Living Words

by William Klock

 

When my grandmother died there was a will.  It spelled out everything in black and white.  Not just the financial stuff, but even her car, the furniture in her house, down to the tchotchkes on the end tables.  Still, one of my twenty-one cousins decided to argue about it.  He was going to take the estate to court and dispute the will.  One of my uncles shut him down.  Not only was he getting a fair share just like everyone else, Grandma made sure her wishes for everything were in black and white.

 

This is Paul’s appeal as we move on to the second half of Galatians 3.  Paul’s going to say, it’s all here—plain as day, in black and white.  There’s nothing to argue about.  But these agitators in Galatia, these “people from James” in Antioch—they’re like that cousin, unhappy with the will, and trying to get what he wants by saying, “No, no.  That can’t be right.  That’s not what Grandma would have wanted.”  And what they want is circumcision.  Remember the situation.  Most of the believers in Galatia were gentiles.  They had been pagans.  They took part in all the pagan practices that were woven all through daily life in the Greco-Roman world.  But then they heard the good news about Jesus, they believed, and that meant withdrawing from all those pagan practices.  They threw out their household gods.  They stopped taking part in the pagan festivals.  They stopped visiting the temples and worshipping Caesar.  And now their neighbours and coworkers and even the city officials think they’re irreligious and unpatriotic.  If something bad happens, everyone will come after them for angering the gods.  So these gentiles Christians have claimed the Jewish exemption.  Jews were exempt from all those pagan aspects of daily life and since following Jesus was a new way of following the God of Israel, it was an easy out.  But the local Jews got angry.  If you’re not circumcised and don’t live by torah, you have no business calling yourself a Jew!  And then these agitators who were preaching a false gospel of Jesus plus torah—or at least Jesus plus circumcision—they showed up and took this as an opportunity to convert the Galatian believers over to their way of thinking.  The end result was that they were dividing the church.  Instead of Jewish and gentile believers worshipping and praying and fellowshipping and gathering around the Lord’s Table together, they were dividing up—as if instead of one body, Jesus now had two.

 

So Paul continues on in Galatians 3:15.  Here’s what he writes:

 

It’s there, like Grandma’s wishes, all in black and white with her signature at the bottom.  You can’t dispute it saying, “No, but Grandma wanted this instead.”  Here the really important thing is who the beneficiary is.

 

Well [Paul goes on] the promises were made “to Abraham and his seed”—that is, his family.  It doesn’t say “his seeds,” as though referring to several families, but indicates a single family by saying “and to your seed,” meaning the Messiah.

Remember the promise made to Abraham.  Even though he was a childless old man, he would have a family with children as numerous as the stars, a family that would bless and eventually inherit the nations.  And what Paul is stressing here is that there’s only one family that inherits that promise.  Quoting the Greek version of Genesis 15:18, Paul uses the word “seed”.  The promises were made to Abraham and his seed—to his offspring, to his descendants who were yet to be born.  Don’t think of “seed” as a single seed you might plant in the ground.  Think of it in terms of the family that grows from that seed.  God’s promises were made to that single family, but Paul also stresses what even the circumcision people would have known: that family has come to be represented by the Messiah.  Remember, too, that the king represents his people.  So Jesus the Messiah and his people are the inheritors of God’s promises to Abraham.  Now, Paul goes on in verse 17:

 

The circumcision people have been saying that if you want to be a real Christian, you have to at least get circumcised.  They probably wanted people to live by other parts of torah too, but it starts with circumcision.  And Paul’s saying, “Look, God established a covenant with Abraham on the basis of faith.  Circumcision came years later.  And torah?  The Lord gave that to Israel four hundred and thirty years later after he delivered them from Egypt.  And when the Lord gave them torah, remember that they were already becoming the great family he had promised to Abraham in the beginning.”  Torah was a big deal, but even something as important as torah couldn’t rewrite the covenant that the Lord had made with Abraham on the basis of faith.  When the Lord appeared as a smoking pot and burning torch that night to Abraham, when he passed back and forth down the pathway Abraham had made between the halved carcasses of those sacrificial animals, the Lord had—so to speak—put it all down in black and white and signed it at the bottom.  Whatever else would come later, none of it could or would—nothing on earth or in heaven—could change the terms of his covenant with Abraham and his family.  So torah—the law—cannot be the thing that defines the people of the Messiah.  Like Abraham, their faith is what defines them, what includes them in the covenant family and marks them out as different from the rest of the human race.

 

But what about the law then?  If Christians down through history have struggled with what to do with torah we can only imagine how those first Jewish believers would struggle with it.  It’s not hard to see how Jewish believers would go down this path of Jesus plus torah.  Because torah is what set apart the Jewish people from all the other peoples.  Torah is why the pagans thought the Jews were weird and torah was why the Jews thought they were better than everyone else.  God had given it to them and God had commanded them to live by it.  He’d even promised blessing if they did and cursing if they didn’t.  So Paul anticipates their question: If faith is the basis of the covenant, not torah, not the law, then where does torah fit into all of this?  Is Paul saying that torah is bad?  Look at verse 19:

 

 

Why indeed?  And Paul writes:

 

God’s purpose in calling Abraham and his purpose in giving him a family was to save the world from sin.  Remember that the story that comes just before the calling of Abraham is the Tower of Babel.  The point of the Tower of Babel story is to show how the whole human race had lost the knowledge of God and was lost in darkness.  God then speaks to Abraham, calls him out of darkness and idolatry and thus begins the long story of redemption.  Through Abraham’s family, God would save the human race.  But there was a problem.  Abraham’s family, Israel, was infected by the same disease of sin as everyone else, so God had to do something to preserve this special family until his promises were fulfilled through them.  Torah—the law—was that something.  It wasn’t a bad thing at all—which is what some people might have thought Paul was saying.  Instead, torah was a good thing.  In fact, Paul stresses, it was laid down by angels at the hand of a mediator.  The mediator is Moses and he didn’t make it up.  It came to him by angels, which is Paul’s somewhat roundabout way of saying that it ultimately came from God.  So torah wasn’t bad.  It was wonderful and holy.  Think about Moses, coming down Mt. Sinai carrying the law carved on stone and his face literally glowing with the glory of God that he’d seen.  Torah was good.  But neither this mediator—that means Moses—not the law he delivered could bring the “one”—that one family promised to Abraham.  Moses and the torah had a different job to do—a vitally important job, but still a temporary job—until the time was right for God to fulfil his promises in that one family of the Messiah.

 

So what was the job of torah?  Paul says it was added because of transgressions.  What does that mean?  Well, “transgression” means to break the law.  It’s more specific than “sin”.  “Sin” is general.  It means to fall short.  So while the rest of humanity stumbled around in its rebellion against God, God gave Israel a law so that the people’s sins could be turned into trespass—so that they could see that they weren’t just stumbling around in the dark.  Torah showed them that their sin was really deadly disobedience.  Torah prepared the people who carried the promise for the day when the Messiah would bring that promise to fulfilment by dealing with sin on the cross.  Through torah, God deliberately created a logjam in the river of blessing.  Torah exposed sin for what it really is so that the Messiah could then deal with it.

 

Think of a rocket being shot off into space.  It has to have an incredible amount of force to push against earth’s gravity and that means it has to have a massive booster rocket full of fuel to create that force.  That giant booster lifts the rocket into space, but once the rocket is in space, the astronauts flip a switch and they let go of the booster so it can fall back to earth.  The space capsule doesn’t jettison the booster rocket because it was bad.  Without it, they’d never have got into space.  They jettison it because it’s no longer needed.  It’s a good thing and its job is now done.  Torah is like that.

 

So, Paul asks in verse 21:

 

So Paul’s saying, “Okay.  If—and the stress is on if—a law had been given that could give life, if that had happened, then being part of that covenant would indeed have been by that law.”  Life is the goal.  God wants to set the human race to rights.  But that’s not what torah did.  Again, what torah did was expose sin for what it really is: deadly rebellion against God.  Torah didn’t give life.  Just the opposite.  It showed that humanity is enslaved to sin and that apart from God’s reconciling grace we stand condemned.  Life, Paul stresses, comes through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.  Paul rams the point home here: If you go back to torah, you’re going to end up back in jail.  The way forward is through faith in the Messiah.

 

If this isn’t clear enough, Paul puts it another way starting in verses 23:

 

Before this faithfulness arrived [that’s the faithfulness of the Messiah he just mentioned] we were kept under guard by torah, in close confinement until the coming faithfulness should be revealed.  Thus torah was like a babysitter for us, looking after us until the coming of the Messiah, so that we might be given covenant membership on the basis of faithfulness.

Before Jesus, Israel was like a child and torah was the babysitter.  In Paul’s world rich people would have slaves who looked after their children, taking them to and from school and generally keeping them out of trouble.  So between Moses and Jesus, this is what torah did for Israel.  But at some point kids grow up and they don’t need a babysitter anymore.  The sign that Israel had grown up was “faithfulness”.  Specifically, the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.  He came and did what Israel had struggled and failed to do all through their history.  Jesus is finally the one faithful Israelite.  That makes him the fulfilment of God’s promises to Abraham.  But there are two sides to his faithfulness.  Believers answer the faithfulness of Jesus with faith of our own and it is this faith—not torah—it is this faith in response to Jesus’ faithfulness, that marks out the mature family of God.  Jesus plus nothing.  Jesus, as the faithful Israelites, opens up Abraham’s family to everyone regardless of ethnicity or language or sex or class or anything else.  He writes in verse 25:

 

“Sons of God”.  That’s language—that’s a title—right out of the exodus story.  In Exodus 4, when the Lord tells Moses to go to Pharaoh, he calls Israel his “firstborn son”.  What Paul is doing here is shifting the frame of reference.  He’s been talking about Israel between Moses and Jesus as a time when Israel was a child, guarded by a babysitter, and waiting for the promises of Abraham to be fulfilled.  Now, when he talks about being sons of God through faith in the Messiah, what he’s saying is that that time from Moses to Jesus was really like the years that Israel spent as slaves in Egypt.  In Jesus the time of rescue has come.  Paul is saying to the circumcision people: Do you want to go back to being a child, when you could be a grown-up?  Do you want to go back to being a slave, when you could be free?  If you want to be grown-up Israel, the thing that marks you out is faith, is trust in the Messiah.

