Psalm 44:3
grace and truth
Thou art beautiful above the sons of men: grace is poured abroad in thy lips; therefore hath God blessed thee for ever. (Psalm 44:3 DR)
In the prologue of John’s Gospel we read of the reality of the Word being made flesh, the Word who is eternally with God and God himself coming to dwell among us. This series of verses, read as the Last Gospel after the traditional Latin Mass is concluded, provides a succinct synopsis of the mystery of the Incarnation.
An important aspect of this prologue, however, is that it is not esoteric but grounded in history; John is taking pains to say that Jesus Christ isn’t a mythic figure or an abstract notion to be approached only through secret knowledge (as the Gnostics would have it) but really became flesh and blood at a certain point in history.
This Incarnational moment is also not into a vacuum but into a particular context of the prophecies of his coming and the preparation thereof. St. John writes:
John beareth witness of him, and crieth out, saying: This was he of whom I spoke: He that shall come after me, is preferred before me: because he was before me. (John 1:15 DR)
This John is of course John the Baptist, who identifies himself as the forerunner foreseen and forespoken by Isaiah:
The voice of one crying in the desert: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the wilderness the paths of our God. (Isaiah 40:3; cf. John 1:22-23 DR)
St. John the Evangelist continues to more completely contextualize the Incarnation by contrasting the grace of Christ with the law of Moses:
And of his fulness we all have received, and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. (John 1:16-17 DR)
The implication here is that something greater than Moses has arrived on the scene, and brings something greater than the law. The fascinating aspect to this is that God chose Moses to reveal the Law to his people, so for there to be something greater than Moses and his Law is a bold claim, essentially claiming that Jesus Christ is the prophet spoken of by Moses himself:
The Lord thy God will raise up to thee a PROPHET of thy nation and of thy brethren like unto me: him thou shalt hear: (Deuteronomy 18:15 DR)
St. Paul also sees this as fulfilled in Christ and explicitly exalt Jesus above Moses:
For this man [Jesus] was counted worthy of greater glory than Moses, by so much as he that hath built the house, hath greater honour than the house. For every house is built by some man: but he that created all things, is God. And Moses indeed was faithful in all his house as a servant, for a testimony of those things which were to be said: But Christ as the Son in his own house: which house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and glory of hope unto the end. (Hebrews 3:3-6, DR)
Grace, as St. John says, comes through Christ, and by implication is greater than the law just as Jesus Christ is greater than Moses. However, there is no necessary antithesis between them, for grace and truth are not opposed to the law but rather are its fulfillment:
Do not think that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. (Matthew 5:17 DR)
Grace is both actual and sanctifying. Actual grace is that which is extrinsic to us, a grace which provides the impulse and assistance to do what is right and avoid evil. It is a divine aid to lead us into union with God. But sanctifying grace is that which is intrinsic to us, a habitual act, the state of being in communion with God and brought into sonship.
Actual grace could be communicated under the Old Covenant; in fact, the giving of the law is a form of actual grace in that it communicated God’s will and law to his people. However the Old Law was unable to bring the people of God into a state of sanctifying grace, that of sonship and union with God.
Thus Christ in his Incarnation brings grace that can bring man into communion with God and make them adopted sons of God, whereas the Law could only make sons by means of natural descent:
But as many as received him, he gave them power to be made the sons of God, to them that believe in his name. Who are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12-13 DR)
This sanctifying grace which comes through Jesus Christ is thus nobler than the law since it has the end of making men into sons of God. St. Thomas Aquinas thus explains why sanctifying grace is nobler than actual grace:
The higher the good to which a virtue is ordained, the more excellent is the virtue. Now the end is always greater than the means. But sanctifying grace ordains a man immediately to a union with his last end, whereas gratuitous grace ordains a man to what is preparatory to the end; i.e. by prophecy and miracles and so forth, men are induced to unite themselves to their last end. And hence sanctifying grace is nobler than gratuitous grace. (St. Thomas Aquinas, ST, 2.1., Q. 111, A. 5)
And just as sanctifying grace fulfills the end of actual grace, so Christ fulfills the law as the one through come grace and truth.
Once again the Psalmist in this verse sees beyond the veil, proclaiming the mystery of the Incarnation in his song to the king. As the Word he is the perfect and eternal expression of God’s love for mankind and thus as the Word Incarnate grace is poured abroad in his lips, as he himself is that Word of grace and truth, as St. John says. St. Augustine succinctly ties this verse and St. John’s prologue together:
Lo! now then that Word, so uttered, Eternal, the Co-eternal Offspring of the Eternal, will come as “the Bridegroom;” “Fairer than the children of men” [Psalm 44:2.] “Than the children of men.” I ask, why not than the Angels also? Why did he say, “than the children of men,” except because He was Man? Lest you should think “the Man Christ” [1 Timothy 2:5] to be any ordinary man, he says, “Fairer than the children of men.” Even though Himself “Man,” He is “fairer than the children of men;” though among the children of men, “fairer than the children of men:” though of the children of men, “fairer than the children of men.” “Grace is shed abroad on Your lips.” “The Law was given by Moses. Grace and Truth came by Jesus Christ.” [John 1:17]
In this animation I found a great image of this angel statue on Unsplash and cut it out in Photoshop. I also found another abstract background and applied Loopflow to it in After Effects to achieve the flowing movement.
I then composited the angel image on top and added some slight wiggle hold to the Position property with an expression to get a bit of movement. Finally I duplicated the angel image and turned off some of the color channels to get a bit a of chromatic aberration effect with it. The great thing about the wiggle expression is that it applies a new random seed in each instance, so the mere act of duplicating randomizes the seed and thus creates an automatic offset, which I thought worked perfectly for this.
Enjoy.
Thou art beautiful above the sons of men: grace is poured abroad in thy lips;
therefore hath God blessed thee for ever.
(Psalm 44:3 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: