As a former English teacher, I am sometimes known for being a bit particular about words. It irritates me when people are sloppy about them, or when they persistently misuse or even abuse a particular word. And I feel humiliated when someone discovers that I have been similarly inattentive to the way that words should work. I can never remember when to use ‘effect’ and when to use ‘affect’, for example.

To some people this might seem like fussiness—and, worse than that, fussiness over something that doesn’t matter very much in the long run.

But I am firmly committed to my fussiness. I think words are worth being fussy over, because they are the tools of our communication, and because when we miscommunicate with one another we hurt each other.

The difficulty in grasping the true meaning of words increases when we are dealing with words as they move between languages. ‘Love’ is a famous example: the Greek words we have classically translated as ‘love’ are not the same as one another. Yet when we use the English word ‘love’ we may be talking about erotic love or friendship or the delight in a particular flavour of ice cream. “I love Jenny” and “I love rum ‘n’ raisin” do not mean the same thing at all.

The word ‘grace’ is one of these words. When we use it in English we usually think of two things. First, we think of that prayer some people say before meals and call ‘grace’. Secondly, we think (well, I think) of Audrey Hepburn, that great actress of the silver screen. Why? Because, as the embodiment of this word, she had a kind of virtuous elegance about her.

Is that what ‘grace’ really is? There’s something right about using this word to speak of the virtue belonging to a person who is extremely regal and yet, without compromising their decorum, is able to speak to mere mortals. But theologically and biblically speaking, we need to start not with grace as exhibited by human beings, but grace as it comes from God himself. And in the great narrative of the Bible, the words we usually translate as ‘grace’ (hen in the Hebrew, and charis in the Greek) usually refer to the way in which God approaches human beings to relate to them.

The Israelites are the prime example of this. God called them out of Egypt, where they were a slave people with no rights under an oppressive king, making bricks in the hot sun. He saved them from disaster through the Red Sea, and brought them into land he had promised would be theirs. And in doing so, he revealed his very own nature to them.

One of the great moments of the story is at Mount Sinai, in the desert. There, he said to Moses:

“The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:6-7, NIV)

It’s worth reflecting on these words carefully, not least because they come at such an important point in the story of the Exodus, but also because they are words that come up again and again in the Old Testament. For instance, Jonah, dismayed that God is not going to punish Nineveh after all, complains to God of his own character (Jonah 4:2)! These words become a bit of a slogan of God’s character, and rightly so.

These words tell us what God’s grace is by showing us what God’s grace does. And what is that exactly? God shows his grace in maintaining his love even to those who do not deserve it by any stretch. But notice, too, that he is not simply a pushover. Grace does not mean that sin and evil do not matter to God. Neither does grace mean that his justice is compromised. He does not, he says of himself, overlook the guilty or let them go unpunished. This might seem to be a contradiction at the heart of God’s declaration about himself. How can he be both gracious and slow to anger, and yet proclaim himself  the uncompromising punisher of sin? But the contradiction is completely resolved only with the cross of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. This is what the apostle Paul explains in his letter to the Romans, which rightly should be known as the ‘epistle of grace’. How can God be both just and righteous and justify the ungodly? He expresses his grace in the death of his Son, who turned aside God’s wrath against sin and opened up the way for Jews and Gentiles together to know peace with God. ‘For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’, he writes, ‘and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus’ (Romans 3:23-4). That is: God’s favour is made available to human beings, definitively and beautifully, through the death of Jesus on the cross for sin.

That is grace in a nutshell. It’s something God shows to human beings when by rights they have earned nothing. As Paul keeps saying: you can’t boast about grace, because it is given entirely as a gift.

But that’s not the end of the story of grace. By the time a few centuries had passed, the balance had tilted quite the way in the direction of humankind. To put it simply: instead of something God shows to us, ‘grace’ became defined as a thing that God gives by which God recognises how virtuous we are—and thus rewards us with our salvation. We can receive this grace in particular through taking the sacraments – baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

The Reformers of the sixteenth century—people like John Calvin and Martin Luther—would have none of this. They argued that the ‘grace’ that was being taught was nothing like grace in the Bible. For them, salvation was by grace alone, or (to use the Latin slogan) sola gratia. There was no combination of grace and works involved in the rescue of human beings. There could not be, since sin is so bad that we could never think of human beings as co-operating in their final salvation.

True grace was entirely a matter of God’s favour towards us secured by Jesus Christ on the cross. The things we do cannot ever be the basis of our salvation, as Paul explains in Romans 11:6, because ‘if it were, grace would no longer be grace’.

‘Grace no longer grace’?

That’s right: if there’s a suggestion that grace is merely God’s help for us in pleading for his favour, then it is no longer what it really is. He has not shown us his grace at all. It would be like giving us a Ferrari but not giving us the keys.