"Grace and Peace"

To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. – Romans 1:7

The greeting of “grace and peace” was both common for Paul’s writings and, on some level, quite meaningful.  To begin with, when Paul used the term "peace" he was referring to the Jewish understanding of peace—Shalom.  In fact, Shalom was the common greeting of the Jewish people, invoking a sort of eternal blessing on those greeted. 

Shalom was not the kind of peace many of us might imagine—it was an “otherly” kind of peace whereby a person would receive a sense of having been redeemed by God.  In other words, Shalom gave a sense that all hostilities and barriers between a man and God were shattered.  Israel’s desire for this type of peace was integral to their history.

While many of the first century Jews had rejected Jesus as the Messiah, Paul was still doggedly determined to see his fellow kinsmen saved (Romans 10:1) and therefore, consistently invoked the idea of shalom into his greetings as a means to both proclaim the Gospel in a way that spoke clearly to the Jewish people and to maintain a level of Jewish-ness to his ministry.  Put into today’s terms, Paul was being missional to the Jews in his greeting!

Paul’s other greeting of “grace” has a different story.  In Hellenistic letters, it was common to greet people with the simple term “greetings”.  On the surface, Paul’s use of “grace” does not seem significant as a replacement term.  However, in the Greek language, the word for greetings was “chairein”.  The Greek word for grace was “charis”.

So you see, Paul took one of the most significant words used in explaining the Gospel (grace) and inserted it as a rather clever (word play) alternative to the standard Greek greeting.  Not only did Paul show deference to Hellenistic custom, but he probably raised a few eyebrows by this subversive greeting.  Perhaps Paul also desired to invite curiosity from his Hellenistic readers and hearers.

Finally, the fact that Paul used a play on the common Greek greeting in tandem with the standard Jewish greeting said two things about Paul’s approach to people.  For one, Paul didn’t ever waste an opportunity to tell the Gospel...even in his greetings!  The combination of both grace and peace basically says that he wants the reader/hearer to know true Shalom…but that He will need the grace of God to realize true peace. 

Second, this only reinforces Paul’s ever-consistent desire to see both Jews and Gentiles reached by the Gospel…and worshiping—united together—under the Gospel.