Canter Bridge

Grace is at once the most threatening and satisfying of human experiences.

In biblical terms, divine grace makes it impossible for us to earn our way into God’s favor. It is so lavish, so inscrutable, so powerfully invasive of lives that it pulls out from under us the tightly-woven carpet of credits and demerits upon which we have learned to gain traction, to stand tall. It deconstructs and reconstructs identity as potently as any other force. So, it threatens the construct in which we have learned to survive and, occasionally, to thrive.

At the same time, grace is refreshing. It is a cool breeze, pure water, untrammeled vista. It is life itself, for it seems to penetrate every cell, invigorating, purifying, reshaping, and enlivening. Grace is powerful in a life-ward direction, as though every organism were made to thrive in its environment.

It is difficult for any religious system to comprehend grace, much less to welcome its dismantling force. Religion thrives upon predicability, rank, and manipulation. It rewards those who read the instructions. It is a ladder of achievement, a web of meritocracy that is available even to those whose intellect does not advance them and whose charms—innate or cultivated—are not outstanding. Not for nothing did the aspiring young man for many years choose his options from a conventional menu: government service, business, the military. Or the church.

The apostle Paul turns his attention to the particular grace-less web that was the Judaism of his time. It was not the only religion that was preshaped to resist the persistent intrusions of grace. It was merely Paul’s own and the matrix from which messianic faith—in this case the expanding shared life of those who followed Jesus as messiah—was to emerge. It was at once the root and source of this new faith and its most potent adversary, a paradox whose torment Paul bore to his grave.

Paul becomes to his own Jewish faith its rhetorical adversary, ferreting out its systemic hypocrisies and shining a cruel light on its contradictions. One gathers that he did not enjoy the task, but saw it as a kind of surgical preparation, the cleaning and cleansing that would prepare the body for restored vigor.

It is all too easy to read the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans as a blanket dismissal of Judaism, as though Paul had declared the faith of the fathers to be imposter religion. This would be a sad reading of the apostle, one that has too often nourished atrocity.

Paul is no less Jewish for having uttered these words. Arguably, he is more so. Like all reformers, he can be read as rejectionist. This he was not.

On his way to a redefinition of the Abrahamic heritage, Paul allows himself these words:

For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart—it is spiritual and not literal. Such a person receives praise not from others but from God.

All, for one moment, is relativized. All, that is, except the I-Thou dialogue of the pure of heart with the God who is grace.