How our human instincts find grace not only unfair, but impossible!

I want to believe in radical grace. I really do. But I’ve learned that when grace stops being abstract and starts landing on actual people—especially people whose lives look nothing like mine—I begin to reach for explanations.

Jesus hangs on the cross between two criminals, each of them nearing a final, humiliating breath. One of them turns his head and speaks—not with a lifetime of repentance behind him, not with ordinances completed or debts repaid, but with a simple request born of desperation.

And Jesus answers him.

“Today you will be with me in paradise.”

I’ve heard those words my whole life, and I’ve often admired them from a distance. But if I’m honest, they unsettle me. They feel too immediate. Too generous. Too unconcerned with sequence and process.

Today. With me.

Almost instinctively, questions rise in me—questions that sound faithful on the surface but are really attempts to regain balance. What does paradise mean? Surely it can’t mean what it sounds like.

Within LDS doctrine, I know the answer. Paradise is understood as a temporary state in the spirit world—a place of peace, rest, and instruction, not final judgment. A merciful holding place where things can still be sorted out properly. Where order is preserved. I understand why this explanation exists. I’ve needed it myself. Because without it, I feel exposed. If a thief can be with Jesus immediately, then I have to face an uncomfortable question: What was all my carefulness for? What about restraint, obedience, the long, quiet discipline of trying to live well?

This is where I recognize the elder brother in myself.

I see him standing outside the celebration, arms crossed, not because he lacks goodness, but because he cannot stand the imbalance. He has done everything asked of him. He has stayed. He has worked. And now grace is being handed out in ways that don’t seem to respect the effort.

I wish I could say I’ve never felt that resentment.

But I have.

The same discomfort shows up in the parable of the workers in the vineyard. Some labor all day under the sun. Others arrive at the eleventh hour. At the end, they all receive the same wage. When I read this parable honestly, I don’t side with the landowner right away. I side with the early workers. I know exactly how they feel. They’re not angry because they were underpaid—they’re angry because someone else was over-loved. And that’s the part that’s hardest to admit.

Grace feels offensive not because it harms me, but because it refuses to validate my comparisons. It does not pause to acknowledge how hard I tried, how much I restrained myself, or how carefully I stayed within the lines.

Jesus doesn’t seem interested in managing fairness the way I am.

At this point, the question rises in me almost automatically:

Then what is the purpose of obedience and ordinances?

I’ve asked that question sincerely. I’ve also asked it defensively. Sometimes it’s curiosity. Sometimes it’s fear. Because if grace really is that immediate, that unguarded, then something I’ve been relying on for reassurance starts to wobble. If obedience functions as currency—proof that my sacrifice earned something—then radical grace threatens its value. And I realize how much I’ve wanted my goodness to mean I deserved more, or at least that others deserved less.

But the father’s response to the elder son doesn’t defend the system. He doesn’t argue fairness. He doesn’t explain himself. He simply says, “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.” That sentence has taken me a long time to hear.

Because the father isn’t saying, You earned this.

He’s saying, You already had it.

The elder son’s loss wasn’t obedience—it was joy. He lived as though proximity were a wage instead of a gift, as though his father’s presence had to be justified rather than enjoyed. I recognize that posture painfully well. Doing the right things but holding them tightly. Staying close but never relaxing. Measuring instead of receiving.

Seen this way, grace doesn’t make obedience meaningless—it rescues it.

Obedience was never meant to secure God’s presence. It was meant to help me notice that I was already living inside it. Ordinances were never currency exchanged for heaven; they were embodied reminders that God is near, that grace is something to step into with my body, not something to earn with my record.

I’m still learning this. Slowly. With resistance.

There is a part of me that wants grace to arrive late, so my restraint feels justified. There is a part of me that wants paradise to have gates and guards, so my carefulness feels necessary. And yet, Jesus keeps offering companionship first.

“To be with me.”

Not after everything is cleaned up.

Not once the story is respectable.

But now.

The hardest truth for me to accept is that righteousness loses its joy the moment it needs someone else to suffer in order to feel complete. When my faith depends on comparison, it curdles into resentment. When it depends on proximity, it softens into gratitude. Perhaps that is why radical grace feels impossible—not because it asks too much of God, but because it asks me to let go of the quiet bargains I’ve made with goodness.

And beneath all our disagreements about who deserves what in the next life—beneath doctrinal fist fights and theological scorekeeping—I notice a quieter, more pressing question: What is a good life? Not after I die, not once accounts are settled, but right now. It’s the same question every philosopher has asked across history. And it’s the same question Jesus seems to ask, not as a distant teacher, but as one walking inside it himself. He grows—grace for grace—not all at once, but slowly, patiently, educated into the life he will later call “eternal.” Eternal life, then, is something learned, inhabited, practiced over time.

And if I am fortunate enough to glimpse even a fraction of that depth—liberated from the prisons of my own mind—then I have already lived the reward. And I notice how absurd it feels when I still grumble about someone else stepping into it at the end of their life.

Why must someone else’s life be subjected to endless suffering to make my good one valid? Why does grace threaten me so much that I forget to celebrate what I have already been given? It’s remarkable—and uncomfortable—how easily I can describe Jesus’ mission to liberate us, to free us from sin, fear, and death. I can explain it with clarity, conviction, even eloquence. And yet, I am still blind in my own mind to the very traps it was meant to dismantle.

The subtle games of comparison, the quiet ledger of who deserves what, the way I measure my joy against someone else’s suffering—they all persist. I catch myself counting, calculating, defending, even as I say I believe in freedom. Instead of confronting these ego traps directly, conventional religion often repeats the mistakes of the past: it builds systems to preserve order, doctrines to secure fairness, practices to manage my anxiety. And I participate, sometimes without noticing, as if defending my righteousness will somehow prove I am free.

But freedom, I am learning, is not something I can guard with rules. It begins the moment I recognize these traps in myself and, slowly, let them go. Grace insists on it. Radical, immediate, inconvenient grace—the kind Jesus offers on the cross—leaves no room for moral accounting. 

When scripture speaks of damnation, I was taught to hear it as a theological and moral response demanded by cosmic justice. God will damn us to hell. We have failed to perform adequately, and therefore his hands are tied. But the longer I sit with the text—and with myself—the less convincing that picture becomes.

Scripture rarely positions God as the active source of damnation. More often, damnation appears as something we do. A resistance. A refusal. A turning inward. Not God barring the way, but human beings interrupting the unobstructed flow of grace—like damming a river that is already running downhill.

Grace does not need to be summoned. It does not need to be earned or activated. It moves on its own, toward us, by its very nature.

What stops it is not divine restraint, but human insistence.

The fastest way I know to damn grace is this simple thought: I earned it. And if I earned it, then so must you. In that moment, grace is no longer a gift—it becomes a wage. And once grace becomes a wage, comparison returns, resentment follows, and the flow slows to a trickle.

And this is precisely why the ordinance of the sacrament matters so much.

Each Sunday, as Latter-day Saints, we are given the chance to practice something that feels almost impossible: expanded hospitality. We eat, as Jesus did, in the presence of sinners—knowing full well that includes me. No interviews. No clarifications. No pause to determine who has earned the right to be fed.

The emblems of grace are passed freely, hand to hand. We take grace into ourselves, and then we offer it to our neighbor without knowing their story, their failures, or their standing. The table does not wait for certainty.  Jesus did not remove Judas from the last supper. In fact, he drew attention to the matter— one among them would betray him—but tonight, he would graciously eat with the unworthy.

In that way, the sacrament functions as the opposite of a public display of worthiness. It interrupts my instinct to judge, to measure, to withhold provision until righteousness has been sufficiently demonstrated. It trains my body to receive what I did not earn—and then to pass it along just as freely.

Week after week, the ritual quietly insists on a different logic: grace is not scarce, and it is not mine to manage. My role is not to guard the flow, but to stop damming it

Damnation, then, is not God withdrawing himself from us. It is us defending our deservingness so fiercely that we can no longer receive what was freely given. It confronts the ego directly. It refuses the scorekeeping that comforts us so much. And that is terrifying, because it asks me to admit how captive I have been—even while believing I am liberated.

The elder son had everything. He just couldn’t enjoy it while keeping score. I’m still learning how to stop counting—and how to believe that being with the father has always been the point.

Discussion Questions
1. Is Grace really possible? I think it’s possible to make a good argument against Grace as a viable governing principle, but the biggest problem I see is operating under strict merit and calling it Grace.
2. When have you experienced Grace in your life?
3. What other Doctrines are Petty, promoted as Grace, but actually betray it?