a modified kiss

in The Ragamuffin Gospel, brennan manning relates an excerpt from the book Mortal Lessons by Richard Selzer, M.D. it reads:

“i stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. a tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. she will be thus from now on. the surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; i promise you that. nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, i had to cut the little nerve.
“her young husband is in the room. he stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. who are they, i ask myself, he and this wry mouth i have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily? the woman speaks.
“will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
“yes,” i say, “it will. it is because the nerve was cut.”
she nods and is silent. but the young man smiles.
“i like it,” he says, “it is kind of cute.”
“all at once i know who he is. i understand and i lower my gaze. one is not bold in an encounter with a god. unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and i am so close i can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.”

the garden of eden should have been enough for us. we should have been content to walk with God in the unblemished beauty of His creation. looking at the world around me, i can’t help but curse eve for damning us to this mess. but i know, had i been in the position to make the choice to eat or forego, i would have eaten. the grass is always greener on the other side, right? the mystery of the unknown, the tantalizing idea of a betterment of our situation just around the bend, is enough to tempt us all. in the garden before the fall, God’s grace was in it’s most simple form: He communed with adam and eve and there was no evil. once eve made that fateful decision, God had to execute His contention plan. i don’t mean to say that God was caught by surprise by eve’s choice by mentioning a contention plan; God knew exactly what would happen. i simply mean that God knew all along that our decision would lose us our ability to commune with Him directly, and that He wanted to save us from ourselves.

when God was planning history, he knew we would deny grace, so he had to figure out another way to offer it. just as the man in the story had to modify his kiss to accommodate the ruined face of his wife, so God had to modify the kiss of grace to accommodate the ruin of humanity. He did this by offering up His only Son, who lived a perfect life, to become sin. when Jesus was agonizing on the cross He knew all of the awful things that i would do with my life. He died anyway, in order to offer me a chance to serve Him with my life on earth and to live with Him and His father for all eternity.

“for while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. for one will scarcely die for a righteous person-though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die-but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. for if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.”
-Romans 5:6-10