob, chosen by God for who-knows-what reason, on my way through the Old Testament in the Bible, I sit back stunned, floored and a little offended by Jacob’s obnoxiousness, his lies, the way he cheats. This is God’s man? Jacob was not a good guy, not even by our modern definitions. He could have been the surprising villain on any reality TV show. My first reaction, upon studying God’s story through his life, is always incredulous. And it is meant to be. It arrests me—this bewilderment over the favor God extended to Jacob, while I’m trying to find merit for grace, which is, by definition, always unmerited. This is, after all, the thing that makes God’s grace so amazing, that no one who receives it actually deserves it.
Though my sins were scarlet, you have made them as white as snow.
Oh grace, upon grace already given to me.
I pause, gazing out at that snow, at how stunning forgiveness—a pardon, for I have received one too—looks when liberally applied, when graciously covering over our dead lawn, that cold, barren ground, in the bleak mid-Winter.
Pardon me, please, for just realizing that in this story, I’m both a posturing scoundrel and a recipient of wild grace. As I said, I’ve got no qualifications for mercy. I really am the one standing there wearing filthy rags, or at least, I would be, and swept away by that flood, too, were it not that God extended clemency to me, even re-dressed me in Himself.
Someone has to pay, it’s true, for justice to be served. And someone has. God has never miscarried justice. Even back in the Old Testament, God made covenants with people, assigning to Himself the due penalty for human unrighteousness. From the beginning, God planned to satisfy justice by paying our debts.
What is difficult, what keeps us now from that whooping freedom and soaring joy in recognition of this, even as we stare down incredulously at the latest headlines in the news, is the adamant desire—still–to claim no need for pardon ourselves. For it is only in honestly recognizing the black-red color of who I was before that I can truly appreciate how God chooses to see me now, only all that unblemished, light-throwing white.
