From his fullness we have all received, grace instead of grace (John 1:16)
It would have to be up there with one of the most recognizable of film
quotations, somewhere between ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn’ and ‘I’ll
be back’.
It’s the words of Clint Eastwood’s dark knight of the San Francisco PD,
Dirty Harry:
A man’s
got to know his limitations.
It’s of course much easier to get a hearing when you are holding a .44
Magnum, but this is one of the more profound, and theologically true, things
that ever been said in cinema.
We have our limits. We are finite creatures, located in one time and space,
not transcending either. Though we have one what theologian has called
‘immortal longings’, those longings point to a paradox, or a tragedy, in our
experience: though eternity has been set by God in the hearts of men, our
existence is played out in days, months, years, which John Donne called ‘the
rags of time’.
I make my wife several cups of coffee every day. I could not count how
many. I do not know how many cups of coffee I will finally make her. And yet,
as I was making one just the other day, I had the rather melancholy thought:
whatever number it is, it is an actual number. It is not limitless. I only have
limited time in which to make coffee. There will be, one day, the last cup, as
either myself or my dear spouse lose our grip on life.
Isaiah put it this way: all flesh is
like grass, which withers, and fades.
And that limitation is not simply a limitation of length of life. It is an
experience we know in life, too. We
are not equipped to give endlessly. We can have the feeling of emptiness – that
feeling that you’ve given everything we can to a person or a cause, and are now
exhausted. We’ve got limits to our patience; we’ve got a certain measure of
kindness, but not more. We can help, but not endlessly.
Now in turning to the incarnation of the Son of God, we may fear that the
contracting of the Godhead into a certain pinpoint of time and space, the
flesh, bones, and DNA of Jesus of Nazareth, may have constricted and obstructed
and thwarted his divinity, just when we needed it. From the Old Testament,
human beings had a word of God’s limitless grace. They remembered it in many
ways but most often through the telling of the story of the Exodus, in which
the encountered the God who provides – the giver of manna in the desert, and
water from the rock, and the plenitude of his own Word of grace and truth.
And it was God’s transcendent qualities that enabled him to give from
endless stores of grace. He is the creator God, from whom everything came from
nothing at all. He is therefore thankfully not bound. He is not limited or
restricted. He is invisible – and his invisibility is not simple an image
problem, it is entirely right for a limitless God to be invisible, since a
particular form would restrict him.
But the foundational claim of the New Testament is that the Word became flesh.
And here’s the question: would the frame of Jesus’s flesh constrict him?
Could the limitless abundance of God flow through the body of the Christ? Could
God become man, and still yet be God? Would the price of the incarnation be the
loss of just those qualities of God that we most sorely need?
John’s claim is: no. As we read in vs 14, the Word became flesh, and pitched his tent among us, and we have seen
his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. That
is: the radiant and transcendent glory, harder to look at than the Sun itself,
shone through and in the flesh of the man from Nazareth. Transcendence itself
walked amongst us: and it was full to the brim not only of the divine
properties of wisdom and power, but of the distinctive characteristics of the God
of Israel: grace and truth.
This is what is meant by the ‘fullness’ in vs 16. Jesus of Nazareth was a
human being, and had the defined borders of human-ness: a birth, a death, a
frame of bones and sinew and a covering of skin. And yet: in him was the very
entirety of God. The grace and truth of the true and gracious God was in him;
and, says John, ‘we have all received from it, grace after grace.’ Which is to
say: there was the gracious word of life and truth that came through Moses,
sweeter than the honeycomb; and there is now the grace that pours out of Christ
Jesus, the Word made flesh. The grace of the promise has now given way to the
grace of fulfilment, since the very presence and person of God himself is in
Christ.
This was the longed-for shekinah, the
presence of God. It is here.
The significance of this in our current spiritual landscape is not I think
to be missed.
What we have in John’s account is not a pathway out human limits to the
divine. It is not the attempt at superhumanity we see on the yoga mats of the
Eastern Suburbs, with its vague attempt, assisted by coconut water, to ascend
through the discipline of the body to the higher spiritual plane. This is not a
religion of gnostic ascent through layer after layer of mystery, until you are
initiated into the deeper knowledge, and finally attain the truth as one of the
spiritual elite.
This is the opposite of that entirely. This is not the description of a
spiritual technique for connecting with the transcendent, but the story of the
descent of the Son of God to dwell among men and women on the surface of the
earth. We do not attain; we merely receive. But what we receive from him is
none other than the limitless generosity and blessing and life that answers our
immortal longings, and tells us that, limited creatures though we are,
measuring out our days in coffee spoons, we were made for eternal communion
with the limitless, fathomless, invisible, and gracious God.
