This is the reason that I, Paul, am a prisoner for Christ Jesus for the sake of you gentiles, for surely you have already heard of the commission of God’s grace that was given me for you and how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I wrote above in a few words – Ephesians 3:1-3 (NRSV)
What does it mean to live in God’s grace alone? In the Lord’s prayer, we pray that God might forgive our sins. So often we say this without thinking about what we mean. Part of the issue is that we tend to think of sin only as things we have done wrong. Certainly we are aware that we are human and limited and make mistakes, but do we really have to go through a whole ritual of asking God to forgive us for something that we can’t help doing?
An important part of asking for forgiveness is dealing with our sense of shame, which runs deeper than we usually care to admit. Shame is not the same thing as guilt. We feeling guilty when we know that we have done something wrong, and so we feel bad about our actions. Shame, on the other hand, is a sense that there is something wrong with me in my core. Even before any actions, shame says tells us that we are not good or valuable as a person. If we feel shame, then we will assume that all of our actions are bad because we see our core self as inherently bad.
Feeling shame can make us not wish to pray at all. Shame is related to the traditional idea of “original sin,” in that in tells us that even before we are aware of God’s desires for our lives we already have a sense of our relationship with God and with who we should be as being in some sense broken. We are not who we could be, and that makes us feel like there is something wrong with our lives and that we are separated from God. Shame, then, makes us not trust in God’s grace. Shame can even make us try to stay away from God’s presence. Our sense of shame tells us that we are not worthy of God’s attention or love. Yet by praying this prayer, we are putting our trust in God rather than ourselves. In this way, even if we are starting from a position of shame we are still able to pray because we are not praying for ourselves but rather are following Jesus’ authority, which allows us to approach God in prayer.
We therefore recognize our shame as a type of sinfulness, because it causes us to fail to trust in God. Yet we also confess in this prayer that God’s grace is more powerful than our sin. For Martin Luther, the devil is always whispering to us, “God punishes sinners. You are a sinner. God will punish you.” The devil speaks just enough truth here to try to deceive us. We are sinful. We fail to trust God’s grace and resist God’s love because of our sense of shame. Yet this sense of shame is itself the result of what Luther would term the works of Satan, and not the reality of God’s intention for us.
In our shame, though, we fail to believe that we are worthy to ask God of forgiveness – that is, to have our shame removed so that we can live joyously in God’s love. So that we do not have to ask for ourselves, Christ puts these words into our mouths. We use the prayer he gave us. When we do that, we dare to ask God to be forgiven because we trust Christ. Christ tells us to do it, and so we can ask. This is living in God’s grace. God has done the unthinkable for us.