Daily Manna · Day 281 · October 8
Grace Upon Grace
“And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.”
You have started praying politely. Not about the real thing, because you have brought the real thing so many times that it feels like wearing out a welcome, so you bring the tidy version instead and keep the rest to yourself.
The man who wrote this sentence was the last one left. He is writing decades after the fact, an old man by then, the only one of them who had not been killed, and what he is trying to put into Greek is what it was like to stand close to Jesus for three years. We beheld his glory, he says, and then this: of his fulness have all we received.
Grace for grace is an odd phrase and the oddness is the gift. The preposition means in place of, one thing exchanged for another. Grace replacing grace, the way one wave arrives exactly as the last one is finishing, so that there is no moment when the beach is dry. And the word before it is fulness, which is not a large supply. A large supply runs down. Fulness does not diminish by being poured out; that is what makes it fulness rather than a lot.
Of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. All of us, and there is no counter anywhere in the sentence that records how many times you have come.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 281 is Where Wast Thou (Job 38:4).