The Endless Ocean

|He took my burdens, and he rolled them in the sea.
|He rolled them in the sea.
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I remember once going to visit my Grandpa who lived down on the South coast of KwaZulu-Natal. He lived in this little complex, and his unit was double storey, which I always thought was super cool. My brother and I used to play this Macgyver inspired game where we would stand on the ground floor, and using a spoon tied to some string as a grappling hook, we would try and infiltrate the top floor without anyone noticing. Spoons make terrible grappling hooks though, and we could never get it to take hold.

Anyway, on this particular trip I remember it had rained heavily on the first day, and when we woke up in the morning the Umkomaas river had come down in full flood, turning the Indian Ocean a chocolate brown colour for miles up and down the coast. If you have ever seen the South coast of KZN after a big rain storm, you will know what it looks like — innumerable tons of soil wash from the farmlands up country and are dumped into the sea, bringing with it ruined trees, pieces of broken sugar cane, and the waste of any small town along the river’s course. The ocean literally turns brown for about a kilometre out to sea. Swimming is not an option, and that is devastating for a kid on a coastal weekend away.
I remember being really angry, and telling my Dad that it was unfair.

But the ocean is the great regulator.
On the first day after the storm, the water was a muddy, oil filmed mess.
On the second day, the dirt had begun to settle, and slowly, over the next few days, the ocean began to return to its original colour.
Thinking back on this now, the whole process is amazing.
By what mechanism does the ocean return to its original blue? Not by any intentional action of the ocean itself — it’s not trying to clean itself.
But the sheer grandness of the ocean is such that the filth poured into it ultimately loses all scale and shape and reference and is eventually diluted to such a degree that it is no longer recognisable as a blemish at all.
The hugeness of the Indian Ocean swallows up the filth of the land, and it is forgotten entirely.

When I was working as a youth pastor, I placed a lot of importance on theology — ideas about who God was, and how he might work. I wanted to understand the mechanics of things like salvation, and redemption, and grace. I learnt words like propitiation and substitutionary atonement and I made bold, certain statements about the nature of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross of Calvary. But in my later, less zealous years, I have come to see the foolishness in using words like ‘mechanics’ when talking about things like grace — attempting to apply the binary distinctions of Western reasoning to something as huge as the work of Jesus is a blasphemy of the worst kind. Grace is not an on/off switch. It is not something that can be accessed by saying some magical words at the front of a church.
I’m not sure grace is something that can be accessed at all — it’s more of an inherent force of nature than some anthropocentric remedy for an individual’s ills. Like the great ocean, absorbing by its sheer hugeness all the filth of innumerable rivers, so the endless ocean of grace will eventually swallow all fear and filth and horror, and these things will become formless, shapeless shadows — the sheer inevitability of the eternal winning out against that which is ephemeral.

Grace is not something that a disgruntled deity dishes out to you because you once watched porn. Grace is the unifying field, the endless ocean into which all of the universe is sinking — the river named entropy eroding all of existence and scattering it out into the universe to be utterly forgotten in the vast, unimaginable void.
Is there sickness? It will fade away.
Is there fear? It will fade away.
Only grace will remain, the ocean from which we were born, and the ocean into which all of existence will sink again — remember that it was before the foundations of the world were laid out that the Lamb was slain.

I am not sure if this grace is for everyone, and I do not know upon which tide I will find myself coming to rest there, if I am to find rest there at all.
But this I know for certain — that there is at work in this universe a pattern of sacrifice, death and resurrection, as embodied in the life of Christ, so inherently natural so as to serve as the very fabric of existence itself, and that any attempt to control or manipulate this pattern is as foolish as trying to influence the astrophysical orbits of massive bodies in space.

To end, I would like to borrow from one of my favourite passages ever written:

“Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning. A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside. The following Him is, of course, the essential point. That being so, it may be asked what practical use there is in the speculations which I have been indulging. I can think of at least one such use.”

I too, can think of one such practical use in the speculations about an endless ocean of grace into which I have been indulging, and that is this: There is a beauty in mystery and a splendour in the unknown that we who call ourselves ‘followers of Christ’ have traded for the hard, horrible certainty of seminaries and sacred texts.
Let’s stop with the big words and the complicated theories.
The story will play itself out, and what can I do but play my part?

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