1:3 — Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Here we come to the last part of the coventional prescript to a letter: the greetings. "Grace and peace" is Paul's characteristing greetins in all his thirteen letters (with "mecry' interrupting the expression only in 1 & 2 Timothy; see Paul's Greetings).

Grace is the fountain of God's goodness that makes life with Him, and redemption in all its possible shades and dimensions, possible. Peace is that which we experience when grace is the milieu of our life. Grace is the objective source of life as it should be lived and peace the subjective proof of the life so lived.

And always Paul wishes of it for the recipients of his letters that this grace and peace come from "God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." God the Father is the source of all good grace but it is appropriated and understood fully only through the agency of Jesus the Christ.

It has often been suggested by commentators that Paul found the pair that makes up the expression to congenial because grace, charis in Greek sounds like charein, 'greetings,' that is customary of ancient letter writing. Peace, eirene, on the other hand, is typically Jewish, being the Greek word for shalom. In the pair, then, Paul has found a greeting that is equally at home with the Greeks and Jews to whom he preached and wrote. That it went well with both Greek and Jews is a fact, but that the explanation why Paul is so fond of the expression remains hypothetical. The theological richness of the expression (see para.2 above) is so patently apparent that, however, Paul came upon it, anyone who follows after Paul's thoughts about what Jesus has done for us on the cross would immediately be drawn to its power and appositeness as a greeting.

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