Grace flows.
God’s love flows in an overwhelming way, and often God’s love comes packaged as grace.
The Greek word charis means grace. In the 2nd letter to the Corinthians, the word gets translated as any of the following: “favor, privilege, generous undertaking, generous act, and blessing” and yet none of these words really gets close to what is at the essence of the Greek word, which is the life-giving power of God. The reading from the Wisdom of Solomon lands heavily on this very same life-giving power of God.
The Gospel is a beautiful sequence of stories which demonstrate that Jesus possesses this very same life-giving power of God. As I am prone to say, Jesus shows us who God is; in this case, Jesus shows this life-giving power of God. Jesus shows grace, Jesus shows favor, privilege, blessing. Specifically, he shows this grace to those who would have been considered undesirable. Jairus is a Gentile. A hemorrhaging woman would have been ritually unclean. Jesus reaches beyond what were the ginormous barriers of his day. Jesus returns life to the hemorrhaging woman, a life she lost due to her unclean status. Jesus literally gives life back to Jairus’ daughter, who died before Jesus arrived. Jesus shows us that God takes favor in those who are broken, those who don’t fit, Jesus shows up, grace flows, and blesses them.
In second Corinthians, Paul explains that for all who believe in Christ, or have the same faith that Christ had it is this faith that makes the difference. It is believing in Christ or believing as Christ does, that opens up a person to be a channel for the grace of God. It is not that believing in the Christ makes you good or saintly, but that believing in Christ allows for you too to show favor to the broken. It allows you to show grace. Grace is then that power that is saving and reconciling the world, a power that has its origins in God; grace channels through communities of believers. The goal of grace is wholeness and it seeks out where brokenness, suffering, and destruction reign.
There are two important factors about grace. One is that grace is not static, grace flows. In the NRSV, the Greek word perisseuein gets translated as “to excel”, but literally it means “to abound or to overflow”. One could picture this is a spiritual thing, something akin to the Pentecostal fire of the Holy Spirit. However, in a related way, this overflowing is also meant in a very material way.
What I mean by that is the following:
Grace is absolutely NOT a zero-sum game. Grace bubbles out. It is noteworthy that Paul makes the point that this occurs even from the poor and marginalized. In this letter Paul teaches the Corinthians about the churches in Macedonia (Philippi was in Macedonia), that although the people of Philippi didn’t have much, through love, by grace, stuff came together and they were able to be more than generous. They were able to manage and channel their assets, such as money, relationships, abilities, knowledge, all given through love, mutual service, witness, but all flowing, overflowing, abounding, more than enough.
Although Paul approaches this in a somewhat circumspect manner, for Paul everything hinges on grace. “For you know the grace (NRSV, “generous act”) of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” The center of Paul’s Christology is the crucifixion and resurrection, and I assume that Jesus’s execution on the cross is what he is referring to here in the contrast between poverty and riches (see also Philippians 2:5-8). The cross represents a total emptying out of the “riches” of Jesus’s position as God’s beloved.
This then has the potential of being huge, life-changing, God life-giving power changing. If powerful people relinquish their power, imagine what can happen. And imagine how this can be with those who have enough. (and let’s face it, there just is enough).
Now, this may not be popular at this day and age, but Paul’s view on grace and resources offer a rather radical view of charity. Paul insist that the flow of God’s grace can be observed in the movement of money from one community to another. For Paul, money is a powerful and relatively simple way for the reconciling power of God to reach effectively into human lives. The giving and receiving of funds can actually draw us to God, and put us in right relationship with each other as well. Paul even strikes out against the Corinthian’s objections. “I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. As it is written,
“The one who had much did not have too much,
and the one who had little did not have too little.”
Thus, he calls out and shakes up their (and our) culturally-derived sense of what is fair by accounting not only for money but for the invisible virtues that the Macedonians “abound” in that overflow for the benefit of the whole body of Christ, including the Corinthians.
Paul’s teaching on the economy of grace has a role to play in discerning faithful responses to large-scale current issues, which could include, but are not limited to reparations for slavery, fair systems of taxation, the establishment of a realistic minimum wage, and the impact of residential zoning on the education and future income of children in the U.S. Even if you were to say to me that all of that is political and should therefore not be discussed in church, (but if you know me you know that I will answer that life is political; as a Christian I am attempting not to be partisan in the pulpit, but there is no way to avoid being political unless you don’t think Christ belongs in life.) Even if we take this all to local politics or even the politics of this church, then even in these smaller contexts grace abounds, there is no zero-sum game, we give and we receive out of grace. For out of poverty of life, Jesus gave us life. Whether we are rich or poor, we give grace, we give for no other reason so that we and others can have life and have it abundantly.