 

But Paul doesn’t leave it there.  In verses 27-29 he hammers home this point of inclusion in the Messiah.  Five times he uses this word Messiah with relation to our identity.  If you’re following along, most of your translations probably say “Christ”.  Christos is the Greek word and for reasons I don’t fully understand, Christians have usually left it untranslated.  The result is that “Christ” has lost its punch.  We say it like it’s Jesus last name.  Some people even think it is Jesus’ last name.  In fact, “Christ” is just Greek for “Messiah”.  It’s not a name; it’s Jesus’ title.  He’s God’s anointed King.  And so some years ago I decided that unless there was good reason to do otherwise, I was going to translate Christos as “Messiah” in my preaching.  It’s vitally important we understand who Jesus is.  Paul doesn’t talk about being “in Jesus”.  He talks all the time about being “in the Messiah” and that’s because it’s Jesus’ messiahship that makes him able to represent us as the people of God.  So here, Paul hammers it home writing:

 

The Messiah embodies faithful, grown-up Israel.  The Messiah embodies the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham.  So what’s important, Paul says, is that we are “in” the Messiah.  But what does that mean?  Modern people often seem to think of it as some kind of experience, but for Paul and his readers in the First Century, it meant being part of this royal family of which Jesus is the King—the Messiah.  And, Paul says, as much as faith in Jesus is the thing that marks this family out as being in the Messiah, baptism is the entrance.

 

This is another thing we might misunderstand.  A lot of modern people, especially in our Protestant tradition, will say, “But isn’t baptism a ‘work’ and if we enter into the Messiah by a ‘work’, how is it by faith?”  Again, like everything else, we need to see baptism in light of the story.  Paul doesn’t elaborate here, because it was a given believers back then would think of it this way.  Think of the exodus and think of Israel at the Red Sea as the Lord parted the waters and made a pathway through to a new life of freedom and a new life in his presence.  On one side of the parted sea was a life of slavery and on the other side was a promise of life with God—the fulfilment of his promises.  But to get from one side to the other meant passing through the water.  Passing through meant faith, it meant trusting the Lord and his offer of rescue from slavery.  Brothers and Sisters, baptism is like that.  On one side we are slaves to sin and on the other is the Spirit-filled life of the Messiah’s family.  The font stands between like the Red Sea.  In the waters God makes his promise and leads us through to life on the other side.

 

So to pass through the waters of baptism is take the first step of faith in the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.  To pass through the waters of baptism is to put off the old self and to put on the Messiah.  And when we do that, his identity becomes ours.  That’s not to say that everything about our previous identity becomes completely irrelevant, but it does mean that nothing about our old selves has to do with our standing in the Messiah’s family.  Jew or gentile, slave or free, man or woman, we all stand on equal footing if we are in the Messiah’s family.  We come to one Table.  We eat one bread.  We drink of one cup.  Because, as Paul hammers home his last blow: “If you belong to the Messiah, you are Abraham’s family and you stand to inherit the promise.

 

There’s no reason to look for anything else to enhance that status, because there is nothing else that can.  We are one in Jesus because God has been faithful to his promises.  He put it in black and white, he affixed his signature that night when he met Abraham as the smoking pot and burning torch and he fulfilled that promise when Jesus was born of Mary, when Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Jesus rose again on the third day—and he continues to fulfil his promises in us.  Every time someone is baptised into the Messiah’s family, every time God pours out his Spirit, every time he brings us together at his Table on the basis of the faithfulness of Jesus, he fulfils his promises.

 

Brothers and Sisters, if we are passionate about Jesus and if we’re passionate about the gospel, we should be just as passionate about the unity of the family—the church.  This is one of the reasons I am a Reformed Episcopalian.  Bishop Cummins understood this and that’s why—unlike other Anglicans of his day who required episcopal confirmation in order to come to the Lord’s Table—we welcome everyone who is baptised into Jesus the Messiah.  Because we know that all who are in the Messiah are part of the one family of Abraham.  Because we know that our unity is a testimony to the faithfulness of the Father, revealed in Jesus and the Spirit.  Because our being brought together in the Messiah—Jew and gentile, slave and free, men and women—is a powerful witness of the life and light of God’s new age that needs to be shined into this dark and divided world.

 

Let’s pray: Gracious Father, through faith in the faithfulness of your Son, you have made us your people.  Remind us always that faith in Jesus makes us one, so that we might be as passionate about our unity as you are and so that our unity in Jesus might be a bright gospel light in the midst of the darkness.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

Have you ever heard of Charles Blondin?  He was a French acrobat, daredevil, and tight-rope walker in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.  He is most famous for crossing the Niagara Gorge, just above the falls, walking a tight-rope in 1859.  He was the first person to do so.  And it drew a crowd, so he did it again and again and again.  But to keep the crowds coming back he had to keep finding new and more impressive ways to walk the tight-rope across the gorge.  He crossed walking backwards.  He crossed while blindfolded.  He crossed pushing a loaded wheelbarrow.  He crossed while walking the tight-rope on stilts.  He once carried a chair with him, balanced the chair on a single leg on the rope, then stood on the chair.  Another time he stopped mid-rope, cooked himself an omelet (Yes, I’m also struggling to figure out how he did that), ate the omelet, and then continued to the other side.  But, I think, his most impressive feat was crossing Niagara Gorge on a tight-rope while carrying his manager.  I mean, in terms of physical challenges, that was probably one of the easier things Blondin did.  The impressive bit is that his manager trusted him enough to be part of the stunt.

 

So picture Charles Blondin on a tight-rope, crossing Niagara Gorge with his manager—his name was Harry Colcord—on his back.  But then imagine, Harry, halfway across, telling Blondin to stop and put him down.  “This has been nice, and I know you told me not to look down, but I did.  And the water is churning away way down there as it gets ready to go over the falls and, well, I think I’d feel better if I got off your back and got myself across the tight-rope alone.”  Imagine what Blondin would have said to him.  “You witless fool!”

 

Well, that’s what Paul writes to the churches in Galatia, having heard that they’re talking about getting circumcised.  Look at Galatians 3:1-5.

 

So chapter 2 ended with Paul writing about the faithful son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.  He’s reminded them of the cross and now Paul launches into his main argument with that violent image of the cross at the forefront.  “Messiah Jesus was portrayed on the cross before your very eyes!”  It’s hard to say exactly what Paul means by that.  When he was there, did he give them a graphic description of Jesus’ crucifixion?  Maybe.  But everyone in the Roman world knew about crucifixion.  I think it’s safe to say that pretty much everyone had seen a crucifixion at some point.  They knew how awful it was.  Whatever it means that the cross was displayed to them, Paul’s point is that the Galatians knew all about Jesus and the cross and they should have understood how it had changed everything.  They should have understood how it turned everything Jews thought about their identity and everything about the rule of torah upside-down.  Jesus’ death changed everything.  Paul had taught them that.  When he’d left them, they understood all of this—or so he thought.  But now—they’re talking about getting circumcised.  He’s utterly flabbergasted.  How could this be, so he practically shouts at them, “You witless Galatians!”  I thought I knew you, but now this?  Has someone cast a stupid spell on you?  Jesus and the Spirit got them halfway across the tightrope, but now they’re looking down at the long drop and the churning waters and thinking that maybe they should play it safe and go the rest of the way with torah instead.  And Paul’s point: Torah never would have got you this far.  Don’t be stupid.  Let Jesus and the Spirit take you all the way.

 

He's got one question for them, but it spills out as six.  Who has bewitched you?  Did you receive the Spirit through the torah or through hearing and believing the gospel?  Again, are you really this dumb?  Having begun in the Spirit, are you going to end in the flesh?  Have you suffered so much for nothing?  And, did God give you his Spirit and has he done powerful things amongst you because you obeyed torah or because you heard and believed?  It all boils down to one question.  Paul asks them to consider everything that’s happened to them since he first visited them and proclaimed the good news about Jesus the Messiah.  He asks them: “Did all that happen because you were keeping the Jewish law?”  Of course, the answer is a resounding “No!”  Everything that had happened to them had happened through the power of the gospel and the giving of the Spirit as they listened and believed.

 

And when Paul says that, he makes sure to put all the stress on the gospel and on the Spirit and none on them.  The gospel was proclaimed, they believed—and then they discovered that it was actually all along the Spirit already at work amongst them.  That’s the point here.  Their lives had been transformed by the Spirit and the Spirit was doing amazing things in their churches, not because of anything they had done—and certainly not because they’d decided to start living according to the Jewish law.  Up til now, they hadn’t even considered doing that.  So, no, none of this had happened because of their works.  Just the opposite, their works were actually the work of God’s Spirit in them—a gift they’d received, a new life into which they’d been plunged when they believed the good news and were baptised in the Messiah.  Their new life had begun with the Spirit.  So why, O why, Paul wants to know, are they now turning back to the flesh?

 

Now, we should pause here and ask what Paul means when he writes about Spirit and flesh.  The Spirit is God’s Spirit, but for Paul it sort of becomes a shorthand for new life and new creation.  The Spirit is the down payment on the resurrection life of the new world that God has promised.  The life of the Spirit is a preview of what life will one day be like when God finally sets his creation (and us!) fully to rights.  The Spirit is a preview in the sense that we now have a taste of that life, but the Spirit, through his work in us, also gives the world a preview of what God’s new world will be like.  Think about that.  The Church is—or it should be—a preview of the age to come, of God’s new creation.  On the other hand, the “flesh” for Paul is shorthand for the corruption, decay, and death of the old age—it’s shorthand for life without the redeeming work of Jesus and the renewing work of the Spirit.  But, too, Paul also writes about the Jewish people “according to the flesh”—Abraham’s biological descendants marked out with the sign of circumcision in their flesh.  To be clear, though, when Paul talks about flesh and Spirit, he is absolutely not using these works in the sense of the Greek philosophers—whose ideas persist today—who thought the physical word or the physical body (the flesh) was some bad thing and that the spirit was some good, non-material essence—the real us—that needs to be set free.  For Paul, we can think of “flesh” as representing the old age dominated by sin and death and “Spirit” as representing the life of god’s new creation.

