In the name of the Word made flesh: Jesus Christ. Amen.
The most theologically rich verse in all of Scripture may very well be John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” In the Episcopal Church, the Gospel text for both Christmas Day and the First Sunday after Christmas is John 1; which means that in my 16 years of ordained ministry I’ve preached on this passage nearly 30 times. Each year, I wonder “How will this text speak this year?” And, without fail, the Word continues to speak – and it’s often verse 14 that does the heavy lifting. This year, what the Spirit drew my attention to is the final part of that verse where John writes that this Word is “full of grace and truth.”
“Grace and truth.” Between those two is a dividing line in our faith. Grace can be defined as the “incongruous gift of love.” Grace is when something of value – time, forgiveness, a gift – is given without regard to the worthiness of the recipient and with no expectation of reciprocity. Grace is an amazing and wonderful thing that stands at the very center of the Christian faith and this congregation’s identity.
And though sola gratia, grace alone, was the rallying cry of the Reformation, grace alone is actually a problematic position to hold. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who was imprisoned and executed by the Nazis, wrote about “cheap grace” saying, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without repentance, baptism without discipline, Communion without confession… Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”
Indeed, this sort of cheap grace can lead to indifference, inaction, moral laxity, relativism, and injustice. “Grace alone” can leave no room for justice, where wrongs are simply dismissed without addressing and repairing. Sometimes, people who don’t like having hard conversations or dealing with conflict hide behind the idea of “grace” and allow people to walk all over them or take advantage of others.
There is a wing of the Church that is committed to grace, and it can often slip into this sort of cheap grace that welcomes vague beliefs, moral murkiness, and limp discipleship. Look, I’m all for preaching about the love of God – but sometimes that becomes such a sentimental and vague concept that faith becomes essentially “do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.” These sorts of churches are usually indistinguishable from the cultural values of its members and there is no growth, no challenge, no discipleship. To be very clear, I’m all about grace – it’s at the core of everything I believe. But grace, for its own sake, is not what we see in the Word made flesh.
On the other end of the spectrum is truth. In the Passion, Pilate infamously asked, “What is truth?” and there’s the saying that “truth is a slippery thing.” Defining what is true can be a challenge, but we can say that the truth is something reliable and trustworthy. The truth is something with weightiness – something that has force, certainty, and solidness. Jesus says that he is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” and he tells us that “the Truth shall make us free.” Christianity, as a religion and philosophy, is built upon certain truth claims, and this an important part of our faith.
However, just like grace, an overemphasis on truth becomes more harmful than helpful. A vigilante or zealot-like focus on the truth can lead to judgmentalism, closed-mindedness, and condemnation. Pursuit of the truth, for the sake of being perceived as correct, can lead to mere ideological accuracy while missing out the beauty of the truth. It’s seeing the trees, but not the forest. A rigid view of truth turns truth into a weapon to be used against others and often blinds the one who claims to wield it. And, as we all know from arguments and debates, hurling supposed facts, figures, and truths at one another rarely leads to healing, conversion, or transformation. It’s why you’ve never heard someone say, “You know, after typing angrily with that stranger on the internet, I’ve changed my mind about things.”
If the trouble with grace is that it can lead to cheap grace, then the problem with truth is that it leads to fundamentalism. There’s nothing wrong with fundamentals, but it’s the “ism” that creates the problem. Fundamentalism focuses on getting the supposedly correct answer without considering what the correct question to be asking is. Fundamentalism leads to “my way or the highway” thinking which can exclude, ostracize, and vilify. The issue with truth is that we all approach it subjectively. One theologian has said that our perceptions of the world are like a carnival mirror – all of the facts might be there, but there is a distortion in how we interpret them and how we remember what we see.
Just this past week I read a great book by an attorney about how to communicate better. It’s called The Next Conversation by Jefferson Fisher. It seems like odd advice coming from a trial lawyer, but he writes, “Never win an argument. The fastest way to lose your peace of mind is to give someone a piece of yours. Winning an argument is a losing game. Winning means that you’ve likely lost something far more valuable – trust, respect, or worse, connection. The only reward you’ve won is their contempt.” Yes, the truth matters, but it should open doors, not seal them shut.
This line between grace and truth runs right down the middle of our faith. There’s a new movie called Wake Up Dead Man and is the third film in the “Knives Out” series of murder mysteries featuring the detective Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig. Tyler and I enjoyed the first two movies in the series and we watched this new one last weekend thinking it would be an entertaining movie. And it was. What I wasn’t expecting was the theological depth of a film walking the line between grace and truth. I’m not getting any endorsement money from Netflix or anything like that – but even if you don’t have a subscription, it’s worth subscribing for a month just for this one movie.
