While on the long drive home from Alberta today I was listening to my iPod on a shuffle setting. Two pod-casts I didn’t realize were even on there showed up between songs. I have enjoyed the speakers in the past so I listened. Both were on the same topic of law versus grace and how mercy triumphs over judgment.

This stood out to me: The letter of the law is like a doctor who gives only a diagnosis. The spirit of the law (love written on the heart) is like a doctor who can offer a cure. The rules (thou shalts and thou shalt nots) can only show us where we went wrong, but they cannot show us how to change at our core, not in any major permanent way. We need mercy and grace for that. We need a supernatural work inside our very being.

As I was thinking about this illustration, a song from Cavalleria Rusticana started playing on my iPod. I have pretty eclectic tastes, but even I was a bit jarred by the juxtaposition of a sermon on grace and mercy and a scene from an opera with themes of adultery and murder. But as the song progressed I felt a correlation in my heart. The scene of the Easter church service became another illustration of the difference between justice and mercy.

In this scene Santuzza is standing outside the church on Easter Sunday. She has been judged and excommunicated because of her affair with a married man. (Some productions have the chorus singing from off-stage after the processional to highlight her rejection and isolation). The excommunication was meted out by those demanding justice, and she was indeed guilty. The sentence labeled her a sinner and amputated her from the fellowship of other believers, but it offered her no way to change nor hope of restoration. Yet Santuzza cannot help but be moved and sings from the outside, “Innegiamo, il Signor non è morto.”

(Translation)

Let us sing His praise, the Lord is not dead,

let us sing His praise, the Lord has risen

and today ascended to the glory of Heaven!

Resplendent, He has spread His wings.

She is on the outside of the religious establishment, yet sings praise to the risen Christ from her heart, while many others on the inside may be participating in ritual for less devoted reasons.

I wonder how many broken, humbled people who don’t fit in a regular “church” still desire to worship His Presence from their hearts on their knees in the street (or on a mountain side.) I wonder if  more “outsiders,” those Jesus called the poor in spirit, find it easier to experience God’s love in a place where they are not diagnosed as terminal sinners. I wonder if the grace and mercy of the risen Jesus Christ will soon touch more genuine seekers in mercy and restore them to the way God sees them, as He says gently, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”

He did for me.