 

So obviously the Spirit is important.  The Spirit shows that the promises made to Abraham have finally come true through the death and resurrection of Jesus.  The Spirit is the evidence of the gospel doing its work.  This is why, for example, the Pentecostal and Charismatic idea that separated the gift of the Spirit from belief in the gospel is such a problem.  (If Paul had been alive in the early Twentieth Century he would, I expect, have written an equally sternly worded epistle to them.)  The Spirit is not an add-on to life in Jesus—as if you can believe in Jesus now and receive the Spirit at some later time—or even not at all.  To believe the gospel is to trust in Jesus the Messiah, not just for the forgiveness of sins—as if that’s all there is to gospel.  To believe in the gospel is to become part of God’s promised new creation, to be plunged into the Spirit so that the very life of God himself makes us new.  To be in the Messiah is to have the Spirit in you.  You cannot separate the two.  Anything less than that is, as Paul would put it, “flesh” and, Brothers and Sisters, the gospel which begins with the Spirit ends in the Spirit.  It will never leave us stuck in the flesh.  The Lord does not deliver you from bondage in Egypt only to leave you stuck in Egypt.  He leads you through the Red Sea and into the promised land.

 

So, to sum up so far: We live the life of the Spirit not because of anything we’ve done, but because we have heard and believed the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen.  Even then, the fact that we have “heard” it, is because the Spirit was already at work in us.  Now, lets move on to verse 6.  Paul writes:

 

Remember what I talked about last week.  Why was Abraham so important to Paul?  Because the story of redemption begins with him.  He’s the model for all of God’s people thereafter.  The Lord spoke into a world completely lost in the darkness of paganism and he called Abraham: “Go to the land I will show you and I will give you a family and an inheritance.”  It was a crazy promise made by a strange God, but Abraham believed—he trusted—and the Lord established a covenant with him and with his children.  Through them, the Lord would, one day, drive away the darkness and set the world to rights.  I said last week, that’s what “righteousness” is about for Paul.  It’s about membership in this covenant family of God.  For the Jews in Paul’s day the human race was divided into two groups: the Jews were the “righteous”, the “sinners” were everyone else.  It began with Abraham—long before there was ever a torah or, for that matter, even before circumcision.  The Lord established a covenant with Abraham because of faith and—here’s the key point for Paul here that stands like a mountain over this whole passage—it is this faith, this trust in the Lord that marks out Abraham’s family.  It’s the faith people, not the circumcision people who will inherit God’s promises.  Imagine Paul pointing his finger at the Galatians—most of whom were gentiles—as he says this.  He’s saying, “This means you.”  They—gentile believers renewd by God’s Spirit— they were the sign that God’s promises to Abraham were finally coming true.  He goes on in verse 8:

 

God’s promises were a lot bigger than Abraham.  Again, God began a project with Abraham, through which he intended to bring the whole world—the nations—out of the darkness of sin and death.  And Paul could point to these gentile believers in Galatia and say, “See!  You are living proof of the faithfulness of the God of Israel.  In you, the blessing promised to Abraham has begun to reach the nations.  Brothers and Sisters, the same goes for us.  Some of my ancestors were Jews, but most of them were pagans who worshipped oak trees.  They heard the good news about Jesus, the Spirit got hold of them, they believed, and the Spirit led them out of the darkness and made them sons and daughters of Abraham and inheritors of his promise.  You and I are proof that God is faithful to do what he promised.

 

And that’s Paul’s next point.  It’s God who is faithful.  The promises weren’t fulfilled because Abraham’s family was faithful.  Some of them were, but on the whole, Israel failed miserably.  Look at verses 10-12:

 

We know that the “faith people” are justified—that means they’re the ones counted as “righteous”, as God’s people—because those who put their stock in doing the Jewish law, well, they’re under a curse.  Paul quotes Deuteronomy 27:26, “Cursed is everyone who does not stick fast by everything written in the book of the law, to perform it.”  Now, Paul’s point isn’t that it’s impossible to keep the law, so don’t bother trying.  What he’s saying is that if—like the agitators in Galatia or the people from James in Antioch—if you decide to go down the road of circumcision, well, that’s just the first step.  There are 612 other commandments you’ll have to follow and not even the agitators, not even these “circumcision people” were doing all of that.  Torah is all or nothing.

 

Here's where Paul is going with this.  He’s telling the story again.  I think we miss that because we’ve been trained to think in terms of abstract doctrinal propositions, but for Paul it was all about the story of God and his people.  It began with Abraham and the family that the Lord miraculously gave him to carry forward his promises to the nations, but along the way the story shows that Abraham’s family was infected with the same sin problem as the rest of the human race—the very same problem God’s promises were meant to heal.

 

This is the lens through which the Jews of Paul’s day saw themselves.  The Essenes at Qumran—the people responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls—they’re a great example of this.  They saw that Israel was broken and fallen, disloyal and incapable of carrying forward the Lord’s promises.  They believed that the Lord was, secretly through them, launching his new covenant to set everything right.  Their scroll on torah (4QMMT) sums it all up.  First there was a time of blessing under David and Solomon, but King Jeroboam sinned and his successors down the line through Zedekiah kept sinning and that brought the curse of Deuteronomy 27 on the nation.  Deuteronomy—Moses reiteration of the law before the Israelites crossed into the promised land, it promised blessing if the people trusted the Lord and a curse if they were unfaithful.  So the Lord did what he promised.  He caused them to be carried way into exile and, even though the people had returned from exile to the promised land, the curse continued—for another five hundred years.  Being ruled over by godless gentiles like the Romans was the proof.  What Israel needed was a new covenant.  Now, the Qumran community was unique in thinking that they were the people of that new covenant, but most other Jews would have agreed with the basic outline of the story.  The angry Pharisees who wrote the Palms of Solomon and the Maccabean martyrs would have agreed.  Ezra and Nehemiah and Daniel said the same thing: God’s people, even after some of them had returned to Jerusalem, they were still sinful, still in “exile”, still “slaves in our own land”.  The promises of Deuteronomy 30, the promises that would come true if Israel were faithful, they had never happened.  Isaiah’s promises of everything set to rights was only a dream.  Deuteronomy warned of that if Israel was unfaithful she would fall under a curse and Paul and his fellow Jews saw that curse happening in their own day.  Oppression by the pagan Romans was the current iteration in a long line back to Babylon.

 

So Paul sums up the problem in verse 11 when he says that nobody is justified before God in the law, so “the righteous shall live by faith”.  He’s quoting Habakkuk there.  But that was the big question for Paul and his fellow Jews.  There were these big promises.  Habakkuk said the righteous shall live by faith, but how were they supposed to get there?  No matter what Israel did, no matter how many reform movements came along, Israel was stuck in unfaithfulness and living under the curse.  Buckling down, like the Pharisees, and doing the law even harder wasn’t working.  That’s why Paul quotes Leviticus 18:5: “You shall therefore keep my statues and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the Lord”.  There’s a promise there, but pretty much everyone by Paul’s day had lost hope.  Yes, if we keep the Lord’s statues we will live, but no matter what we do and no matter how hard we try, we fail.  So Paul throws up his hands in despair and, I think, most other thoughtful Jews of his day would have thought the same way.  What more can we do?

 

But as discouraging as this story might seem, if you really believed that all of Israel’s woes were the curse promised in Deuteronomy 27, there was hope that one day, somehow the blessing of Deuteronomy 30 would happen—including God’s renewal of his people by his Spirit.  And so, while his fellow Jews felt the weight of Leviticus 18:5, Paul saw the beginnings of hope there.  This was the Lord’s promise and the Lord is faithful.  Paul saw it pointing to a new covenant and a new way of keeping the law—one that would finally work.  This—this new thing—is what Paul saw had happened—was happening—through Jesus the Messiah.  He goes on in verses 13 and 14:

 

 

Paul saying, “It seemed hopeless, but look what God has done!  The curse that Deuteronomy promised has been borne by the Messiah.  Jesus can do that, because—remember—the king represents his people.  That’s why I stressed last week that it’s not just the promise to Abraham that’s important, but that we also remember how David, the King, was incorporated into the promise as well.  So Jesus the Messiah, the King came to the place where the pagans, agents of the curse, were oppressing his people and he took the curse on himself.  And he didn’t do it in some abstract way.  It was obvious.  It was unmistakable.  The cross was the great symbol of Roman oppression and brutality.  Jesus literally took Israel’s curse on himself when he died on the cross.

 

Israel, through her unfaithfulness, had become like a logjam in the river of God’s blessing, so Jesus the King became, himself, a literal son of Abraham and bore Israel’s curse himself, thereby becoming the conduit for God to pour out his Spirit.  He cleared the logjam.  This is what Paul means in verse 14 when he writes that the blessing of Abraham could flow through to the nations in Messiah Jesus”.  That’s the first result of Jesus’ death on the cross.  The second thing he did was to renew God’s covenant.  This is what the prophets had promised.  The Lord wasn’t just going to let Israel rot away as a logjam in the river or even bypass Israel.  Through Jesus, God poured out his Spirit on Israel, giving them a new way to keep his law, so that they could, again and as he intended, be the river carrying his blessings to the nations.  That’s why Paul says we, meaning he and his fellow Jews who believed the good news about Jesus, we “might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith”.  God has dealt with the logjam created by the law and the unfaithfulness of Israel and he’s done so through Jesus’ death and through the pouring out of his Spirit.  And now Paul and his fellow Jewish missionaries are like the river, freed of the logjam, rushing out to carry the light and life of God to the nations.  For Paul, the mission to the gentiles and the fact that in Jesus, the gentile and Jewish believers were worshiping and eating and gathering around the Lord’s Table together as one family, this was proof that God is faithful to do what he has promised.

