If I care to listen, I hear a loud whisper from the gospel that I did not get what I deserved. I deserved punishment and got forgiveness. I deserved wrath and got love. I deserved debtor’s prison and got instead a clean credit history. I deserved stern lectures and crawl-on-your-knees repentance; I got a banquet—Babette’s feast—spread for me.
― Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About Grace?

I confess that for much of my life, I didn’t fully understand that there was a banquet, an inconceivable and unprecedented feast, spread before me. I was too busy bellying up to the drive-up windows of what-I-deserved. A little condemnation (extra shame please), a side of paralyzing self-doubt (hold the compassion), and a whole lotta guilt (super-sized). Quite frankly, I didn’t get grace. What was I to make of such a beguiling offer of love and forgiveness? How was I to accept a gift I didn’t deserve? Truly, I deserved crawl-on-your-knees repentance; unmerited favor was surely intended for others.

Recently, I watched the feature film, Just Mercy, which tells the story of Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Stevenson, a public interest lawyer, has dedicated his life and career to helping all those who need and deserve grace: the poor, the imprisoned, and the condemned on death row. The movie–based on Stevenson’s book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption–focuses primarily on one of Stevenson’s first clients, Walter McMillian, a young black man awaiting death for the murder of a young white woman. McMillan didn’t kill this woman, and there was no evidence to prove that he had, except for the sole testimony of a white felon desperate to get himself a better legal deal. Faced with the seemingly insurmountable odds of challenging a southern justice system that had summarily condemned McMillan and countless other black men, Stevenson perseveres through legal battle after legal battle. Ultimately, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals exonerated McMillan, reversing the lower court decisions and freeing him after six years on death row.

Stevenson writes:

We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and—perhaps—we all need some measure of unmerited grace.

Just Mercy specifically addresses serious flaws in our justice, prison, and social systems. Still, I believe that Stevenson’s admonishment that we all need some measure of unmerited grace is relevant and fitting for everyone. We may neither deserve nor understand it, but most of us yearn for a banquet of love and forgiveness, acceptance and affirmation. We’ve tired of fast food that arrives cold and tasteless. We desperately want something better.

As we celebrate Easter, the feast is before us–year after year. The table of unmerited grace is set, our places reserved. Often, however, we join the ranks of so many throughout history who have struggled with this reality. We’re wage-earners who like to pay our own way. We’re self-made men and women who don’t like to be beholden to anyone. We’re hard workers who want to deserve the gifts we receive. For too many Easters, I didn’t accept my invitation to the banquet. When unmerited grace was offered, I passed, thinking that I’d done so out of humility and a keen sense of justice. How could I stuff my face with forgiveness I didn’t deserve? How could I accept an entrée of love? How could I possibly take even one hors d’oeurve of compassion?

I’m guessing that many of Bryan Stevenson’s clients felt similarly. Faced with years of imprisonment and/or execution, they, too, may have felt as though the banquet invitations they’d received were surely meant for other, more deserving folk. But the strange and glorious news of Easter is simply this: no one deserves a place at the banquet table, and yet all are invited. It is the wonderfully irrational promise of Easter that gives us clean credit histories.

In his book, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Philip Yancey writes:

How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible’s astounding words about God’s love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?

Yancey understands the potential power of unmerited grace, how it may truly transform those who accept it and come to see themselves as God does. As we sit down to eat our own Easter banquets, I pray that we might see ourselves as the undeserving but much-loved children of God. And above all, that we might graciously accept the standing invitation to the greatest banquet of all.

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God. Ephesians 2:8