Grace, Law and Faith

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 11th June 2023, the 1st after Trinity

‘Munster by the grace of God!’

This slogan is claimed by Munster rugby fans, particularly when they are winning - as they did against the Stormers in South Africa a week or so ago, to win the United Rugby Championship. It makes me laugh, but it also gets me thinking about the grace of God.

In today’s epistle reading (Romans 4:13-25), St Paul argues that God’s promise to human beings, that we will be justified through Jesus’s death and resurrection, depends only on God’s grace and the faith in God it evokes in us, and not on our vain human attempts to follow God’s law - in other words our trying to be good. And to make his point Paul uses the old familiar Israelite story of how God blessed Abraham and his wife Sarah, promising them ‘I will make of you a great nation’.

It is rather difficult stuff; at least I find it so. And Christians have often bitterly disputed the relationship between God’s grace, God’s law and our faith in God. It was a central theme of the Reformation, and it still causes disputes to this day. So I think it might be useful to try and tease out Paul’s argument about grace, law and faith.

First let us refresh our memories about the story of Abraham and Sarah

It is really the foundation myth of the people of Israel. Most cultures have foundation myths of some kind. We do too: the ancient Irish claimed descent from Milesius King of Spain as the mythical founder of Celtic Ireland through his sons who invaded and dispossessed the Tuatha Dé Danann. Through an O’Brien ancestor I can claim descent from Milesius through Brian Boru through some very dodgy genealogy. Most of you probably can too!

In the small part of the story we heard today (Genesis 12:1-9), God tells Abraham ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a
great nation, and I will bless you.’ Abraham obeys, and when he gets to the land of Canaan, God tells him ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’

You may have noticed that in the passage Abraham was called Abram and his wife Sarah, Sarai – God renamed them later on, when he made a covenant with Abraham, renewing his promise and establishing male circumcision of Abraham and his descendents as a sign of it.

God tells Abraham that his promise will be kept through Sarah. Through all this long saga, Abraham never gives up his faith that God will fulfil his promises. At long last Sarah conceives and gives birth when he is 99 and she is 90. Sarah expresses her delight in beautiful words, saying ‘God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me. Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.’ Her son Isaac is the father of Jacob, also called Israel, and the ancestor of the Jewish people.

Now I can’t for one minute believe that Sarah was really 90 when she gave birth to Isaac. But then I don’t think we should treat the story as if it were history. We have to accept it for what it is, a myth. The nugget of truth within the myth is surely that the Israelites looked back to founders who cultivated a strong relationship with a God who promised them so much, and who believed whole heartedly that God’s promises would be kept.

Now let us examine Paul’s argument.

Firstly, Paul argues that the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham in the old story, through his descendants the children of Israel, can have had absolutely nothing to do with obeying God’s law – the Jewish law. After all, the law was given to the Israelites by Moses, long after Abraham’s death. For Abraham there was no law, so there could be no violation of the law, and no wrath, no punishment for breaking it.

Religious Jews were asking then, as religious people still do, ‘How can we get in God’s good books in order to inherit God’s promise?’ Their answer was that they could only do this by obeying God’s law, in other words by being good people and always doing the right thing. It is all up to us, they thought, God will only fulfil his promise if we deserve it. Paul saw with great clarity that this could not be true. No one could fully keep the law, so if God’s promise depends on keeping the law, the promise can never be fulfilled.

So on what, then, did the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham depend? Paul’s answer is that it depended on Abraham’s faith, on his unshakeable belief and trust that God would fulfil his promise. Abraham continued to believe in God’s promise, even when he grew old, and even when Sarah was clearly unable to have children. His faith was ‘reckoned to him as righteousness’; that is, it was his faith that gave him God’s favour.

There are two ancient Greek words for a promise. The first is a promise on condition: if you do this, I will do that. Paul uses the other, Eppagelia, which is an unconditional promise out of the goodness of one’s heart. This is the word a father or mother might use when promising to love their children no matter what they do. Fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham was not earned by his good works, it was given freely by God’s grace, it was unmerited, says Paul. All Abraham had to do was believe it.

And finally Paul argues that this applies to us as Christians, in just the same way as it did for Abraham. If we only have faith in the God who raises Jesus from the dead, he will reckon us to be righteous. We will be justified by God’s grace through Jesus’s death and resurrection. And we too will experience God fulfilling his promise, just as Abraham did.

That is what the grace of God is: it is the favour that God has showered on all of us humankind without our doing anything to earn it – the wonder of creation, our loving relationships, our capacity for happiness, our very lives – and our salvation, in the sense that God has shown us how to recover from our innate propensity to sin, to receive forgiveness.

The Greek word translated as grace is charis (χαρις), which literally means "that which affords joy, pleasure, delight, sweetness, charm, loveliness".

There’s the theology. But I suggest another way to look at it is through the prism of psychology.

When I was a child, I was just as naughty as every other little boy or girl. I was wilful, I often did not do as I was told. And I could be quite nasty, particularly to my baby brother when he annoyed me. But rather than expecting more of me than I was capable of, and punishing me when I did not live up to their hopes, my parents always cherished me. They let me know they were sad when I was bad, but they also let me know that I could rely on their loving me whatever I did. Their unconditional love showed me how to love back, and as I grew up, I learned from their example how to distinguish right from wrong.

I think this is the way that God works with us. God does not expect more of us than we are capable of. He does not punish us unmercifully when we break his law, when we do not behave as we should. Rather he promises us unconditional love, which we experience as God’s grace. And when we respond in faith, and learn from his example, we become more like the people he wants us to be. God’s kingdom comes that little bit closer.

So let us pray that we may respond in faith to God’s grace, receive the fullness of his promise, and be led by it to understand and obey his loving law.

And if you’re a Munster supporter, and their victory affords you joy, pleasure and delight, you can reckon it as yet another manifestation of God’s overwhelming grace!