This is the last of my three-part (for now) series on the power of grace. I hope you’ve come even just a little bit closer to knowing deeply the richness of God’s grace. But before I write anything more, I want you to watch this video and do your best to emotionally engage. Feel it as deeply as you can, even if you’ve seen it before.
Are you a bit emotional right now? If so, I want you to take some time to figure out why.
I get emotional every time I watch this video. And apparently so do quite a few other people, because it’s been viewed over 55 million times as of the writing of this post. I think it’s possibly the best Gospel metaphor on all of YouTube (it includes Gospel elements such as: a free gift for all people, the outcasts of society coming to a healer, scoffers and doubters, the good leader empowering disciples to carry on the same message, restoration to the hurting and lonely, strong opposition from the powers that be, triumph and victory in the end, and heck…he even fits our Anglo image of Jesus).
But let me go ahead and list the reasons why I think I get especially emotional when I watch it:
1) People become real and come alive; they let their defenses down and make themselves vulnerable in the presence of a safe environment where they can simply receive. I long to exist in that place.
2) Something good is offered freely to everyone; regardless of who they are, what they look like, where they come from, what they’ve done, whether they’re a “good person” or not. For a brief second, everyone is equal in their eligibility to receive this gift.
And our world is longing for this.
Christians, non-Christians, everyone.
And I think it’s overly simplistic to say this video is so popular because ”we just want to be loved” and this video demonstrates acts of love. There are tens of thousands of YouTube videos with parents showing a rich, warm, unconditional kind of love to their children; a love that’s probably much stronger than what this guy has for the people he’s hugging.
And though those videos may make us feel warm and fuzzy, we’re not crying, showing our friends, and spreading it to 55 million people, causing subsequent “Free Hugs” outbreaks among young people in public places across the nation. I think the thing that makes a person tear up and want to send this video to their friends is the grace of the act.
There’s something in us that expects the parent in the YouTube video to love their child immensely. The act may be beautiful, but it’s not startling, and the video almost certainly isn’t going to be watched by anyone beyond immediate family and random passers-by.
But something about free hugs is just different.
That someone would do something so wild and radical as offer love freely to complete strangers in full sight of the whole world makes us want to tell someone. And when we watch it, we want to take part. We desperately long to be able to give and receive this undiscriminating kind of love. I think it’s what makes grace the most powerful thing in the world to behold.
I ache for the Church to hone their ability to similarly tell stories of grace that makes the world want to tell their neighbor.
I want to make better videos.
So I want you to ask yourself how you can personally proclaim and demonstrate this kind of grace in a way that touches something deep within the heart of every human being; something that might provoke someone to tell all their friends of the good news. How can you start a “free hugs”-type movement in the name of the greatest grace-giver the world has ever known? Because as God’s Church, we’re the ones who have actually experienced the divinely gripping realities of this video; the ones who have tasted the Kingdom. 55 million hits says the world longs for a taste. How will you offer it to them?
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I love symbolism…the “theatre of grace”, if you will. The images and the visuals are powerful, but when I see them I also ache. I am willing to make a display of grace and such displays are valuable, but I so rarely distribute grace at great cost to myself. Grace isn’t free; it’s paid for. I am all too happy to announce to a stranger the grace paid for by Jesus, but I hate suffering the act of forgiveness for those who have wronged me without regret. To freely release them from their debt to me with no guarantee of personal honor or even a restored relationship is an act tantamount to death. Hugs are expensive.