2023-05-26 A Meditation on Thoroughgoing Grace

“For circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the law, but if you break the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision. 26 So, if a man who is uncircumcised keeps the precepts of the law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? 27 Then he who is physically uncircumcised but keeps the law will condemn you who have the written code and circumcision but break the law. 28 For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. 29 But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God” (Ro 2:25–29 ESV)

There is always some word to be added, and when there isn’t, there is a word to be remembered. There is always a joint call unto tangible, vivid, Grace, Grace that is more than general philosophy or principle: it instead is born in the trenches. Instead, it is tacked onto Real Things. Instead, it is touching us when and where a long need met with silence. We rise when experiencing such Method, such Announcement, such Grace.

It is the cleansed inner organs, and the built-up bodily involvement, the body involved as much as the brain and heart that it encompasses. The body fine as a parable of Christ’s own Body the Church. So to understand Grace is to understand immediate bargaining with Man’s conscience, cohesion, inner voice, self-assessing mentality. We assess, and in the heights do find the same old lows. We latch onto frights past, forgetting plain goodness or righteous boasts of what God has done, and instead dwell near to embarrassment or humility. We even forgive our outlandish sins, only still struggle to forgive the shameful, the humiliating, the awkward years. Sometimes this is the only fraction of the bargain that we can remember.

Grace is terrorized on all sides, all parties watchful that the preacher not fall into Law. The preacher might wake up one day with a bit of frustration at what “those-all” people are up to. He or she might wake up deciding to cash in earned trust for a spell of dictated deeds. And if understood aright, there is nothing wrong with having a moral code, with having distinctions made between “our people” and the uncircumcised masses. Yet all that is possible if love is involved, nay, if trust is invoked: rather than moralize, we trust that in truth, all that we see happening is a bit of Law provoking sin and mocking the penitent heart. Ask the preacher what good deeds we should be getting up to, and the answer is the good deed Jesus got up to: recognize sin as impossible to solve, decreed to be solved by the unspoken Word of a death and a Resurrection. Help, as such soothing calms minister to the heart frantic and crimped.