(The correct reading of the prayer is probably: “Deliver us from the Evil One.”) The salvation the Bible speaks of is not some kind of religious emotion. It is health, total health of body, mind, and spirit, for the individual and for the whole human family. The New Testament declares again and again that it is for this that we are being saved as members of Christ’s Church. Being saved is being rescued, not only from the hell we make for ourselves, as for the colony of heaven God is establishing on earth.
It was because Luther found the answer to this question of salvation, first for himself and then for the Church and the world of his day, that he was able to sing: “Though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, We will not fear for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.” He found the answer in the Bible, where it lies still today. Nowhere is it more clearly expressed than in the seven monosyllables of our text: “By grace are you saved through faith.” They summarize the whole content of the Bible. They express the dynamic of the Gospel which keeps springing to life again whenever the Church gets drowsy and over-organized. They offer to you and me today the only real antidote to anxiety and confusion. In them we hear the truth of the Gospel through which we can face the world, the flesh, and the devil unafraid. “We will not fear for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.”
“By grace. . . . ” The view from forty thousand feet was not all an illusion. There is a glory in the natural world and in the works of man that reflects the joy of the Creator who still sees the universe he has made “and behold, it is very good,” and also the dignity and aspiration of human beings created in his image. Neither Luther nor Calvin was blind to the beauty of the natural world, and each of them knew how to enjoy human company over, respectively, a stein of beer and a glass of wine. They were not the grim, sour-faced ecclesiastics of popular imagination. If they knew what it was to see a world filled with devils, they also knew how to see it filled with angels. The point is that, like the Bible, they took both the angel and devil seriously. That is: they saw the terrible force of sin in human nature but believed in the grace that can lift us up to our angelic destiny. In a demonic world they chose to live by grace.
Does that mean simply that the Gospel invites us to look on the bright side and throw our weight on the side of goodness in the human struggle? Can this Christian answer to our fears be adequately described in the words of Studdert Kennedy as “backing the scent of life against its stink”? There’s truth enough in that to hold on to, but the word “grace” in Scripture and the life of the Church carries a profounder meaning. Sure, it’s grace when we see this city sparkling in beauty on a fresh Fall morning; it’s grace when a little boy disarms your anger with an absurd remark; it’s grace when a stricken family gives thanks and takes courage in a memorial service here; it’s grace when we hear the happy stories that never appear in the morning paper. But the Bible tells us that these signs of grace flow from the great rescuing love of God, a love that shines through even the bloodiest pages of the Bible story, a love that comes to a climax with the coming of Jesus Christ. “We beheld his glory,” says the apostle, “full of grace and truth.”
When we use the words “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” we are not only thinking of the perfection of his life, the blazing signal that God has not given up on the Adam of his design. We are not only thinking of the way in which the love of God reached out through him to the lonely, the crippled in mind and body, the outcast, and the broken-hearted. We are thinking of his battle against the forces of the devil, his encounter with the evil in our world. This battle, this encounter, reveals what is most amazing about this grace. For it took the form of letting the powers of hell do their worst. The one who was the embodiment of grace let himself be crushed by the very forces of which we are so afraid today. He took the entire weight of human sorrow, anguish, and sin upon himself, and was crucified, dead, and buried. This is what Luther called “the right man on our side,” the One who goes this length for our rescue. And ever since he came back triumphant from this mission against the enemy the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ has dawned upon the world as our hope and our salvation. “By grace are you saved . . . ”, by this gift of God, by this liberating love, by this victory over all the powers of darkness.
In his day Luther found a Church in which this grace was being obscured, even as it is often today in churches that celebrate his Reformation. It was, and is, obscured in two ways. First, there is the notion that grace is some kind of religious medicine dispensed by the Church. The impression is given that there is a kind of reservoir in the institution that is drawn on by its members, and that through the pipelines of its ordinances and activities we can get enough “religion” to keep us going. Luther, in his search for “a merciful God” made the great discovery that grace is supremely personal, the gift of a God who cares for each one of us. The grace that saves us is as personal—and as powerful—as the love of a mother for her child, as the communion of two close friends. The love that moves among a group of caring people is not something to be measured or rationed out; it is a free, spontaneous, accepting, forgiving, and delivering power that comes from the heart. So, I would say, grace comes not from the plans and programs of a religious organization, but from the heart of God. The services, the sacraments, the activities of a church are properly described as “the means of grace.” They are not grace itself.
The second way in which grace is obscured is the persistent notion that somehow it has to be earned or deserved. The music exploded in the heart of Luther when he finally knew that nothing whatever was required of him to merit the grace of God: no penances, no mortifications—yes, and no smug sense that he had made the grade as a moral and respectable citizen. If there ever was a character who seemed able to rely on his own interior strength it was Luther who, when warned of the danger that awaited him at Worms, remarked: “If I had heard that as many devils would set on me in Worms as there are tiles on the roofs, I should none the less have ridden there.” Yet this was the man who sang: “Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing, Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing.” It was this “right Man” whose grace alone forgave his sins, set him right with God, and nerved him for every struggle.
It is still a surprise for many people, even within the Church, when they really hear that the grace of God means that his love accepts them just as they are, that there is no scale of religious virtue to be climbed before they can know the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. So long as we retain one trace of self-justification, one little desire to earn our own salvation, we are at the mercy of these fears and victims of our pride. Grace is the great leveller—never more needed than in times when we tend to range ourselves with the good guys and blame all our troubles on the bad. “All have sinned,” said Paul, “and come short of the glory of God.” But all can be “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” “By grace are you saved . . . ”
How then if there is nothing we can do, can we be really linked to this amazing grace? That’s the big question today as at the time of the Reformation. There can be no quarrel among Christians any more about the answer. “By grace you are saved through faith.” Catholic and Protestant may still have different ways of expressing what this means, but increasingly we converge on the ultimate truth. Faith is our total trust in this grace that meets us in the person of Jesus Christ. Every one of us knows that it takes two to be friends. I can offer you my friendship, my understanding, my sympathy, my love, but if this evokes no flicker of a response then nothing happens. Grace is the hand of God stretched out—and it waits to be grasped by our hand in faith. This faith can be expressed in a silent prayer of commitment and trust, in a common affirmation in creed or hymn, in an inward yielding to the Spirit of God. But it is also expressed by the direction of our lives, our concern for other people, our reflection of the love of Christ, our readiness to follow where he leads.
Here we come to the question that always arises when the Gospel of salvation by grace through faith is preached. Do you mean, it has been asked since the days of the apostles, that since there is nothing I can do to earn my salvation, I can just trust in this grace—and carry on in my own sweet way, caring nothing about the commandments of the Lord? Dietrich Bonhoeffer
