This weekend the Church begins a brand new liturgical year with the season of Advent, and we are starting a new message series, “Grace and Truth.” That phrase comes directly from St. John’s Gospel.
As you know, there are four Gospels, each one telling the story of Jesus’ life and mission, but from different perspectives. Most of the Christmas stories we know and love: the iconic scenes we find on Christmas cards, sung in carols, the shepherds, the kings, the angels: are all found in Matthew and Luke. John tells the Christmas story as well, but it is from a more theological point of view. John describes the arrival of “The Word”. The “Word” is Jesus himself; God’s Word. To know God’s character and values, we can simply look to the person and life of Jesus Christ.
The first thing that St. John tells us about God’s Word is, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). In other words, Jesus moved into our neighborhood to reveal to us two aspects of who God is: grace and truth. Scripture doesn’t say that Jesus balanced grace and truth. It’s not half and half. Just like Jesus himself is not half God and half human, but fully both. So, what is grace and truth?
Grace is favor. It is God’s help. Grace is unmerited favor which means you can’t buy it,
you don’t earn it and you’ll never deserve it. All you can do with grace is refuse it or receive it and cooperate with it. Grace is not an enabling agent, for codependent relationships, but rather a gift that helps us grow. Grace is not divine indifference to our faults and flaws but rather the means by which they can be transformed. Grace isn’t about making excuses for our failures, it isn’t about lowering standards to accommodate our sin and selfishness. Jesus didn’t come among us to lower standards. In fact, he raised them. Grace is all about strengthening us to meet his higher standards.
Truth is reality. It is not something we get to make up. We can’t alter it. It just is, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not. It is something that can be taught and learned, sought and discovered. Or, conversely, it can be ignored, denied, misrepresented. There’s quite a lot you can do with the truth, but there’s one thing you can never do: you can’t change it.
The truth is often uncomfortable. So, we easily confuse what we want to be true with what actually is true. The truth can even be painful when it belies our self-deception. But, the truth can also be beautiful, it can be dazzling when its beauty is recognized. The truth can be liberating. It can be transforming, it can change everything.
Truth asks, “Is it real? Does it correspond to reality?” Grace asks, “Does it help? Does it heal?”
The truth often lead us to awareness of our selfishness and self-centered, exposing our pride fullness, revealing the distance between who we are and who we want to be. And as such the truth is the first step toward grace, toward opening our hearts and minds to acknowledging our need for grace.
We are only open and willing to receive God’s grace when we acknowledge that we need it and we are hopeless with out it. But the truth cannot really be received unless there is graciousness to it, unless it is meant to be helpful and done as a favor to others, as a genuine kindness otherwise truth becomes a weapon.
Jesus brought grace and truth together, again and again in their full measure. Not Grace or Truth, but Grace and Truth.
All of us, on the other hand, tend to focus on one and ignore the other or emphasize one at the expense of the other. Even more likely, we find ourselves bringing only grace to certain situations and only truth to others. Take away grace or truth from any equation, from any dynamic and the results are damaging for our relationships, detrimental for our work environments, and potentially disastrous for ourselves.
In the Gospel today, Jesus talks about his Second Coming. His coming at the end of time, that he promised would happen someday, though he did not tell us when. Christmas celebrates Jesus’ coming in history, but the season of Advent begins with looking at Jesus’ coming at the end of time. Of that time Jesus warns ominously: “For as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking,
marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away” (Matthew 24:37-39).
Jesus is telling the disciples to pay attention to the larger picture and what is really going on. They are to be constantly on the look out to see God’s movement and activity in the world instead being sucked in and consumed by the busyness of life. Jesus doesn’t want his disciples to be taken off guard. So he says to them, “Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come” (Matthew 24:42).
That is a verse that perfectly sums up the whole season of Advent. A clear time of preparation for a more complete coming of Christ into our lives. Ultimately the truth contains grace. The truth is that you and I are so loved by our heavenly Father that he sent his son, “For God so loved the world that he sent his son…so that the world might be saved through him” (John 3.16,17)
Christmas doesn’t mean anything if we don’t recognize we need truth and grace, and it is available to us in Christ.
So, as we begin, what is surely a favored season for us all, this week, be attentive to yourself and your environments. Where are you bringing truth? Where are you bringing grace? How can you better balance those two? Pay attention to what is needed.
When you start paying attention to how well you’re doing, you’ll start to do better. And, at the same time, you become more adept at recognizing God’s grace and truth at work in you.