compassion

I recently watched an episode of Grey's Anatomy that really struck a cord with me. Meredith, the main character, who the show is named after, treats a death row inmate at the hospital (I'm assuming here that some people on the planet actually DON'T watch Grey's Anatomy, which may or may not be true. I am also assuming that these few people would actually read these random thoughts from a tired mom. A lot of assumption....). He ends up telling her it would be nice to see "a friendly face" when he is executed. So she goes to the execution. As she comes out of the prison, she is met by Derek, her boyfriend, who also treated the death row inmate. Derek, throughout the episodes, has had disdain and contempt for the man, refusing to let him cheat the system by dying in the hospital. Meredith has formed a kind of friendship with him. She comes out and sees Derek and bursts into tears and says, "I wanted to have compassion on him. That's why I went. And it was horrible. It was horrible." As I watched the scene unfold, I had tears streaming down my face.

This is an amazing picture of grace, of compassion, of what it means to reach out to someone unlovable, unlovely, unwanted, undeserving. Grace is radical and flies in the face of the way the world works. This man was condemned to die for horrible, horrendous things he had done. And Meredith, by going, extended grace in a way we could all learn from. God has given us this same radical grace. We are, in our sin, unlovable, unlovely, unwanted, undeserving. We are a mess. And God reached down and gave us grace, and mercy. It was painful and hard and ugly as Jesus died on the cross and took our sin. We are to be like him, to live like him. Extending grace to those around us can be painful and hard, just as it was for Meredith.

A side note: I have seen every episode ever made of Grey's Anatomy, or at least ever aired, and this is the first time I have seen any sort of picture of Jesus in it. And it may be the last. I don't plan on filling this blog with reflections about TV shows that fill primetime. But this time it warranted it.