What does it take to understand grace?
Nancy Seaman is a small lady, friendly and good-natured, known by her neighbors in their placid Detroit neighborhood as a dedicated stay-at-home mom.
And she’s a murderer.
In 2004 Nancy Seaman killed her husband, Bob. And the murder was assertive. Brutal. Seaman hit her husband with a hatchet and stabbed him with a knife more than twenty times in their suburban garage.
Seaman readily admits to the grisly crime. Now 65, she has spent more than a decade in a cell at the Huron Valley Correctional Facility, Michigan’s women’s prison, ruminating on that fateful day. “I have always accepted full responsibility for the fact that my actions caused the death of my husband,” Seaman told NBC News. “The horror that I’m responsible is more than most people could even fathom.”
The jury agreed. Oakland County Circuit Judge Jack McDonald ruled in the case in which jurors found Seaman guilty of first-degree murder, which carries with it a mandatory sentence of life without parole.
And that’s when the unthinkable happened. The verdict haunted Judge McDonald, and eight months after the gavel fell he took the radical step of changing the verdict to second-degree murder and ten years in prison, providing the opportunity for parole. Not only that, McDonald became an advocate for Seaman’s release.
McDonald says that beneath the surface of Seaman’s marriage lurked a dark truth: her husband had subjected her to physical and emotional abuse for years. Co-workers saw physical injuries. Their children told of witnessing the abuse. She had gone to the police twice, but never filed a report. The abuse worsened as she earned her teaching degree and her husband lost his job and escalated when he discovered she planned to leave him.
“I’ve probably had twenty murder cases at least,” said McDonald, and “I [had] no pangs of conscience at all. This was the case that bothered me.” McDonald has joined others in advocating for her sentence to be commuted.
So the judge who sentenced the criminal, clearly guilty of a heinous crime, is now the advocate for her freedom, taking steps only he could take, leaning into the controversy, to set her free.
Seamans is starkly clear on reality. “Commutation is an act of mercy,” she observes. “It doesn’t absolve someone of guilt.”
No. No it doesn’t. She is guilty. But who would have thought that her judge would also be her advocate? That he would do the unthinkable, the unconventional, the unwarranted, and design a method for her to be set free? To advocate for her release?
And so it is for you. And for me. Our Judge pronounced us guilty, sentenced us to die, and then arranged for our release.
Imagine that. You stand before the Judge. The one who can sentence you to death— the One who already has. In that moment of stark clarity, you recognize that He knows what you did, who you are, what you cannot hide. So you admit it.
You are guilty. You have committed unspeakable crimes, sins, not only against other people, but against the Judge Himself.
And then He sentences you. It is so assured it is unremarkable. “The wages of sin is death.” Expected and yet horrifying. Could it be true? Your knees weaken and your heart sinks. But you have no recourse, and you have no excuse.
And you can do nothing.
But He can. And the turning point, the unthinkable, spins on one small word. “But.”
“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).
And the Judge becomes your advocate. Guilty, but free. Not because you deserve it. But because He chose to do it.
Now do you understand grace?