 

That’s as far as we’ll go today with Chapter 3.  These verses have a reputation for being notoriously difficult, but a lot of that is because for a very long time we’ve tried to read what Paul says here as abstract doctrinal propositions, when what Paul is really doing is telling the story of God and his people.  Paul does it that way in part because it puts the faithfulness of God to his promises front and centre and gives us reason to believe him and to trust him, but Paul also puts this all in terms of this great story of redemption, because it shows us our place in the story.  When we look at this in terms of the story, what stands out in the middle of it is that we are, by faith in the Messiah, members of Abraham’s promised family.  By faith in Jesus the Messiah, not by circumcision or torah or anything else.  By faith in Jesus the Messiah.  Getting that right was the solution to the problems in Galatia.  Think about that.  When we think about Christian identity, how often do we think of in terms of being sons and daughters of Abraham?  This was a really, really big deal for Paul.  And as much as we sang the song about Father Abrahamwhen we were kids in Sunday School—I am one of them, and so are you—this theme is almost entirely ignored down through the history of the church.  We even have a whole school of recent evangelical theology committed to the idea that only ethnic Jews are children of Abraham.  But this truth, that we are children of Abraham and heirs of God’s promises to him, it’s absolutely essential to Paul.  So much so, that for him the gospel stands or falls on this truth.  It means that we’re part of the story and it means that as God pours his Spirit into us and makes us his temple, we see his faithfulness to his promises.

 

Think on that as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning.  We eat the bread and drink the wine as one family in fulfilment of the promises that the Lord made so long ago to Abraham.  We are brothers and sisters, because Jesus has, by his grace, grafted us into this family.  The simple fact that we are here together and that God has poured his Spirit into us, is proof of his faithfulness.  So eat the bread and drink the wine, look around at your brothers and sisters, remember our place in this story, and have faith, believe, trust.  We live in difficult days and like, Charles Blondin’s manager, sitting on his shoulders and looking down at the long drop and the churning waters, we might be tempted to get down and walk the tightrope ourselves.  Brothers and Sisters, keep the faith, keep trusting in the God who has proved himself faithful.  Jesus and the Spirit have brought us this far and Jesus and the Spirit will see us through to the end.

 

Let’s pray: Gracious Father, who keep us steadfast in faith, we pray.  We are fickle, but you have proved yourself faithful.  Remind us always of the great story into which you have grafted us so that we live in your faithfulness, redeemed by your Son and renewed by your Spirit.  Give us grace to trust and obey you and to be your river of gospel life flowing to the nations.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

As I was preparing to preach on the central part of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, beginning with Chapter 3, it occurred to me that it would be an understatement to say that Paul spends a lot of time talking about Abraham.  A lot.  Not just about Abraham himself, but about a whole host of themes that go back to Abraham’s story.  Themes like faith and faithfulness, seed and inheritance, and of course righteousness.  And as I was thinking about that and especially about the reason why Paul spends so much time talking about Abraham, it occurred to me that today would be a good time for an interlude before we launch into Paul’s grand argument.  That’s what I’d like to do this morning.

 

So why does Paul talk so much about Abraham?  The way some commentators talk, you might think that Paul was doing nothing more than proof-texting.  He needed an example of faith over works from the Hebrew scriptures and, voila, there was Genesis 15.  Or, it’s possible that the agitators in Galatia were appealing to Genesis 17, the passage where the Lord gave the covenantal sign of circumcision to Abraham.  So, naturally, Paul goes two chapters back to show that well before circumcision was a thing, there was faith.  But Paul had a greater reason than any of that.  Paul never engages in shallow proof-texting.  And Paul never talked about theology or doctrine in the abstract the way people often do today.  Paul told a story and Abraham was important to Paul, because Paul saw the gospel as the culmination of the great story of the God of Israel and his people and of his promises and of his faithfulness and how it all comes to fulfilment in Jesus the Messiah.  Everything for Paul rides on that great story and it begins with Abraham, because God’s calling of Abraham was the answer—or, at any rate, the beginning of the answer—to the mess into which the human race and the whole word have fallen.  Right from the get go, Adam went wrong.  Because of his rebellion against God Adam was cast out of the garden temple he’d been created to steward, and he was cut off from the life of God.  And from there his descendants went from bad to worse.  Even wiping out the whole human race in a flood, while saving the one righteous man left, even that didn’t fix the problem.  From righteous Noah it’s only a turn of the page to the Tower of Babel.  All of humanity had lost the knowledge of God.  The world was lost in darkness.  And then out of the darkness the Lord called Abram: “Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house to the land I will show you.  And I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing…all the clans of the earth through you shall be blessed.”  And, the storyteller records, “Abram went forth as the Lord had spoken.”

 

For years Abram believed and trusted this strange God who had called him to Canaan and made him an outrageous promise.  And the Lord blessed Abram with sheep and cattle and camels, he blessed him with a great reputation, he defeated king for him, but the central part of that promise—the land and especially the family never came to pass.  And so, in Genesis 15, the Lord speaks to Abram again:

Seed.  A family.  Children.  At least one single son to be his heir.  The promise required at least that in order to be fulfilled.  But Abram was an old man.  His wife was long past her child-bearing years.  It looked like everything would soon pass to Abram’s servant, Eliezer, and the promise would be dead.  As I read Abram’s protest here, I can’t help but think of the father of the possessed boy in Mark’s gospel.  He cried out to Jesus, “I believe, but help my unbelief.”  Abram knew this strange God was real.  Of all the gods, this was the only who had ever spoken.  And Abram had followed him to Canaan, and there this God provided And now, years later, Lord was no longer a stranger.  The Lord was real, but would he prove to be truly faithful to his promise?  The story goes on:

And now the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “This one will not be your heir, but he who issues from your loins will be your heir.”  And he took him outside and he said, “Look up to the heavens and count the stars, if you can count them.”  And he said, “So shall be your seed.”  And he [Abram] trusted in the Lord, and he [the Lord] reckoned it to him as righteousness.

The Lord reiterated his promise to Abram: a promise of seed and a promise of an inheritance.  And Abram, looking back on the Lord’s faithfulness so far…this God who had started out a stranger to him, but was now a faithful friend…Abram had faith.  Some translations say he “trusted” and others he “believed”.  The Hebrew word has a pretty clear sense of trusting in someone or something who has proved himself trustworthy, reliable, faithful.  Despite that, I’ve noticed that we often struggle to get this part of the story right.  A lot of us hear those words, “Abram believed…”  or “Abram had faith…” and we think of this as something Abram did with only his brain.  Knowing what he did of the Lord, he gave his intellectual assent to this promise.  For a lot of us “belief” or “faith” is mainly a thinking word and in large part that’s because in our Protestant tradition we’ve tended to drive a wedge, to set up a wall between faith and works.  The Reformers were right when they said that salvation is by faith alone, but that doesn’t mean that faith is just something we do in our heads.  Faith is organically intertwined with trust and trust is organically intertwined with obedience.  Faith in a God whom we know to be faithful naturally works itself out in how we live.  Abram followed where the Lord led him, because that’s the nature of faith.

 

It's worth taking note of how the later Jews translated this into Greek.  Greek has a word group for belief that puts the emphasis on our brains and on thinking.  Dokeo.  It’s the dox in orthodox, which means to believe or to think the right thing.  But instead, the translators of the Old Testament chose the word pisteuo.  Sometimes this pistis word group can get into the brainy, the thinking aspects of belief, but most of the time it’s more like that Hebrew word.  It's not just intellectual assent, it’s not just thinking the right things, it means to trust, to give yourself over to someone or something proved to be faithful.  In the Greco-Roman world, pistis was the sort of loyalty, allegiance, and trust around which communities were built.

 

This language of trust was how the Jews thought and it’s how the early Christians thought.  It’s a sad part of our history that over the centuries we’ve tended more and more towards the idea of faith as primarily a thinking thing.  Consider how we think of the creeds.  We usually think of them as a set of theological propositions.  I believe in God the Father.  I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son our lord.  I believe in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.  We think of these as bits of abstract doctrine that define right belief—again, that’s what “orthodoxy” means.  We learn the creeds and we give them our intellectual assent.  It’s something we do with our brains.  And that’s good so far as it goes, but consider that the creed started out in the early church as a baptismal affirmation.  People—pagans—encountered the good news about Jesus and the faithfulness of the God of Israel, they heard the story that went back all the way to Abraham—of this God who gave promises and then kept them, of a God unlike anything they knew in the pagan pantheon, of a God who reveals himself in Jesus, his incarnate son, of a God who gives his life for the sake of his people—and they believed.  They put their trust in this God who made heaven and earth; in this God who revealed himself in his son, born of Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, and who rose three days later; in this God who now gives his own Spirit to quicken, to enliven his people.  Like Abraham, they were leaving behind their countries and their families, and stepping out in trusting faith into a new world and into a new life in which they were risking persecution and even martyrdom.  Their faith wasn’t just an intellectual exercise; they were entrusting their whole selves to this God whose story they confessed in the creed, a story that was now their story.

 

I’ve been reading Teresa Morgan’s newish book on the language of faith in early Christianity and she very helpfully puts it this way, “The translators [of the Greek Old Testament] regularly chose pistis language at moments of change and decision-making, when the relationship between God and his people is portrayed as entering a new phase, or a covenant is made which will create or shape Israel in the future.”[1]  It’s language of trust, and of loyalty, and of obedience—not just something that happens in the brain.  God is doing something new, maybe even strange or bewildering, and this is the language of his people committing themselves to him in this new thing, because they know him to be faithful.

