N.T. Wright on grace, truth, and the incarnations meaning for us.

Full of Grace and Truth
Hebrews 1.1–4; John 1.1–18, Psalms 85
Edited sections from a sermon at the Eucharist on Christmas Morning 2006
by the Bishop of Durham, Dr N. T. Wright

Psalm 85 is a prayer for restoration, for forgiveness, for the mercy and grace of God to break through the long dark night of Israel’s exile and bring about that new life for which God’s people ached.. the Psalmist has a moment of vision, and this is what he sees. First, he sees that God will speak a fresh word, a word of peace to his people, to those who have faith. Second, he sees that God’s glory will come once more to dwell in the land – in other words, that the Temple will be restored, and the tabernacling presence of the living God will come to live there in full majesty. And, thirdly, he sees that when this happens it will be like a cosmic wedding, with heaven and earth coming together in a rich and fruitful embrace: grace and truth will meet at last, justice and peace will kiss each other; truth will spring up from the earth, and justice look down from heaven

Psalm 85 is, in other words, a Christmas poem: Advent is over, God’s fresh Word is spoken, breathed out, received by those who have faith deep in their hearts, and God’s glory … And in this glory we find the coming together of heaven and earth, of grace and truth.

So what does it mean that grace and truth come together in this way? Both are gifts of God, yet in this Psalm grace is the fresh love of God coming from beyond our world, and truth is the plant which springs up, strong and tall and resilient, from within our world. As I said, the phrase suddenly becomes three-dimensional. Something is happening before our very eyes, as we gaze upon the baby in the manger, the Word made Flesh, and reflect on what it all means. God’s gift of his own very self isn’t, as people so often imagine, a kind of alien invasion, an intrusion from outside. It is of course a matter of grace, of (that is) totally undeserved mercy, the free gift of an uncaused and overflowing love – and if you want to see what free and overflowing love looks like and feels like, and which of us doesn’t, then read the rest of John’s gospel and marvel at Jesus loving his own who were in the world and loving them to the uttermost. But this free grace, coming to us from beyond the world, is precisely coming from the one who created the world in the first place and made it to be a place of truth, of solid reality – the reality about which T. S. Eliot commented sadly that humans can’t bear too much of it – so that when grace happens, truth happens. And in the baby in the manger we see them both happening; we see them both married for ever. In the Word made Flesh we gaze upon the glory not just of the living God, coming to us in utter love in the person of this tiny baby, but of God’s design for his whole world. As St Paul put it, God’s plan from the beginning was to unite, in Christ, all things, things in heaven and things on earth. And part of the point of Christmas is that this marriage of heaven and earth, of grace and truth, has now begun and isn’t going to stop until it’s complete. Welcome to the wedding.

…the world has tried to have truth without grace, the church has often been tempted towards grace without truth – as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, ‘cheap grace’. God has become a benevolent old softie, ready to tolerate everything, to include everyone, to throw away all those unpleasant old moral standards and say it’s all right, do your own thing, if it feels good it must be OK. And once again the results are all around – both in the anti-moralism of the arch-liberals and the anti-authoritarianism of today’s new conservatives, who don’t realise that they are simply producing an ecclesiological parody of the do-it-yourself morality they so detest. But no: grace and truth must meet together; if it really is grace, it really must produce truth, a rich, deep personal, moral and ecclesial integrity which is deeply true to the created order and to its recreation in Christ, to the deep structures of God’s wise and loving ordering of his world and of us human beings. Cheap grace – assuming, in whichever direction, that God is on your side because your agenda seems to urgent, so obviously right, and not troubling to ask the hard questions – is to genuine grace as ‘facts’ are to ‘truth’: a late modern parody to be named and shamed and rejected in the name of the Christmas message, of the grace and truth which we find in the baby in the manger.

...... One of the great truths of spirituality is that you become like what you worship. We beheld his glory, says John: we gazed at it, long and lovingly, with adoration and worship, so that the marriage of grace and truth which we see and know in the Christ-child can be born in us as well, so that we can be people, we can become communities, in whom God’s grace generates and sustains a human integrity, a wholeness and holiness of character. And the definition of mission … can be restated in exactly the same terms: we are to become people in and through whom God’s grace overflows to the world around, producing a new integrity, a new truth and truthfulness, at every level from politics to university study to sexual morality to ecology …. and reaching out into human hearts and lives and imaginations with the news that there is such a thing as truth, because there is such a thing as grace, because there is such a person as Jesus, and because in him we see and know God’s living word made living flesh and are summoned to become living words in living flesh ourselves. Grace and truth have met together; justice and peace have kissed each other; truth springs up from the earth, and justice looks down from heaven. From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace; for the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Come to him today, taste his grace and truth in bread and wine, and become yourselves wedding guests, feasting at the marriage of heaven and earth.