The Significance of the Word 'Grace' in the New Testament
Some scriptural background on an important word.
The concept of grace has deep roots in the Old Testament, in which God enters into friendship with a people and offers his saving help. Still, the word grace—the Greek charis—expresses a radically new action by which God has entered into the life of man through Jesus Christ and through the gift of the Holy Spirit. In Christ, God has definitively shown his mercy, steadfast love, graciousness, and faithfulness. While all the writers of the New Testament have an acute awareness of this reality, many of them do not specifically use the word charis. The word does not appear in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark; in John’s Gospel it appears only in the Prologue. The accounts of Matthew and Mark, nonetheless, show the foundation for the Christian term grace in their revelation that the kingdom of God has drawn close to men through the Person of Jesus Christ.
This kingdom is not an earthly institution. Rather, it comes about by a radical new invitation to turn to God in faith and to be freed from sin (Mk 1:15). In Christ, God has revealed his fatherly love for us in a new way and invites us to share in his own divine life in an unprecedented manner. Christ reveals that God is a father, ever attentive to the needs of mankind, and moreover Christ grants us the possibility of participating in his own unique filiation with the eternal Father (Mt 6:32; 11:27). In the face of the Pharisees’ conception of holiness, which heavily emphasized man’s efforts to carry out the law, Christ manifests God’s wholly gratuitous love for sinners.
Paul uses the word grace (charis) as a central concept for expressing the new revelation of God which has taken place through the Incarnation and saving passion of the Son of God. With this term, the Apostle of the Gentiles seeks to express the reality of God’s gracious love in a way which would be understandable to a non-Jewish audience. In the Greek world of Christ’s time, the word charis had come to indicate a ruler’s gracious favor, as well as a specific gift that was the result of this benevolent attitude. The word had even come to be associated with a kind of religious power that came from the world above.
All of these resonances made charis a fitting term to articulate the immense favor of God toward man which has taken place in the Person of Christ, and also for expressing the way man himself is transformed and elevated by this action of God. Paul uses the word in various senses. In the first place, it can refer broadly to the entire mystery of salvation accomplished in Christ. Christ is “the grace” that God the Father has bestowed on man. The apostle describes the entire mystery of Christ when he states that “the grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all men” (Ti 2:11). With the term grace, the apostle emphasizes the immense goodness that God has shown to us without any preceding merit on our part.
Paul expresses this gratuitousness of God in a striking way in his Letter to the Ephesians: “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace [chariti] you have been saved)” (2:4–5). The apostle wants to accentuate this loving divine initiative to those Jews who seek salvation in the fulfillment of the law, and also to those pagans who seek salvation in a special religious knowledge outside of Christ.
Today as well, we can run the risk of reducing religion to a set of practices, whose completion gives a set of satisfaction in our own efforts. In the face of such a tendency, in the same passage Paul goes on to describe how God has shown “the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” The apostle then notes, even more resolutely, the absolute primacy of God’s action over that of man: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God—not because of works, lest any man should boast” (Eph 2:7–9). Grace here serves as a pivotal way of expressing the radical gift offered to us through the Christian religion, which we are called to receive in faith. More than anything that the Christian might do, he is first called to let himself receive what God himself has done in his loving plan of salvation.
In addition to this more general sense of grace, as a way of describing and characterizing the entire mystery of Christ, Paul also describes grace with a more particular meaning. In this usage, grace can refer to each specific help offered by God to the believer. Later in the same Letter to the Ephesians, the apostle speaks of the different tasks through which the Church is built up. He comments that “grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (4:7).
While we have seen that the concept of grace shows us the radical initiative of God’s love, grace is always more than simply an action of God. Grace implies God’s will to reach the human person; it is precisely the way we try to convey God’s mysterious desire to give us a sharing in his own life. Grace introduces a totally new principle of life into man, which destroys the power of sin: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom 5:20–21).
Since grace in a wider sense refers to the gift of God which is Christ himself, to live in grace means fundamentally to live in Christ Jesus. Paul writes to the Galatians that “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (2:20). Grace therefore means a life of divine sonship through the only begotten Son of God, and furthermore a sharing in the Holy Spirit, the divine Person who is the love between the Father and the Son. The powerful action of God in man, through grace, is meant to bear fruit in works. While Paul emphasizes the absolute priority of God’s action, he also reminds the Ephesians that they are called to respond to God’s “work” in them with their own “works,” the result of freely cooperating with God’s action: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph 2:10). Grace leads the Christian to a specific way of life guided by the Holy Spirit, characterized by “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6).
From The Theology of Divine Grace (Scepter, 2023) more info