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GRASPING THE ESSENCE OF GRACE
Understanding grace isn't easy. I think of the insight expressed by a little girl, who, after being caught in the act of disobeying her mother, was taken to her room to be punished. "Aw, Mom, how about a little grace?" she pleaded. "Give me one good reason why I should," said the mother. "But, Mom," said the puzzled little girl, "with grace there is no good reason." Grace wouldn't be grace if it were conditional. Grace is having just cause to punish someone and instead giving them something of extreme value.
Our comprehension of God's grace is feeble. The very word used in Greek for grace, charis, needed to be assigned a deeper meaning by the early church because there was no word in the culture that could express unconditional grace. How can we understand something that is so foreign, so unlike our day-to-day experience of life? Life in the 90s has little expression of grace, especially in the marketplace. It's survival of the fittest. You snooze, you lose. You mess up, you get kicked in the teeth. You do what's expected of you and, if you're lucky, no one bothers you. On the other hand, if you work hard and carefully for eighty hours a week, you might eventually, after 25 years, find yourself the rather miserable owner of boats and cars and a big house. That's our context for reward and punishment, but it's not a very good framework to understand God's grace.

HARD PRESSED
In Mark 14 we find the account of Jesus' time in the garden, where he goes to pray: "They went to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, 'Sit here while I pray''' (verse 32).
Do you know what 'Gethsemane' means? It means 'oil press.' Gethsemane was a section of the Mount of Olives. Olives were a very important crop, because if you crush and beat a delicate olive mercilessly, it will produce a drop of oil which can then be used for lighting a lamp. I can imagine that at one time this section of the Mount of Olives was used for the purpose of crushing olives and producing oil with the help of an oil press. I find it interesting that this is chosen as the place for the crushing of the Son of God's soul. Isaiah, after saying that it was the will of God to crush him, adds this connection: "Out of his anguish, he shall see light" (Isaiah 53:11). Like the valuable oil produced by the tender olive under the weight of the stone in the oil press, so is the forgiveness of sins produced by Jesus under the crushing penalty of our sin.
Luke says that it was Jesus' custom to come here regularly. It was familiar to Jesus, a favored place to come to enjoy the fellowship of his Father. It was a place to plead with the Father for his disciples and the other riff-raff that Jesus drew to himself. But Jesus was under a very different burden on this night. "He took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be distressed and agitated. And he said to them, "I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake" (verses 33-34).
Those of you who have gone through the experience of losing someone close know that grief is a "whole body" experience. It's your mind and emotions and body and soul experiencing the searing pain of having a piece of yourself ripped out. Jesus' intimacy with the Father was being torn apart at Gethsemane because the Father was laying on the Son the sins of all humanity. Jesus was taking onto himself the anger of God aimed at you and me. Every unkind thought and word and deed ever committed by humanity past, present and future was being ascribed to the Son of God as if he had done them all. Do you remember the time you got really angry and said those hurtful things? The time you entertained those vile thoughts? The time you ran toward a sin with your heart, soul, mind and strength? In Gethsemane, God was looking at Jesus as if he were the one who had done those things. Those who commit unrighteous acts cannot have peace with God. God's purity and righteousness could not overlook our sin which was being heaped up on Jesus at Gethsemane. Their sweet fellowship was being torn to shreds by our sin, and Jesus was profoundly sad. In fact, Luke says that an angel appeared to Jesus and gave him strength, as if to suggest he might have died from the shear grief of being separated from his Father.
"And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, 'Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet not what I want, but what you want.'" (verses 35-36).
The heavy stone of God's hatred of our sins was being lowered on the pure and perfect soul of Jesus, and Jesus, knowing that with God anything is possible, was asking for a third alternative. He only had two choices: He could avoid the Cross hoping to remain in sweet fellowship with the Father, letting humanity pay for their own sins. Or, he could go through with the ordeal. Couldn't there be another choice? Do you know what it's like to throw yourself on the ground and plead with God for an alternative to the anguish you're experiencing? This is perhaps Jesus' most human and most divine moment. Just as any of us would, if faced with the white hot anger of God, Jesus is pleading for relief from the pain.
Jesus may have been sinless, but he was not that unlike you and me. Hebrews says that this pleading was with "loud cries and tears." Still, Jesus was one in being with the Father, and he knew that it was the Father's will to crush him. It was for this moment that he had been born. And so in an act of pure divinity, Jesus invited the crushing will of the Father upon his own head.
I once heard Dennis Cochrane, a Wycliffe missionary, speaking on this very passage. It was a message that was engraved in my soul. His presentation had been fairly stoic and matter-of-fact, until he talked about the term "Abba" and explained that because it was such an intimate term used by children for their father, our word "Daddy" might be a close synonym. The entire auditorium was startled when in the middle of this calm, straightforward presentation he suddenly cried out at the top of his lungs, "DADDY! Anything is possible with you! Take this cup from me!" Three hundred students in that auditorium were stunned into silence. We nearly stopped breathing as we came face to face with the real cost of the cross.
The Hollywood portrayals of this scene show Jesus piously mumbling this prayer while kneeling near a large boulder. That's not the way it was. Our Savior was not dispassionate about our sin. Hebrews says that it was for the joy set before Jesus that he endured this torture. It was the incredible joy of seeing you standing blameless before a holy God that allowed him to endure the cross, covered with your sin. Have you ever known a love so passionate? So obsessed with seeing you free of guilt? That's Jesus. That's the amazing love with which he loves you.

OPENING THE GIFT
But grace is only consummated when it is received by the undeserving. Until then it simply sits, offered in outstretched hands waiting to be accepted. God's generosity is transformed into saving grace only when it is accepted.
What happens, then, when you wake up to the gravity of your sin and receive adoption from the very person you have victimized (who also happens to be your judge)? The writer of Hebrews describes this transaction for readers who were used to a system of sacrifice for sin: "And every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, 'he sat down at the right hand of God,' and since then has been waiting 'until his enemies would be made a footstool for his feet.' For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified" (Hebrews 10:11-14).
Many of us have continued the Levitical priesthood. We labor to cover our sins with sacrifices that are never adequate. If we've been especially good boys and girls, we imagine God is happier with us than if we commit an indecent act. If we engage in some kindness or manage to have a lengthy time of prayer or Bible reading, we think that this is the last impression we have left with God and, until we blow it, we feel good about ourselves. We're in this perpetual state of trying to leave God with a good impression. We forget that God is not linear: our good acts of today stand side by side with our sins of both yesterday and tomorrow in his eyes. Of course, living a ninety-nine percent holy and righteous life has no power to erase our one percent wickedness. Arguing with a judge that you should be absolved of your traffic ticket for running a red light because you've correctly gone through hundreds of other similar intersections just won't work.

GIVE IT A REST
The priest never gets to rest because sins keep popping up. Have you ever played that smash-the-gopher game at an arcade? You stand over a machine with a dozen holes, and gophers pop up briefly while you try to keep watch and beat them down. It's a frightful game because the confounded gophers are everywhere, and as soon as you've beat one down, two more pop up in places you're not expecting. You're left in a constant state of panic, swiping at those pesky gophers and working yourself into a frenzy. If you are intent on being your own "priest" for your sin, then that's what life will be like for you: "Oops, I blew up at my roommate, better have a quiet time. There, that feels better." "Whoops, there I go again looking at sexually explicit material, but if I spend an hour in worship maybe I won't feel so miserable about myself." "Uh-oh, sort of cheated on that test, maybe if I volunteer to tutor everything will come out in the wash."