“He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them…’” John 20:22–23

 

The old religious vocabulary may have receded, but the old religious anxiety remains very much in business. The usual language many Christians have used to address this anxiety can land with the dull thud of ecclesiastical irrelevance, carrying the odor of committee minutes, doctrinal footnotes, and clerical self-importance.

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            Here, the ‘grace industry’ has at least understood something important. It knows that people are not lying awake at three in the morning, asking whether they have sufficiently satisfied the third use of the law. They are asking why their lives feel like a verdict. They are asking why rest feels guilty, why success feels fraudulent, why failure feels final, and why every mirror and screen seems to have been deputized as a minor tribunal.

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            The grace industry understands, at least, that law is not merely something announced from pulpits or printed in catechisms. Law is climate. Law is atmosphere. 

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            Personally, I like to imagine it as the ‘nomosphere’ (from the Greek, nomos, law): the law-thick air in which the self inhales accusation every morning before breakfast! With every breath, every person, first world, third world, it doesn’t matter who or where you are, is permanently summoned to breathe in this toxic air: at work, at home, online, in the body, the opinions of others, in parenting, politics, productivity, and moral awareness. 

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            One may offer a restrained word of thanks, I suppose, when Christian voices at least speak of grace as the antidote to this suffocating atmosphere without requiring the listener to first learn the vocabulary of a systematics text. They are right to say that the trouble is not merely bad habits, weak discipline, or insufficient self-esteem. It goes deeper than that. And when they tell the exhausted modern self that life is not finally secured by becoming enough, they have at least come within sight of the gospel.

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            But coming within sight is not arrival. Talking about the gospel is not the gospel. Grace is not a mood of relief inside the old order.

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            The industry of grace-adjacent speech has tested the nomosphere and, having discovered poison in the air, proposes to sell the sufferer a religious breathing apparatus and call it grace. And the sufferer, already choking, reaches for it eagerly enough. Who wouldn’t? Oxygen is welcome when the room is filling with fumes. 

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            The old Adam and Eve are perfectly capable of enjoying this temporary relief. They can prefer grace-inflected art, grace-inflected commentary, grace-inflected podcasts, grace-inflected humor, grace-inflected therapy, grace-inflected conferences, and grace-inflected essays. 

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            Sooner or later, however, the air cannister runs out, only to be replaced by another and another. And the poor soul discovers that she has not been delivered by grace at all. She has only been taught to survive in the nomosphere a little longer, and at a price.

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            The oxygen tanks of inflected grace are not inexhaustible. The momentary breath of relief is not resurrection. Indeed, one must ask whether this deserves the name grace at all. For grace, in the theology of the cross, is not religious management of the poisoned air. It is not a religious apparatus strapped to the face of the old Adam so he may continue his anxious existence with an improved vocabulary. 

 

            When the gospel of grace is proclaimed, the nomosphere must be named as unsurvivable. 

 

            Here is the point at which the grace industry must be told, politely if possible and plainly if not, to get out of the way.

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            Grace is not a tone, not a mood, not a therapeutic atmosphere, not a Christianized permission slip for the anxious self to feel slightly less accused. Christ has not sent the Church into the world to cleverly diagnose the poisoned air and then peddle improved breathing equipment to those already choking to death on the law. 

 

“He breathed on them…”.

 

            Christ sends the Church into the suffocating world with His breath, His life, His Spirit, to be handed over to the ungodly, preached into the ear, poured over the body, and placed into the mouth. 

            “For Jesus’ sake, I declare unto you the gracious forgiveness of your sin.”

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           There it is. The whole thing. The absolution of the ungodly. The verdict from outside. The Word that creates what it commands, gives what it announces, strips away every borrowed breath, and gives the breath of life because Christ himself is life.

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            For grace is not finally an idea about God’s kindness. Grace is the crucified and risen Christ delivered here and now by the external Word and sacraments: God’s own promise spoken to the sinner with no condition left to satisfy.

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To those who have run out of breath.

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To the ungodly.

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To you.