 

And I think that now moves us from the “Abram trusted” part of Genesis 15:6 right to the “and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” part.  What does that mean?  Well, how we read this—probably for most of us, whether we realise it or not—has been shaped by Martin Luther and the Reformers.  Luther confronted the medieval church, which was falsely teaching a theology of merit, a gospel in which our works and the works of the saints earn us a place in God’s presence—one we could even buy with money.  Luther believed—actually this is a good example of that idea of trust, because this wasn’t just a thinking exercise for Luther, he put his life on the line for the gospel—but Luther believed that salvation is by grace alone through faith.  He was right.  And this was one of the key passages he drew on.  The problem was that Luther was reading Sixteenth Century problems back into Paul’s First Century letter to the Galatians and back into Abraham’s story in Genesis.  And that meant that Luther was sort of looking for the right answer in the wrong place—or maybe, better, asking the wrong question of the right text.  And so, in light of the works-righteousness he was arguing against, Luther took “righteousness” to mean a moral quality—one that we sinners lack and one that Jesus has.  So for Luther, when Paul cites the story of Abram and how Abram believed and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, that meant that when we put our faith in Jesus, a sort of legal transaction takes place in the heaven courtroom, and Jesus’ righteousness becomes our righteousness and we become acceptable to God.  And I think if Paul were alive to hear that, he'd give us a bit of a funny look and say, “Well, if righteous did mean some kind of moral status, then I guess you’d be right, but that’s not what righteous means.  Righteousness is about our God’s covenants.”  Because for Paul, to be reckoned as “righteous” was first and foremost about being part of God’s covenant people—about living in his promises—because that’s what Genesis 15 is about.  Let’s look back at the rest of Genesis 15, beginning at verse 7.  We’ve been told that Abram trust in the Lord’s promise and that the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.  The rest of the chapter tells us what that means.

So in response to Abrams’ faith, the Lord establishes a covenant with him.  In Abram’s culture this is how binding agreements were made.  Two parties would work out the details of the agreement.  Maybe it was two kings pledging military support to each other.  It might be two rich men established a boundary between their lands.  It might be a king and his vassal, the vassal pledging a tribute and the king pledging to defend his vassal with his army.  They would clearly state the conditions of the covenant and then they would make a sacrifice.  They might slit the throat of a bull, saying in other words, may this be done to me if I am not faithful to what I have promised.  And this is what happens here in Genesis 15.  In response to Abram’s faith, the Lord comes to Abram in this sombre ceremony to ratify his covenant promises.  He passes through this pathway between the halved carcasses of the animals Abram has slaughtered, as if to say, “May this happen to me if I am faithless.”  This is, I think, one of the most profound passages in the Bible with regard to the Lord’s faithfulness.  And this is what Paul is retrieving in his argument with the Galatians.  It’s why he talks about things like “seed” and “inheritance” and it’s why he talks about faith and faithfulness and righteousness.  He’s saying that in the gospel, in the good news about Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, we see the ultimate example of the faithfulness of God to his promises and that through faith in Jesus we become part of this covenant community in which God has pledged himself to us.

 

So this is why Abraham was so important for Paul.  This is why he talks about Abraham’s seed and Abraham’s inheritance to the Galatians.  But it might not be so obvious how he connects it to Jesus.  So…there’s more to the story of God and Israel than Abraham.  As the story goes on other actors walk on stage and eventually one of those will be Israel’s king.  And so Paul also recalls Psalm 2, which is one of the “royal psalms”.  It begins with the nations raging.  The kings of the earth plot together against the God of Israel, but the Psalmist sings:

 

         The Lord said to me, “You are my Son;

In Genesis the Lord promised the land as an inheritance to Abraham, and in Psalm 2 that promised inheritance is given to the coming Davidic king, but it’s expanded—from the land of Canaan to the ends of the earth.  And Paul brings these two promises, these two covenants together in Galatians.  It’s not just the Lord’s promise to Abraham that is fulfilled in Jesus, but his promises to the king, too.  And that’s important.  Remember what I said last week about the king and his people.  The king represents his people.  What’s true of him is true of them.  And that means that the inheritance promised to Abraham now belongs to King Jesus and his people.

 

This was vitally important to Paul, because for Paul the most important thing about the gospel is that in it God reveals, he proves his faithfulness and, in response, we give him glory.  I think we often miss this.  For Paul the gospel was centred on God, but we often centre the gospel on us.  Brothers and Sisters, the gospel is for us, but it’s not about us.  I can’t really say it any better than Tom Wright does.  He makes the point that “Paul understood…[his]…mission not simply as a way of ‘getting people converted…”  because that would be a human-centred gospel…“but as the symbolic as well as actual means of extending and displaying the reign of Israel’s God, and of his ‘Son,’ to the ends of the earth.”[2]  In other words, the gospel—and the proclamation and spread of the gospel out into the pagan world—was the fulfilment of God’s promises, proving his faithfulness, and ultimately to bring the nations before him in glory and praise.

 

Now, if we have any lingering doubts about this covenantal meaning of “reckoning it to him as righteousness”, I think there’s one more passage that clears it up.  Psalm 106:30-31 praises Aaron’s grandson Phinehas.  You might remember that I mentioned him a few weeks ago.  The Psalm says:

 

Phinehas intervened.  Specifically, he speared one of the Israelites along with his Moabite mistress as they were, so to speak, in the act.  And for that act of faithfulness, the Lord appointed Phinehas and his descendants to a special role in Israel’s priesthood.  Or as the Psalmist says, his act was counted to him as righteousness from generation to generation forever.  In response to Phinehas’ faith, the Lord established a covenant with him—he made a promise to him.  In this case, it’s clear that “reckon as righteousness” doesn’t mean that the Lord credited Phinehas with a moral surplus and it doesn’t mean that for Abraham either.  It’s about God’s covenant, which he established with Abraham and his “seed”.  And this is what Paul’s picking up on in Galatians when he makes his argument that the gentiles are just as much a part of God’s family in Jesus as the Jews are—that these formerly unclean pagans are as much and as really Abraham’s descendants as he, a “Hebrew of Hebrews” is.  “If you belong to the Messiah,” Paul writes in 3:29, “you are Abraham’s family (his seed) and you stand to inherit the promise.”

 

But family and land weren’t the only things the Lord promised in his covenant to Abram.  The Lord also promised that Abraham’s family would become slaves in Egypt, but that he would ultimately rescue them.  This is as much a part of what Abraham’s family will be as all the other things the Lord promises.  From the beginning, the Lord establishes this family as a rescued-from-slavery people.  It’s in their covenantal DNA.  It literally comes to pass just as the Lord said, but since this is in their DNA, it’s the lens through which the Jews would forever see themselves.  That’s why in Paul’s day saw this as their ongoing story.  It was a story of blessing followed by the curse of exile, but one day—because it’s who God had made them as a people—one day their God would come and rescue them again and live in their midst.

 

So Paul shows how the gospel embodies and fulfils this promise of seed and inheritance to Abraham, he shows how it embodies and fulfils the promise of slavery and rescue, and that means that, third and finally, the gospel also embodies and fulfils the exodus promise of God to dwell in the midst of his people.  The prophets sometimes explained God’s presence in the temple in terms of his Spirit and this, I think, explains how Ezekiel and Joel could promise that God would renew his people by means of his Spirit.  This was the future that Israel’s story looked towards: an end of exile and God’s presence through his renewing Spirit.  And this is why Paul, as part of his argument in Galatians, points to the present indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the people of God, as the earnest or the down payment, of the foretaste or firstfruits of the ultimate fulfilment of the Lord’s promised inheritance to Abraham.

 

And that brings us back to the creed.  My point has been that Paul, rather than talking about abstract theological propositions, tells a story—the story of God and his people, of his promises and their fulfilment—and our place in that story.  The people from James and the agitators in Galatia, they knew that story, but they were leaving important parts out, so Paul goes back to the beginning and tells it all again, to show them the bits they missed—or maybe the bits they remembered, but hadn’t yet learned to see in light of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  It is kind of remarkable how, as Paul tells us the story of the one, true God, the God of Israel, what emerges is a story of the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—there all along, but finally and fully known through this new covenant, this new promise ratified by the blood of Jesus.  I know my first point this morning has been to help you understand why Abraham was so important to Paul, so that as we get into his main argument we’ll understand why he says the things he does, but I also want to encourage you to think—or maybe I should say to trust—in the story.  The next time you recite the creed, don’t just think of it as a set of theological propositions that need to be affirmed to be orthodox.  Think of it as the great story of God and his people, the great story of his promises and his faithfulness, the great story that reveals the redeeming grace of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the great story that ultimately ends with the world finally set to rights and proclaiming his glory—the great story into which we have been baptised—the great story in which we live.

 

Let’s pray: Almighty God, our gracious Father, who called Abraham out of the darkness and promised to make his family a light to the nations, we pray that as we recall the great story of your faithfulness, and especially how you have fulfilled your promises in Jesus and the Spirit, teach us to trust in and to find our assurance in you, not just in our heads and with our brains, but as we commit our whole selves to you and become, ourselves, part of the great story of your faithfulness.  Amen.

[1] Roman Faith and Christian Faith (Oxford, 2015), 188.

[2] Galatians (Eerdmans, 2021), epub edition.

In the Messiah

Galatians 2:11-21

by William Klock

We’re all familiar with the image of the two masks, side-by-side, representing tragedy and comedy—one face frowning and the other smiling.  The image represents the theatre, whether it’s on playbills, or carved on the outside of a building, or use to mark the location of a theatre on a map.  That image is something that goes all the way back to ancient Greece.  Back then all the actors were men, there was no makeup, and many people sat far enough away that it was hard to see who was who.  So that the audience would know who was on stage and what they were about, the actors held masks in front of their faces—a bit larger than life and with exaggerated features and expressions.  The Greeks had a name for this sort of acting and it’s come straight into English: hypocrites—hypocrite, hypocrisy.  By St. Paul’s day the word had evolved beyond describing actual actors in a play.  It still did, but it commonly referred to someone who was playing a deceitful game of false pretences and pretending to be someone they really weren’t.

 

As we move on in Galatians 2, Paul levels this charge at Peter.  Not very long before Paul got word of what was going on in the Galatian churches and wrote this letter, Peter had travelled up to Antioch from Jerusalem.  This was a church of both Jews and gentiles and hat may be why Peter visited.  As we saw last week, Peter and Paul had agreed that Peter had been sent to the Jews and Paul to the gentiles, so here’s Peter going to visit the Jews in Antioch.

