Keys: Grace

Romans 3: 24, Romans 5: 15

Romans 11: 5 – 6, 1 Corinthians 9: 8

1 Corinthians 15: 10

November 2, 2025

One of my favorite musicals is Les Mis. This musical is based on Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel and is a story of social injustice, redemption, and revolution in 19th-century France. The music is memorable, the story is powerful and every time I have seen it – whether in the West End, Broadway, or in the movie theater, I am often moved in powerful ways throughout the showing.

In Les Mis, Victor Hugo gives us three men who could not be more different—and yet, they are bound together by a single word: grace.

Valjean is a man crushed by the injustice of his world. After 19 years in prison, Valjean is released and encounters the Bishop of Digne - a man who meets Valjean’s bitterness not with condemnation, but with mercy.

When Valjean steals the cathedral silver, the Bishop responds to Valjean’s thievery with a very surprising emotion. As the police haul Valjean back to the Bishop with a charge of theft, the Bishop greets Valjean:

But my friend you left so early

Surely something slipped your mind

You forgot I gave these also

Would you leave the best behind?

So, Messieurs, you may release him

For this man has spoken true

I commend you for your duty

And God's blessing go with you.

That act of unearned love breaks Valjean’s cycle of bitterness and vengeance. Grace enters where law has failed. Valjean’s life from that moment on becomes a long, living response to mercy. The Bishop continues:

But remember this, my brother

See in this some higher plan

You must use this precious silver

To become an honest man

By the witness of the martyrs

By the Passion and the Blood

God has raised you out of darkness

I have bought your soul for God!

Jean Valjean is a man who has been crushed by uncaring law. Nineteen years in prison for stealing bread—five for the theft, fourteen for trying to escape. When he is released, the world still sees Valjean as nothing but a number: 24601. He is free, but he is not forgiven. The law has done its work. But where the law fails, grace transforms. Valjean reflects on the actions of the Bishop:

Yet why did I allow that man

To touch my soul and teach me love?

He treated me like any other

He gave me his trust

He called me brother

My life he claims for God above

Can such things be?

For I had come to hate the world

This world that always hated me

One word from him and I'd be back

Beneath the lash, upon the rack

Instead he offers me my freedom

I feel my shame inside me like a knife

He told me that I have a soul,

How does he know?

What spirit comes to move my life?

Is there another way to go?

Valjean has experienced grace.

And then there is Javert—the man of law. To Javert, justice is clear-cut, the world divided into good men and bad. Order must be maintained; mercy is a crack in the system. He spends his life chasing Valjean, unable to believe that grace could truly change a sinner’s heart. Javert sings:

There, out in the darkness

A fugitive running

Fallen from God

Fallen from grace

God be my witness

I never shall yield

Till we come face to face

Till we come face to face

He goes on:

And so it has been, and so it is written

On the doorway to paradise

That those who falter and those who fall

Must pay the price!

Lord, let me find him

That I may see him

Safe behind bars

I will never rest

Till then

This I swear

This I swear by the stars!

But one day, the tables turn. Valjean has the power to kill Javert - but instead, lets him go at great risk to himself. Javert, faced with a grace that overturns every rule he’s ever lived by, cannot bear it. His world of absolutes collapses. He cannot live in a universe where mercy is stronger than law.

Valjean receives grace, is transformed, and then can’t help but offer grace. Valjean receives and then offers life. Javert’s law leads only to a crushing death.

We tend to be a people of the law. “That’s not fair!” is a comment often heard and much time, and much expense, is spent on trying to find, to embrace, even to regulate what is fairness.

We have a highly developed sense of “fairness” and it often impacts how we interact with one another or respond to particular situations. In Matthew, there is the story of the laborers in the vineyard. Workers are hired at different times throughout the day – some working 12 hours and some only working one hour. And yet, as an act of grace, the workers are all paid the same generous amount.

The early workers complain about the fairness of the compensation. No one is shorted; indeed, the only complaint is over the generosity of the owner. We read the story and often sympathize with the workers who complain about the fairness of the pay schedule, rather than marvel at the grace of the vineyard owner.

And the issue is not just with compensation. Those who have lived lifetimes of Christian service will sing about amazing grace and yet question the deathbed conversion and reward for those who have come to faith so late. Where is the fairness? Where is the reward? Where is the special treatment or recognition for those who have been faithful for decades versus those who are so very late to the spiritual party?

I was once the member of a very progressive school district’s crises intervention team. Once identified, the team was given three weeks – 8 hours a day for 15 days – we were given an intense course of training in our assigned task. Sadly, I was on campus fairly frequently because of a series of tragedies that hit that school district.

I remember one day in our training – an entire day – was on the concept of treating students fairly. Most of us came to the course with the typical working definition of what fairness means. For most, fairness meant that everyone is treated the same – that they received the same resources, the same time and same attention.

We watched a documentary on special education. In a class full of special education students, in a class full of a variety of cognitive and physical challenges, to treat each student – in the name of fairness – in exactly the same way was in fact, unjust.

Fairness, in that context, didn’t mean treating them all the same. Fairness, in that context, meant being equally committed to giving each student – in their variety of challenges – exactly and uniquely what they need. The law says that we must treat all students the same. But grace says that we must be equally committed to giving each student what they need.

Friends the reality is that we all need grace – maybe at different times, maybe for different reasons – but we all need it. C.S. Lewis wrote convincingly and at length on grace. He wrote that the world, in its philosophies and religions, teaches that morality is dependent upon self-improvement. In Mere Christianity he declared that we, in fact, are incapable of achieving the moral purity that our faith envisions on our own.

It was, according to Lewis, like standing on the floor and telling someone to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps: “Discipline alone is never enough. Imagine a man trying to lift himself off the floor by pulling on his own bootstraps. That’s human morality without grace. Christianity gives you boots and a ladder - God’s grace - which allows you to rise above your natural limitations. It transforms the person, not just their behavior.”

Friends, unlike Javert, we are saved, we are transformed, we stand the highest chance of becoming the person that God created us to be through grace. Each and every one of us has been created as an act of grace, we have been gifted and filled with purpose as an act of grace, we have been reconciled, redeemed, and transformed as an act of grace.

The law has its purpose. The law identifies those things that hurt us, hurt others, and damages our relationship with God. It has a role – an important role – but that role is not a transformative one. That outcome is reserved for grace. The law can only take us so far.

So what do we do with this grace? As recipients of God’s grace and mercy - EACH OF US! – how does that transform our relationships with one another?

Each of us stands somewhere between Valjean and Javert—between the need to receive grace and the struggle to give it. The story asks, God asks: Will we live by the letter that condemns, or by the grace that saves?

Valjean went on, transformed by grace, to be a source of light, love, and service in his town. But let’s be honest, it is easy to write such happy endings for a book or a musical. But what about in real life? Sadly, expressing grace doesn’t come easily, it doesn’t come naturally. As self-centered people, life by the law is so much easier – it takes little thinking, little effort, it has little risk.

But grace….. that is another thing altogether. Can we dare to be people of grace? If so, we must say no to a cynicism that expects the worst and is all too ready to offer the worst – in the name of the law. If we are going to be people of grace, we must be ready to give up our sense of victimhood and righteous calls for legal punishment and instead be ready to forgive, as we have been forgiven – as an act of grace. Grace calls us to see the best in ourselves and others and positions ourselves as dispensers of God’s best for others whether we think they “deserve it or not. Maybe, particularly if they don’t deserve it.

Grace truly is amazing. It is a joy that is meant to be shared. May we be people of grace! Amen.