Grace Upon Grace

Grace Upon Grace

John 1:1-18[1]

It’s not hard to understand the sentiment that putting 2020 behind us is “good riddance.” It has been a hard year for all of us. We who enjoy being around people have struggled with the isolation. For some of us, 2020 has been positively brutal. The longer the pandemic goes, the more likely we are to know someone who has had the virus. Even worse, the longer it goes, the more likely we are to know someone who has died from the virus. For many reasons, we have experienced the losses of this year more deeply than perhaps ever before.

When we go through hard times like this, we can respond in a variety of ways. I’m concerned that some of us are hoping that changing the calendar will somehow make it possible for us to “go back” to the way things were before the pandemic. And while I look forward to the day when we can gather freely again, based on my experience I would say that “going back” is never really an option in life. In truth, who really wants to “go back” to major cities clogged with traffic and smothered in smog? Who really wants to “go back” to a way of life that can fairly accurately be described as a “rat race”?

Our Gospel lesson for today is about another major change in human experience: the “Word” who was with God in the beginning and who is God became “flesh.” And he did so in order to reveal the truth of God’s amazing grace and unfailing love to us all. That’s a hard concept to wrap our heads around. How can God really become human? I can’t explain it, and I don’t know that anyone ever has or ever will. But I believe it. Not because of philosophical reasons or a biological miracle. I believe it because at the heart of our Gospel lesson is the message that the God whose very nature is love entered our world in the person of Jesus in order to share that love with us all.[2]

If there’s one word in the New Testament that summarizes the gift that God has given to us in his son our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, it’s grace. And so it comes as no surprise to us when our Gospel lesson says that the first Christians saw in Jesus “the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:14). More than that we are told, “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (Jn. 1:16).  

Because we’ve heard words like this from the Bible so many times, it’s easy for us to overlook the fact that John’s Gospel goes “over the top” to describe the gift we have received in Jesus the Christ. I’m afraid that phrase “grace upon grace” gets lost in our hearing. In fact, our translations have a hard time putting it in words. Some of them, like the NIV and the NLT, render it with “one blessing after another.” I prefer Gene Peterson’s translation in The Message: “We all live off his generous bounty, gift after gift after gift.” In this first chapter of John’s Gospel, the meaning is clear: Jesus comes to us as the one who brings God’s grace. And he brings so much of it that all you can call it is “grace piled on top of grace.”[3]  

John’s Gospel uses other words like light and truth and life to describe the gifts Jesus brought to us. But there’s one very important aspect of this gift that is clear in John’s Gospel. The divine Word became human in the person of Jesus in order to make God known to us (John 1:18). The NT doesn’t offer a lot in the way of explanation about what “incarnation” is or how it took place. But it does have some definitive things to say about what it means for us. And one of the central affirmations of the NT is that the loving and grace-filled God whom Jesus reveals to us truly is God.[4]

If you’ve been joining us in reading through the Bible this year, you may have some question about that. The image of God in the book of Numbers is a very different one—if “common” Israelites got “too close” to God they would be struck dead. The image of God in Deuteronomy is equally troubling—anyone who sins must be executed in order to prevent an angry God from destroying the people. I struggle to make sense out of those ideas. About the best I can come up with is that they must have had something to do with how people understood God in a very different time and place.

But that is definitively not the God whom Jesus came to “explain” to us (John 1:18, NASB). Jesus shows us the God who showers us all with “gift after gift after gift,” with “grace piled on top of grace.” That may be hard for us to see in our actual lives this year. It may be even harder for us to grasp that everything we’ve been through has been accompanied by God’s grace. If we look at it from that perspective, I think the truth of our experience this year is not one of trying to “go back,” but rather one of moving forward into the new life that God is creating for us all. It may be hard to accept 2020 as a “gift” from God, but if we can look at it through the lens of “grace upon grace,” perhaps we can see it as an opportunity to grow and learn to live in better ways than ever before.

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[1] © 2021 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm, Ph. D. on 1/3/2021 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 114, where he describes the incarnation as an expression of the “eternally self-communicating love of God.” Cf. also ibid., pp. 120-22.

[3] Cf. Christine D. Pohl, “Homeward Bound,” The Christian Century (Dec. 27, 2005): 19. Cf. also Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.3.1:236, who speaks of it as “inexhaustible, victorious grace which can be followed only by more grace.”

[4] Cf. Gail R. O’Day “The Gospel of John” New Interpreters Bible IX:524, “John 1:14-18 is not theological speculation about the character of the incarnate Word, but the testimony of those whose lives have been changed by the incarnation.”