 

You would think after what had happened when Paul visited Jerusalem, after he stood firm against the “circumcision party” and found that he and Peter were ultimately in agreement with each other, you would think this visit to Antioch by Peter would have gone smoothly, but it did not.  Look at what Paul write in Galatians 2:11-14.

 

But when Cephas [again, that’s Peter’s Greek name just like Paul is Saul’s Greek name] came to Antioch, I stood up to him face to face.  He was in the wrong.  Before certain persons came from James, Peter was eating with the gentiles.  But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, because he was afraid of the circumcision people.  The rest of the Jews did the same, joining him in this play-acting.  Even Barnabas was carried along by their sham.  But when I saw that they weren’t walking straight down the line of gospel truth, I said to Cephas in front of them all: “If you’re a Jew, but you’ve been living like a gentile, how can you force gentiles to become Jews?”

 

This issue of Jews and gentiles just wouldn’t go away.  Paul thought it was settled after his visit to Jerusalem, but then it happened again when Peter came to visit in Antioch, and now, like a cancer, it’s spread to the churches in Galatia.  No doubt, the agitators in Galatia had already told the churches there their version of what had happened in Antioch, so now Paul tells them what really happened.

 

Before all this, Jewish and gentile believers in Antioch—and Galatia, for that matter—gathered as one people to worship, to pray, and maybe most importantly, to eat the Lord’s Supper.  It helps to remember that in those early days, the Lord’s Supper was part of or at least attached to an actual meal where the people would fellowship with each other.  This gathering together, this eating together was a profound living out of the power of the gospel.  When Jesus died and rose again, he dealt with sin and that put everyone, Jew and gentile alike, on an even footing.  There was no longer clean and unclean, just and sinner: all in Jesus were clean and just.  And this bringing together of the two peoples, it was God’s new creation made visible in the life of the early church—a powerful witness of the gospel itself.

 

We might not think much of it, but it was a big deal.  Jews had been raised, steeped in observance of the law.  Gentiles were sinners and their food was unclean—even their fellowship was unclean.  Think of Peter and his vision in Acts of the sheet let down from heaven full of unclean animals and the Lord telling him to eat.  Revulsion had been instilled in Peter from his birth.  There was a massive “ick” factor.  Our culture, in contrast, has become so accepting of everything that there’s not much left we can compare it to, but maybe you can think of the current conspiracy theories about Klaus Schwab telling everyone to “Eat ze bugs”.  It gets people worked up, because of the deeply ingrained revulsion we have in our culture to eating bugs.  It would have been something like that for Jews to fellowship with, to eat with gentiles.

 

On the other end of things, the gentiles knew full well about those Jewish weirdos and their over-the-top purity laws.  Jews were everywhere spread through the Greco-Roman world, so the pagans encountered them regularly in daily life and in business and were well aware of the revulsion they had to eating with them.  So, that the early Jesus people were not only gathering together to worship and pray, but also gathering together around the same table to share bread and wine.  It was a really big deal.  It got everyone’s attention.

 

And so Peter came to visit Antioch and, Paul says, he worshipped and he prayed and he came to the Lord’s Table with his gentile brothers and sisters.  Everything was fine.  And then the cancer that Paul thought had been stomped out in Jerusalem, the cancer came to Antioch.  Certain people from James came.  Paul doesn’t elaborate on what that means, since the Galatians probably knew who those people were.  Maybe they were sent by James.  Probably they came and claimed authority from James that they didn’t really have.  Whatever the case, they carried the cancer with them.  Paul calls them “circumcision people”.  They had some connection with the pseudo-family members who had been smuggled into the meeting in Jerusalem and who had insisted that Titus be circumcised.  And Peter caved into their pressure.  He “drew back” and “separated himself” and then when the other Jews in Antioch saw Peter do that, they followed suit.  Even Barnabas.  We get a sense of Paul’s shock and dismay that even his partner Barnabas whom he knew knew better, even he went along with this sham.  This is where Paul uses that play-acting term.  Peter and Barnabas and the other Jews acted like hypocrites.  They knew better.  But under pressure from these agitators they withdrew and gathered separately.  They put up masks to placate the agitators and in doing that—not realising what they’d done—they become the people-pleasers so despised by their tradition.  They were gospel people, but to keep the peace they held up anti-gospel masks in front of their faces.

 

Paul knew that this wasn’t the real Peter—or the real Barnabas for that matter. They knew better.  Peter had known this for years before Paul had.  The real Peter behind the mask, the real Peter knew in his bones that the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection created one family in which Jews and gentiles stood on equal footing in the Messiah.  This new reality wasn’t easy for Jews steeped for a lifetime in torah to adjust to.  There was a massive “ick” factor to overcome.  But the gospel is a powerful thing and so is God’s Spirit and adjust they had.  And now, inexplicably to Paul, Peter and the others were dividing what Jesus had made one.

 

Paul says that they weren’t walking the straight line of gospel truth.  The word is orthopodeo—where we get our word “orthodpaedic”.  The gospel draws a straight line and they should have been walking it, but they weren’t.  So Paul says to Peter, “Look here, you’re a Jew, but you’ve been living like a gentile.”  He means that Peter’s been eating with gentile believers and that almost certainly also means that Peter’s been eating gentile food that was off-limits to Jews.  “So then,” Paul asks, “How can you force gentiles to become Jews.”

 

Peter probably would have answered that, no, he wasn’t trying to force anyone to be a Jew.  They could each just do their own thing.  But that brings up images of the temple, where Jews could enter the temple court, while gentiles were stuck outside in the Court of the Gentiles—they weren’t really members of the community, of God’s people.  That’s why Paul is so insistent here.  There is one people—and Peter knew this and Paul knew—there is one people in Jesus the Messiah, not two.  In the Messiah.  This new community is defined not by ethnicity or ethnic markers but messianically by faith in Jesus and nothing else.  If we’re going to divide it up again, well, what’s the point?  To do so undermines the gospel itself and we might as well just throw in the towel.

 

So beginning at verse 15 Paul lays out the argument he gave Peter, because it’s this same gospel-killing cancer that has infected the Galatian churches.  They need to hear it too.  So Paul writes in verse 15:

 

We are Jews by birth, not “gentile sinners”.

 

For Jews there were two groups of people on this earth: the just or righteous—the Greek word carries both those meanings—and sinners.  Jews were the just, the righteous, chosen by God and marked out by obedience to the torah.  Everyone else was a sinner and this is why they kept themselves separate.  But, Paul goes on:

 

But we know that a person is not declared “righteous” by works of the [Jewish] law, but through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.

 

So God had chosen the Jewish people and then gave them his law so that be living it, they’d be set apart.  It’s what marked them out as different from gentile sinners.  And they expected that one day, the Lord would send his Messiah and the Messiah would vanquish the gentile sinners and lead the righteous into God’s new age.  But instead—and this was what Paul had to work through after meeting the risen Jesus—instead, the Messiah came and sinners crucified him.  That wasn’t how anyone thought the whole Messiah thing would go.  Ordinarily, being crucified would mean Jesus wasn’t really the Messiah.  Other men claimed to be the Messiah, they were killed, and that was the end of their messianic claims.  But then God raised Jesus from death.  In doing that he overturned the charge of false messiah laid against him and proved that Jesus was, in fact, the real deal, the Messiah.  Jesus did, in fact, inaugurate God’s new age, his new creation.  So why did he have to die?  That’s when Paul—and the others—realised that as much as torah provided both a righteous way of living and a means of atonement when they failed to be 100% obedient—there was more to righteousness that torah could never provide.  The very fact that torah was necessary to set apart God’s people, highlights that both Jew and gentile alike are subject to the slavery of sin and death.  So Jesus the Messiah let sin rise up and do its worst at the cross, then rose triumphant over it.  Jesus did something that torah could never but do, but in light of Jesus Paul realised, it was something torah had been pointing to all along.

 

Now, there’s an unspoken subtext going on here that we need to understand.  Remember that Messiah mean’s God’s anointed king—the king.  And for Jews, a king represented his people.  So what was true of a king is also true of his people.  This is why godly kings brought blessing on Israel and wicked kings brought curses and ultimately exile.  A king represents his people.  Paul likes to talk about being “in the Messiah” and when he says that, this is what he’s getting at.  We’ll need to know this as Paul goes on.

 

So as much as Paul and his fellow Jews had always thought that righteousness came through the law, it turns out that God had something greater in store.  A greater righteousness, true righteousness comes through the faithfulness—through the faithfulness of the Messiah.  Jews had been faithful to torah and to the Lord’s covenant and that faithfulness marked them out as the “righteous”, but their faithfulness to God was but a shadow of the loving, gracious, self-giving faithfulness to God that Jesus displayed on the cross.  That’s the faithfulness that has created a new people of God, a new and “righteous” or “just” people defined by faith in Jesus.  So Paul goes on:

 

That is why we too believed in the Messiah, Jesus: so that we might be declared “righteous” on the basis of the Messiah’s faithfulness, and not on the basis of works of the [Jewish] law.  On that basis, you see, no creature will be declared “righteous”.

 

Peter and now the Galatians had forgotten what it was all about.  Peter seems just to have wanted to avoid conflict—which we see is a problem in other places in Peter’s story, not least at Jesus’ trial.  For the Galatians it was likely fear of persecution.  Remember that in the ancient word, “religion” wasn’t some nice box you opened up on Sunday, and then closed up the rest of the week.  It wasn’t something you did in private.  The gods were everywhere and a part of every aspect of life.  The fastest growing cult of the time was the cult of Caesar and if you weren’t part of that, well, you were disloyal and unpatriotic.  Jews had a special exemption from all this pagan stuff, but these gentile converts to Christianity were in a tough spot.  When they became Christians they withdrew from all this paganism.  They stopped going to the temples and offering incense to Caesar and doing all the other little things people did throughout daily life and that got them into trouble.  So since Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and following him was sort of a new way of being Jewish, they claimed the Jewish exemption and pretty soon the “real” Jews were insisting that if they were going to call themselves Jews, they’d better at least by circumcised.  But once they did that and strayed off the straight line of gospel truth, they started to forget what the gospel was all about.

 

So Paul reminds Peter and he reminds the agitators in Galatia: this greater righteousness found in the faithfulness of the Messiah, remember, this is why we believed in him!  In light of Jesus death for sins on the cross—remember?—we realised that in the end, torah won’t cut it.  Righteousness is found in the faithfulness of King Jesus.  He goes on in verses 17 and 18:

 

Well, then, if in seeking to be declared righteous in the Messiah, we ourselves are found to be sinners, does that make the Messiah an agent of sin?

 

This is the accusation of the agitators and of the “people from James”.  As part of living out the life of the gospel, Paul and Peter have been eating and fellowshipping with gentiles.  The agitators, stuck in the old, pre-Jesus and pre-gospel way of Jewish thinking, for them that makes Peter and Paul and all the others to be “sinners”—because they’re disregarding torah and the boundary markers that have always been there.  If eating with gentile believers for the sake of the Messiah makes them sinners, then that would make the Messiah an agent of sin.  Paul’s trying to show them how absurd their accusations are.  No, he’s saying:

 

Certainly not!  If I build up once more the things which I tore down, I demonstrate that I am a lawbreaker.

 

They’ve forgotten that Jesus has changed everything.  Jesus’ death has dealt with sin—for both Jew and gentile.  Gentile believers are no longer sinners.  They’re clean.  Paul’s reminding them that the boundary markers of God’s people have changed because of that.  What now counts is being “in the Messiah”.  They’re trying to rebuild what the old walls and in doing so they’re undermining the very saving gospel in which they’ve trusted.  It’s a senseless thing to do.  It’s like calling the police chief to help you bury the body of the guy you just killed.  It’s not going to end well for you.

 

So now, finally, we get to Paul’s familiar and glorious text about incorporation into Jesus the Messiah.  Look at verse 19:

 

Let me explain it like this: Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God.  I have been crucified with the Messiah.  I am, however, alive—but it is no longer I; it’s the Messiah who lives in me.  And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

 

I think the best way to see this is as Paul telling the story of the Messiah’s death and resurrection as his own story.  This is what it means to be “in the Messiah”.

 

Notice how Paul doesn’t just dismiss the law, torah.  One of the first heresies—and one that pops up perennially in church history—was the teaching of Marcion who dismissed the law and the whole Old Testament as irrelevant.  For Paul, though, you can’t have the new covenant without the old.  Torah was building towards Jesus and the cross and the giving of the Spirit all along.  So Paul doesn’t just say he died to law—which we might think means the law doesn’t matter.  He says that through the law, he died to the law.  In Jesus the law fulfilled its purpose and so in Jesus, Paul is now fully alive to God.  How does that work.  Well, Jesus was crucified and in that he dealt with sin.  Remember, again, that the king represents his people.  So Paul says, he has been—in Greek it’s literally—"co-crucified” with the Messiah.  Through faith in Jesus, through identification with the Messiah, Paul has died to sin.  And then he says, “I am—however—alive.”  Of course he is.  If he is in the Messiah, if he has been co-crucified with the Messiah, then he has also been co-raised with the Messiah.  I am alive—but—it is no longer I; it’s the Messiah who lives in me.

 

Brothers and Sisters, notice how Jesus has changed Paul’s identity.  That’s what he’s getting at here.  By faith he has been incorporated into the Messiah so that even though he still lives in the flesh—that final day when we will be made completely new still awaits us—but even though Paul still lives in the flesh, because he is in the Messiah, he now lives within the faithfulness of the Messiah—the son of God—and now Paul makes it more personal—not just that the son of God died, but that he loved me and gave himself for me.  This isn’t just abstract theology.  Jesus, the son of God, was faithful to fulfil torah, and gave himself not just generally for humanity (although that is true), but he gave himself for Paul—for me—for you—out of love, again for you, for me.  Sometimes we need that reminder.  All the theology, all the explanation, all the argumentation to bring false teaching and false gospels to heel is necessary, but in the midst of all that, never forget that Jesus died for you, for me, because  he loves us—not just that he loves humanity as a whole in some general sense, but that he knows and loves each one of us.  He died for you.  He rose for you.  And he’s baptised you into his own Holy Spirit so that you can share in his resurrection life.

 

Paul drives home this very personal aspect of the gospel.  Peter knew this.  The Galatians new this.  And that makes it all the more powerful when he ends his argument saying in verse 21:

 

I don’t set aside God’s grace.  If “righteousness” comes through the law, then the Messiah died for nothing.”

 

He’s reminded them that in his grace, God sent his son to die for you.  But if you start rebuilding that old wall, if you start acting like “righteousness”—he means membership in the community of God’s people—if you start acting like “righteousness” comes through the law and the old boundary markers, then what you’re really saying is that Jesus died for nothing.  Whether Jews and gentile would eat together might seem like a small thing, but it wasn’t.  Eat separately undercut the very foundation of the gospel.  That’s not really an issue for us today—although there are some modern-day groups that do add torah to Jesus.  But Paul would have the same thing to say to anyone today who would divide up the people of God or who would exclude these people or those people based on something added to the gospel.  Our identity, Brothers and Sisters, whatever it was in the past or whoever the world around us tell us we are, our real identity, the identity that matters is in Jesus the Messiah and nothing else.  We have died and now live in Jesus.

 

This is especially relevant to us today in the mist of our post-modern culture.  Our world is rapidly tribalizing over identity: things like race and sex and sexual orientation.  The new thing is creating our own identities contrary to those that God had given us.  In other cases we’ve turned our sins into identities.  And we find these identities so powerfully defining that we bring them into the church and we hyphenate ourselves.  We’re black-Christians or we’re white-Christians.  There’s an ongoing controversy about those who call themselves gay-Christians.  But Paul reminds us that if we are by faith in the Messiah, we have but one identity.  We have died with the Messiah and while we still live, it is no longer we—whatever our colour or language or sex or past sin—it is the Messiah who lives in us—because he loves each of us so dearly that he gave himself for us.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s the straight line of the gospel.  Come to the Tablet this morning.  Eat the bread and drink the wine and be reminded that Jesus died and rose again for you and that in him, you have died and been raised.  His life, his faithfulness, his love and grace and mercy are now your identity.  No more masks, no more play-acting, just Jesus the Messiah.

 

Let’s pray again our Collect: Lord, give your people grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and with pure hearts and minds to follow you, the only God; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Entrusted with the Gospel

Galatians 1:18-2:10

by William Klock

 

I will never forget the first day I wore my letterman jacket to school.  High school is full of tribes.  There were the jocks and the nerds, there were the art kids and the shop kids, there were the cool girls and the stoners and the geeks.  And it was obvious which tribe everyone belonged to.  I was always carrying around a book by the likes of Tolkien or Asimov.  And my friends and I avoided the cafeteria at all costs.  Instead, we played Dungeons & Dragons in the library.  I had both feet firmly planted in the nerd tribe.  But I was also on the swim team.  The swim team was one of those sports no one paid attention to.  The only people who knew you were on the swim team were other people on the swim team.  So I remember walking into school that day with my letterman jacket on and everybody stopped and looked, because there I was, one of the nerds dressed like a jock.  But once the surprise wore off, everything fell into place.  Suddenly people who had never been friendly to me were friendly.  No questions asked.  That jacket marked me out as part of a new tribe.  I didn’t hang out with the jocks.  I still wouldn’t go anywhere near the cafeteria.  I still carried around my sci-fi novels and played D&D at lunch with the nerds, but to the other jocks it didn’t matter.  I had a letterman jacket and that was all that mattered.

 

It was something like that for Jews, except the thing that marked you out wasn’t a letterman jacket; it was circumcision.  There were other things a good Jew was supposed to do that would also mark them out, because there was more to the torah than circumcision.  You kept the sabbath, you ate only clean foods, you avoided contact with gentiles.  Those were the big ones.  But circumcision was the marker.  You could fail at all those other things.  You could eat shrimp, you could do business on the sabbath, you could hang out with gentiles, but as long as you were circumcised you were still a Jew.  Maybe a bad Jew.  Maybe a people-pleasing Jew.  But still a Jew, because you bore the mark of God’s covenant.

 

With that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine how this would present a problem for the first Christians.  Remember what I said last week.  They didn’t see becoming a Christian as switching religions as we might think of it.  They were still Jews.  Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and he was the fulfilment of everything that Judaism stood for.  When gentiles believed in Jesus, they were joining up with a movement that was very much Jewish.  But what did that involve?  The Lord had cleared this up for Peter in Acts 10, when he sent him to the home of a Roman centurion named Cornelius.  Jews didn’t visit or eat with gentiles, but in a vision the Lord made it clear to Peter that through faith in Jesus, even gentiles were made clean.  And this was absolutely earth-shaking.  Gentiles were unclean because they were idolaters.  They were sinners.  In those few instances where gentiles were attracted to Judaism, converting meant being purified and then being circumcised so that they were no longer sinful, unclean gentiles.  Only then could they associate with Jews and be accepted into the community.  But Paul is stressing—against these agitators in the Galatian churches and their false gospel—Paul is stressing that this new Israel, this new ekklesia or assembly of God, is marked out solely by faith in Jesus and that since Jesus dealt with sin in his death and resurrection, those who believe in him are no longer sinners, no longer unclean, and in need of nothing else in order to be part of the community.  In fact, going further, Paul stresses that the implication of this—and it goes against the grain of everything in Judaism of the day—the implication is that there is only one people of God.  Jew and gentile together—it doesn’t matter, because the thing that always separated the two—sin—has been dealt with by Jesus.  This is why any “gospel” that adds anything to Jesus is false.  We saw in the first part of Chapter 1 that Paul actually calls down a curse on such teaching.  The gospel is Jesus plus nothing.

