Here are a few words from the Epistle reading
for next Sunday, right at the beginning of St Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Paul is writing to a distant Christian
community he has not yet met, and he addresses them as...
...yourselves who are called to belong to
Jesus Christ, to all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints: Grace
to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ [Romans 1: 6-7].
Grace and peace... One of my colleagues over many years, an old
friend, usually addresses people in his correspondence including his emails in
that way. He wishes us grace and
peace. To say the least, it makes us
pause and think – this is what mature Christian faith conveys: grace and
peace. Hospitality at its best confers
grace and peace.
They are two rich words which are diminished
when we try to define them. The best way
to learn them is to experience their reality in life. Grace – the lovely Greek word χαρις -- is
Nelson Mandela choosing not to walk the path of retribution at the very moment
he had ample power to do so, and ample reason to do so. Grace is the father running to greet his
returning son who had squandered everything.
Grace is never reasonable and very rarely deserved. It is Godlike.
Peace is the Hebrew word shalom. It means somewhat
more than the absence of noise, although that in itself is not a bad start. Shalom is a fundamental rightness, a sense
that things are tending as God intends.
It includes our health and wellbeing – but the hard thing to grasp is
that shalom does not wait until every problem is solved. Someone whose body is falling to bits can
know the gift of shalom.
St Paul wishes these Roman Christians grace
and peace. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. St Benedict said we must also have grace
and peace from each other. One reality
of the birth of the baby is that you know that baby has no quarrel with anyone
right now. One of the miracles of our
time is that, in a culture whose media is thriving on public blame and shame, on
seeing people suffer, on sickening self-righteousness and lack of wisdom about
human frailty and error, in a cruel culture of retribution – there was this one
man, with no great pretensions to religion, with all his own human frailties on
show, who flatly refused to condemn and punish at the moment he was in a
position to do so. It was a shaft of
grace, and our media could only report it as a strange and wondrous thing. Then came Archbishop Tutu and the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. If you told
the truth, the slate could be wiped clean.
Grace and truth, wrote St
John, came through Jesus Christ. Grace is the receiving of love, unmerited and
unconditional. Grace to you and
peace... Grace and truth... These are at the heart of the strong message
of Advent and Christmas. Grace to you and peace, from God our Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ.
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