Here are two great quotes from Robert Farrar Capon‘s The Parables of Grace:

“Jesus came to save a lost and losing world by his own lostness and defeat; but in this wide world of losers, everyone except Jesus remains firmly, if hopelessly, committed to salvation by winning… it would be funny if it were not fatal; but fatal it is, because grace works only on those who accept their lostness.”

“As I have observed a number of times now, if the world could have been saved by successful living, it would have been tidied up long ago. Certainly, the successful livers of this world have always been ready enough to stuff life’s losers into the garbage can of history. Their program for turning earth back to Eden has consistently been to shun the sick, to lock the poor in ghettos, to disenfranchise those whose skin was the wrong color, and to exterminate those whose religion was inconvenient… But for all that, Eden has never returned. The world’s woes are beyond repair by the world’s successes: there are just too many failures, and they come too thick and fast for any program, however energetic or well-funded… Therefore when the Gospel is proclaimed, it stays light-years away from reliance on success or any other exercise of right-handed power. Instead, it relies resolutely on left-handed power – on the power that, in a mystery, works through failure, loss, and death… For Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to reward the rewardable, improve the improvable, or correct the correctible; he came simply to be the resurrection and the life of those who will take their stand on a death he can use instead of a life he cannot.”