I enjoy interviews, especially when they wind their way into the deep places as Bari Weiss’s recent interview with Amanda Knox did. For those who don’t recall, in 2009 Italian courts wrongfully convicted Knox of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, while studying in Italy as an American exchange student.
The interview is worth listening to in its entirety, but their plunge into the metaphysical depths begins when Knox reads from her memoir, Free, what she said to her prosecutor following her exoneration (at the 1:22:00 mark of the interview). Knox finishes the reading with these words: “I do not wish you ill; I wish you peace.” In other words, Knox extends grace.
Knox’s reading leaves Weiss struck by what she calls “the value system” coursing through Knox’s response to the man who made her life miserable for years. Weiss wonders aloud if Knox’s values are Stoic or Buddhist in nature. In any case, Weiss and Knox believe they have stumbled upon something “transcendent” and “spiritual.”
And I agree.
Rather than turning to the more esoteric stock of eastern religions and Greek Stoicism (as Weiss and Knox do), I think the Bible’s more grounded storytelling offers a better toolkit for making sense of the interview’s swerve toward the transcendent.
The Joseph story (Genesis 37-50) is the most obvious place to begin given the (stunning) parallels between Knox’s ordeal and Joseph’s. Like Knox, Joseph was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for a sex-related crime while living in a foreign land. Like Knox, Joseph spent his 20s in prison, and both find a way of making the most of it by serving inmates through translation and interpretation (dreams, in Joseph’s case).
Like Knox who extended kindness to her wrongdoer, Joseph through an elaborate ruse of grace, extends kindness to his wrongdoers, his brothers, who sold him into slavery years earlier. In a breathtaking turn of events, the family who stripped Joseph (literally) of everything find their younger brother now robed in power and saving the world (including his family) from famine. Rather than smite his brothers in fury, Joseph embraces them in love and mercy (Genesis 45:1-15). In other words, Joseph extends grace.
Joseph’s story anticipates Jesus’s story. Jesus, though doing no wrong, was rejected by his brethren, suffered at the hands of both his people and foreigners, and these sufferings culminated in death upon a Roman cross. Like Joseph, Jesus’s sufferings were the path to his glory. The crown came by way of the cross. Even amid his agony, he issued mercy to his enemies: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
Surprisingly, Jesus refers to his sufferings as his “glory,” which stretches the imagination. (Sure, the cross was necessary, but glorious?) John Calvin explains: “For in the cross of Christ, as in a splendid theatre, the incomparable goodness of God is set before the whole world. The glory of God shines, indeed, in all creatures on high and below, but never more brightly than in the cross. In [his] death we see a boundless glory.”
Like a multifaceted diamond, the cross sparkles with the complex of God’s glory: his holiness as the severe demands of sin come into focus; his love as sinners are reconciled; and his wisdom and power as he brilliantly outmaneuvers Satan’s ploys, disarming the forces of darkness.
Not only is the cross the glory of Christ, but it’s the hinge upon which creation swings toward something new (Revelation 21:5). God’s masterplan for creation, Paul writes, is to unite everything (both in heaven and on earth) to Jesus.
This breathtaking work of Christ (indeed, God’s entire salvation project) flows from the “riches of God’s grace” (Ephesians 1:7). Grace is not a sort of pixie dust that God sprinkles upon the world from on high, but rather God’s favorable disposition toward rebellious humanity. When Jesus arrived, he came “full of grace and truth,” which means, as theologian Herman Bavinck put it, Jesus “is God expressed [truth] and God given [grace].” God’s grace, which is to say God, gained a most concrete expression in the life and work of Jesus (Hebrews 1:3).
Which brings us back to Amanda Knox’s grace toward her prosecutor, and the subsequent awe that washes over both Weiss and Knox. I’d like to suggest that Weiss and Knox did stumble upon something beautifully transcendent, indeed divine.
They experience the powerful intrusion of grace.
It’s an intrusion because grace is generally alien to the ordinary operations of the world. In much of life, it’s law (not grace) that crowds our field of vision; the law’s maxims dominate our days and psyche: You pay for what you get. No pain, no gain. The early bird catches the worm. Practice makes perfect. You sleep in the bed you make. What goes around comes around. And so forth.
But occasionally grace breaks in, which is what happened in Weiss’s interview with Amanda Knox. In recounting Knox’s gracious act, Weiss, Knox, and those listening in had the delight of being surprised by grace. And those with eyes to see got a glimmer of the Gracious One, Jesus.