Grace, Justification and Faith
Paul, Augustine, Luther and Wesley
Galatians 2.15-end
A little over 25 years ago I found
myself in Tubingen in Germany sitting at a massive oak conference table amid
that beautiful university, drinking coffee, eating the most enormous pretzels
and listening to one of the foremost New Testament scholars of his time
Professor Martin Hengel talk about the gospels. About ten from my theological
college were staying in Baden-Wurtemberg for a week and this was one of the
highlights of the trip. One of our number asked Professor Hengel what the
essence was of his own theology. He banged the table with his fist and the
pretzels jumped in the air as he exclaimed – ‘gnade und liebe; gnade und liebe';
grace and love. Simple really.
I guess if you were to have asked St
Paul the same question, though without pretzels, he
would have given you much the same answer. To him the gospel he had been given
by his Lord Jesus Christ, the gospel that he had devoted his life to sharing
across the Mediterranean was all about receiving God’s grace and having faith
in the one who had mediated that grace to us – Jesus Christ. And fairly early
on in his ministry, perhaps around 46 AD Paul, with his long time colleague
Barnabas, the son of consolation, he brought that liberating gospel of grace
and inclusivity to the people of what is now inland Turkey, Celts who had
settled there decades before. And not long after that, so it seems, other
followers of Jesus had come to that part of the world from Jerusalem .
These were Jewish Christians who told the converts of Galatia
that it wasn’t enough to put your faith in Jesus. If you wanted to be part of
God’s new chosen people, if you wanted to inherit his promises then you would
need to stick with the ancient laws and customs of the Jewish people also.
Circumcision, keeping the proper sacred days, eating the correct food – these
were all to be signs of God’s favour that needed to be kept.
And a little after that Paul hears
news of what is happening in some of the churches to which he has brought the
gospel and he writes to them. And he doesn’t hold back it is safe to say. The
epistle to the Galatians is believed to be the earliest writing we have from
Paul and many of the ideas he puts forward can be found in more polished form
when he writes to the Romans a decade later. ‘You foolish Galatians’ he
proclaims. What were you thinking of?
The passage we have heard today can
sound a little dense and difficult to grasp to our modern ears but the words
‘justification; law; faith and grace come through loud and clear. ‘We know that
a person is justified not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus
Christ.’ Back in the book of Job the author puts the question on the lips of
Job ‘How can a man be justified before God?’ It is a question with which Paul
is occupied in so many of his writings. God is all perfect. We…well we are
clearly somewhat less so. And no matter how hard we try, all of our good
actions put together can never bring us close to God, allow us to stand and
look him in the eye. So any law that seeks to justify an upward striving of
human religion and morality is always going to fail because it just becomes a
structure by which we can try and buy our way into heaven.
But Paul knew first hand about
God’s grace offering up a new start. He knew that it wasn’t a matter of what we
do and how hard we try to fulfil certain obligations but rather a matter of
what God has done for us out of love.
Think of Jesus’ encounter with the
rich young man. He has kept all the commandments since he was a boy. But Jesus
challenges him – ‘if you truly want to be part of God’s kingdom, sell what you
have, give it to the poor and follow me.’ Being truly right before God isn’t
about following the law, however admirable, but putting your trust in Jesus –
faith – because of what he has done for us – grace.
Or think of the parable of the
workers in the vineyard. Those who had worked all day expected to receive more
for their labours than those who had worked just the last hour. The grace of
God is not be parcelled out and adjusted to the varieties of individual merit. There
was, as one commentator has pointed out, a coin worth one twelfth of the
denarius that all those workers received. It was called a pondion. But there is
no such thing as a twelfth part of the love of God.’ (F.F. Bruce commentary
quoting T.W. Manson).
And to talk about God’s grace
rather than our own versions of merit can be quite challenging and radical and
disconcerting. I was told a few weeks ago by a member of Allerton congregation
about a former pastor of theirs from Manchester
who used to use this illustration to get people thinking about grace – ‘Imagine
that after your death you really do find yourself meeting St Peter with him
welcoming you as a faithful servant of the Lord. He shows you to a big meeting
room and gives you a ticket to your numbered seat. You find your way past
hundreds and thousands of people, some of whom you once knew and finally find
your seat. You turn to shake the hand of your neighbour and find yourself
looking at Adolf Hitler. What do you say?’
And to talk about God’s grace
rather than our own merit can also be incredibly liberating and inclusive. You
don’t need people to mediate between yourself and God. ‘He himself has come
close to you so that you can come close to him.’ It’s no coincidence that it is
in the letter to the Galatians that Paul makes that famous statement ‘There is
no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, but all are one in Christ Jesus.’
(Galatians 3.28) God’s grace and love his ‘gnade und liebe’ is for everyone and
it isn’t for us to put limits on it or barriers towards it. That’s what those
Jewish Christians from Jerusalem
were trying to do. And that’s why the Galatians were foolish because they had
chosen to be imprisoned again.
And to talk about God’s grace
rather than our own versions of merit is a revolutionary idea that reflects
God’s topsy turvy kingdom – our relationship with God is not essentially about
trying to keep to a set of rules that others have formulated or feeling that
you have to do enough to please him; rather it is based on what God has done
for us – grace – a belief in which makes us want to respond to him – faith.
That is also why it is a belief
that has echoed through history and led so many great men and women to seek to
change the world. The greatest of all Christian thinkers St
Augustine based his ideas and writing on those of St
Paul and influenced Christianity as it spread across Europe .
Martin Luther’s rediscovery of Paul’s understanding and his exasperation with a
church that was encouraging people literally to but their way into heaven drove
one of the great revolutionary movements in history, the Reformation. John Wesley’s
rediscovery of Paul’s understanding helped to awake a rather moribund English
18th century Christianity, produced the quiet revolutionary movement
that was Methodism and gave hope to ordinary men and women throughout the
country.
And what might it mean for us. Are
there any revolutionaries here? Perhaps not. But we are all recipients of God’s
grace through the love he shows to us in Jesus. Through the cross, we are
at-one with God and it is his doing, not ours. What a relief.
And does that mean that because God
has set us free we can do whatever we want? I’m afraid not – or as Paul would
say ‘By no mean’! It is precisely because we have been set free by God’s grace,
because we have put our trust in him that his love and grace can pour out of us
and that all those virtues and all those good deeds can follow.
Last weekend at the tail end of a
party I was in conversation with two non Christian friends. I doubt that they
were in a fit state to remember any of it. But they were stating their belief
that the core of Christianity was about being nice to other people and I was
stating my belief that it is a little bit more than that. There’s nothing wrong
with being nice and God knows there is enough of its opposite around. But
that’s not the end of who or what we are or even the means to the end. It is
the essential by product of God’s ‘gnade und liebe’ towards us.
In his very accessible and well
written biography of Paul Bishop Tom Wright writes ‘those who are grasped by
grace in the gospel and who bear witness to that in their loyal belief in the
One God, focussed on Jesus, are not merely beneficiaries, recipients of God’s
mercy; they are also agents . They are poems in which God is addressing his
world, and, as poems are designed to do, they break open existing ways of
looking at things and spark the mind to imagine a different way to be
human….through the gospel and spirit, God is now putting people right, so that
they can be both examples of what the gospel does and agents of further
transformation in God’s world.’
Agents and poems and a means to
inspire a different way of being human. Wow, that’s a high calling indeed.
Augustine grasped it, Luther grasped it, Wesley grasped it. Can I sign you up?
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