I won’t give any spoilers since it’s only been out for about a month. Yes, the movie is a detective story and so it has all of the “whodunit” elements. But what really drives the plot is the tension between two priests: Monsignor Jefferson Wicks and Father Jud Duplenticy. In an interview, the director, Rian Johnson, talked about how his own religious upbringing, which he has since left, informed and motivated the plot. The Monsignor is a champion for truth and sees the world as a battlefield. Father Jud is motivated by grace and sees the world as a hospital. By the end of the movie, again, no spoilers, there is a moment when these two, grace and truth, collide in a miraculous moment of faith. Neither is diminished, both grace and truth remain present in what we might call a field hospital. Again, I can’t recommend the movie highly enough – though it is rated PG-13 for a reason, so make sure you do a bit of research before planning a family movie night.
The idea of grace and truth colliding is what St. John writes about as well – “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us… full of grace and truth.” Miroslav Volf is a renowned theologian who grew up in Croatia and was deeply impacted by the conflicts, ethnic violence, and political oppression of the wars between Croatia and Bosnia. A result of this experience is the book Exclusion and Embrace. Both Volf and St. John write about how, in Christ, grace and truth collide and are integrated into one another.
The image to have in mind is not that of a scale where we have to balance grace and truth. That’s a zero-sum game – if grace goes up, then truth goes down, or vice versa. This is not what Jesus is about. It’s not grace plus truth; it’s more about exponential growth: grace to the power of truth. In Jesus, the fullness of grace and the fullness of truth are both fully present in an embrace. This is nature of God. When the LORD passes before Moses in Exodus 34, we read that God is “abounding in grace and truth.” This is what is made flesh in Jesus – the fulfillment of incongruous grace with the foundational and dependable truth.
In Volf’s book, he notes that our first reaction is towards exclusion, not embrace. When presented with a dichotomy like grace and truth, we want to pick sides. And this is why the line is often a fault line. It’s why we’re so divided in Christianity between liberals and conservatives – because instead of allowing grace and truth collide into something like a supernova that births new energy, we pick our preferred focus and do battle with those on the other side. It’s why, for some, Jesus is a champion for the poor, the outcast, and the needy and for others he’s about victory, might, and radical discipleship. Of course, Jesus is both of these things.
It’s one of the hardest things to learn, but also one of the most valuable: two things can be true at the same time. We can be afraid and courageous. We can be offended and merciful. We can disagree and be united. In the Incarnation, this is what Jesus demonstrates – that two things can hold together. The Word can become flesh, the light and the darkness can coexist, the divine and the human are joined, and grace and truth embrace.
Volf writes that grace creates the conditions for truth to liberate us from the lies that surround us instead of the truth being used a weapon to accuse and divide us. And truth gives a form and shape to grace, anchoring it in something real and abiding so that it does not become cheap grace. He uses the idea of “double vision” for how this integration happens – it’s when we see two things without it becoming a struggle or an avoidant compromise. Both the fullness of grace and the fullness of truth exist. And in this double vision, the perspective of the Other is seen and integrated. In this double vision, we step outside ourselves to embrace the other.
This is exactly what God does in Jesus – steps outside divinity to embrace our humanity, which allows us to, in our humanity, embrace the divinity that we are created for. The result of this embrace is something that did not and could not exist previously. It’s not truthful grace or graceful truth; it is something bigger than either on their own. Volf describes it as a new community, which we might call the Body of Christ or the Church, built on reconciliation, not a temporary truce, not unjust acquiescence, not an unsatisfying compromise, not pretending the tension does not exist, but reconciliation – when two things that had been excluded embrace; when things that we thought could not go together are joined.
For us, the gift of Christmas is precisely this collision and embrace. In the places in our lives where we settle for cheap grace, truth comes to draw us towards discipleship, towards the beautiful and terrifying love of Jesus on the cross. When we are overly reliant on our version of the truth, grace softens and opens our edges to receive the Other. Truth identifies the wound that grace has to pay for, and grace heals us of all the mistruths we have lived by. It’s worth a bit of self-examination for us as individuals, as a society, and as a Church to reflect on which side of the line we tend to overemphasize and then pray for the strength and wisdom to embrace the other.
What becomes possible in Jesus, in the embrace of grace and truth, is reconciliation. This is what St. Paul has in mind in his second letter to the Corinthians: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view… So if anyone is in Christ, we are a new creation: everything old has passed away; behold, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”
As grace and truth embrace in Jesus, we are brought into this reconciling embrace of no longer needing to pick a side, no longer being satisfied with cheap grace, no longer living with weaponized truths. We become ambassadors of reconciliation; people who can embrace two things at the same time. We do tend to see things as though looking at a distorting and contorting carnival mirror, and in Jesus Christ, the Word becomes flesh to correct our vision and reflect back to us the fullness of our humanity, one full of grace and truth.