 

So with this in mind, let’s finish our look at Chapter 1 and then carry on to the first part of Chapter 2.  In the first part of Chapter 1 Paul has asserted first that his apostleship—his being called and sent—came directly from Jesus.  He’s not the representative of any men.  He wasn’t sent out by men—not even by other apostles.  He’s been sent by Jesus.  And having established that, he’s also stressed that his gospel came directly from Jesus, too.  He wasn’t brought to faith in Jesus by Peter or James or anyone else.  Jesus met him on the road to Damascus, risen from the dead, and that changed everything for Paul.  Even then, he said, he didn’t go to Jerusalem to consult with the other apostles.  Instead, like the prophet Elijah, he went to Mount Sinai to wrestle this through with the God of Israel.  There he worked through the implications of Jesus risen from the dead.  Only then did he go back to Antioch.  Now we’ll pick up at 1:18.  Paul writes:

 

Then, after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas [that’s Peter’s Greek name…Cephas and Peter both mean “rock”].  I stayed with him for fifteen days.  I didn’t see any of the other apostles, except James the Lord’s brother.  And then Paul adds to stress his point, Look, I’m not lying!  The things I’m writing to you are written in God’s presence.

 

Paul uses this neat word here to describe his visit to Peter.  This is the only place we ever see it in the New Testament: historesai.  It’s related to the word historia, which means “an account” or “a personal story”.  By Paul’s day it usually just had the sense of visiting someone, but it could still carry the meaning of “to hear another person’s story” and I think it’s clear that’s what Paul wants to stress here.  He could have said that he went to Peter to be taught, but hewants it to be clear that he didn’t go to Peter for lessons on the gospel or on theology.  He’d wrestled that out with God after his encounter with the risen Messiah.  Paul’s gospel was Jesus plus nothing.  Gentiles didn’t need to be circumcised or to live by torah.  Paul had worked this out as the natural and inevitable implication of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  So this visit was about getting to know his fellow apostle, Peter, to hear his story and to bring him up to date on Paul’s own story and apostolic ministry—and hopefully they’d be in agreement about it all.  Again, Paul was sent by Jesus himself and his gospel came directly from Jesus, not from men.  Paul goes on in verses 21-24:

 

Then I went to the regions of Syria and Cilicia.  I remained unknown by sight to the messianic assemblies in Judaea.  They simply heard that the one who had been persecuting them was now announcing the good news of the faith he once tried to destroy.  And they glorified God because of me.

 

So Paul and Peter met, they brought each other up to speed on their ministries and they got to know each other—lining this up with the book of Acts, this would have been Paul’s first visit to Jerusalem, about A.D. 36—and then Paul went back to Syria to continue preaching the good news of faith in Jesus the Messiah.  The Jesus followers in Judaea knew who he was and they rejoiced that the man who had once tried to stamp them out was now one of them, but Paul’s point here is that if they’d seen him on the street, they wouldn’t have known who he was.  Again, apart from being a fellow apostle of Jesus, he had no connection with the apostles in Jerusalem.  He worked for Jesus, not for Peter or James.  And, he stresses, no one had a problem with this.  In fact, the people down in Judaea glorified God to hear of Paul’s gospel ministry.  There’s an echo of Isaiah there, where the Lord says, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”

 

There is one thing that I think needs attention here before we move on and that’s Paul’s way of describing his ministry.  He describes himself as “announcing the good news of the faith”.  To put it literally, he’s “gospelling the faith”.  It’s an unusual way of putting things, but I think Paul does this here to stress what’s going to be his main point in the rest of the letter: This faith—faith in Jesus the crucified and risen Messiah—is the thing that binds Jesus’ people together.  It’s the one thing that marks them out as his—not circumcision or anything else.  Faith in Jesus makes you part of the family.

 

So there’s about a decade of Paul’s life that passes that we know nothing about other than that he was apparently ministering in Antioch and the surrounding area.  He picks up his story in 2:1, saying:

 

After fourteen years [this would be from the time he met Jesus], I went up again to Jerusalem.  I took Barnabas with me, and Titus.  I went up because of a revelation.

 

Not everyone agrees on the timeline, but this seems to align with what we read in Acts 11, where a prophet named Agabus, told the churches that there would be a great famine.  This was in the middle of the 40s.  The church in Antioch—and that included Paul—responded by sending help to their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem.  This is why Paul says he went to Jerusalem because of a revelation.

 

Now, Paul taking money from his church to help other churches might seem incidental, but it really isn’t.  In fact, it’s very much part of the theme of Galatians.  I think there’s a tendency in conservative circles to ignore the way these early churches cared for each other in response to people on the left making claims that the early church was Socialist.  There’s no reason for conservatives to avoid this.  Karl Marx was two millennia away.  There was no “socialism” in the First Century.  What there was, was Christians doing their best to live out who they knew themselves to be in Jesus.  They were a family.  That’s why we call each other “Brother” and “Sister”.  And families take care of each other.  When the brothers and sisters in Damascus heard that their cousins in Jerusalem were struggling, they sent help.  This was a very Jewish way of life.  This was how Jewish communities worked and I think what’s really remarkable here—and something we probably miss in our reading of passages like this—it’s remarkable that the early church was living this way.  The Jews were literally a family, but these new churches, they were different, especially once you got out of Judaea.  There were people of different races and nationalities, there were freemen and slaves, there were men and women and they quickly realised that just like the old Israel, they were a family.  So what’s going on here is them trying to live that out in their communities.  I think this is something modern Christians in the West need to be thinking about, especially as the world around us becomes more hostile towards us.  Our culture is all about “me” and it’s materialistic and commercialistic and we bring that thinking into the church.  We make it all about what the church can offer me.  When we don’t get what we want or when we have a dispute with someone, we leave and go somewhere else.  We go “church shopping”, looking for the right experience or the right combination of “features”.  That’s the polar opposite of what a family is.

 

For Paul, this unity across all these differences of language, ethnicity, class, and sex, it wasn’t some secondary thing.  It was central to the gospel.  Jesus has one people.  Gentiles who believed were no longer to be seen as “sinners” or as “unclean”, because Jesus dealt with sin on the cross.  Anyone who believes becomes a full member of the one family.

 

So Paul went up to Jerusalem carrying the money raised in Antioch.  While he was there—because he was already there anyway—he met with some of the other apostles to talk about his ministry.  Continuing with verse 2:

 

I laid before them the gospel which I announce among the gentiles (I did this privately, in the presence of key people), in case somehow I might be running, or might have run, to no good effect.

 

So did Paul do this because he thought he might have got things wrong and wanted Peter and the others to weigh in one way or the other?  I don’t think that’s it at all.  For ten years Paul had been proclaiming the gospel and he’d seen its power.  He had no doubts that he had the gospel right.  He’d got it straight from Jesus, after all.  His purpose, I think, seems to have been a desire to make sure that he and the others in Jerusalem were really on the same page.  Things had come up.  Maybe things lost in translation between Jerusalem and Antioch, and I think Paul trusted Peter and the others and that the problems were elsewhere, but he wanted to make sure.  If nothing else, we get the sense that Paul really loved Isaiah 49 and that he saw himself in the figure of Isaiah’s “servant”.  He quoted from Isaiah 49:3 back in 1:24 and now he alludes to Isaiah 49:4, “I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward is with God.”  Paul was worried that he might be wasting his time.  If the apostles in Jerusalem were preaching something different, especially something that added torah to Jesus, well then, Paul was kind of doing all this for nothing, because that kind of teaching was going to tear the church apart.  Paul saw this united messianic community representing, unveiling God’s new creation in the midst of the present evil age.  The fact that this new people existed as one despite all their differences, meant that Jesus had defeated the evil powers of this age on the cross.  And if the folks in Jerusalem were going to undermine that…well…why was Paul wasting his time?

 

So Paul says:

 

But even the Greek, Titus, who was with me, was not forced to get circumcised.

 

Not so much because Peter and the others were on the same page with Paul, but because Paul stood firmly on the gospel he’d received from Jesus himself and refused to move from it.  It turns out that not everyone at that meeting was well-meaning.  He goes on:

 

But because of some pseudo-family members who had been secretly smuggled in, who came in on the side to spy on the freedom which we have in the Messiah, Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery… I didn’t yield authority to them, not for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be maintained for you.

 

Someone—Paul doesn’t seem to be clear who—but someone smuggled some folks into that meeting who shouldn’t have been there.  He says literally “pseudo-brothers”.  They pretended—even claimed—to be members of the church family, but in reality they weren’t.  This highlights just how serious Paul thinks it is to mess with the content of the gospel.  No doubt these pseudo-family members claimed to believe in Jesus, but when they realised that Titus, a Greek, was with Paul and uncircumcised, they insisted he be circumcised.  He was unclean—or so they thought.  This was no small thing.  To turn the gospel into a message of Jesus plus circumcision meant that they didn’t really understand the gospel.  They were gutting Jesus’ death and resurrection of their significance.  They were fake family members.  Paul knew that the gospel stands or falls on this.  Either the death and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit defeated the evil powers of the present age, delivered people from their power, and made them new…or it didn’t.  This was the same thing that was happening in Galatia and Paul took a stand even if Peter and the others wouldn’t.  And, he says, he took his stand “so that the truth of the gospel might be maintained for” them—for his brothers and sisters in Galatia.

 

We’ll finish with verses 6-10.  Paul summarises the end result of his meeting with the other apostles:

 

And those who seemed to be something—what sort of “thing” they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality—those of reputation added nothing extra to me.  On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcision, just as Peter had been with the gospel for the circumcision (for the one who gave Peter the power to be an apostle to the circumcision gave me the power of the gospel to the gentiles).  They knew, moreover, the grace that had been given to me.  So James, Cephas, and John, who were reputed to be “pillars”, gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the gentiles, and they to the circumcision.  The only extra thing they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor—the very thing I was eager to do.

 

Paul went into this meeting knowing what people in Judaea thought of Peter, James, and the other original apostles.  The Christians there accorded them a lot of respect.  They were “something” Paul says.  But what Paul didn’t know was how Peter and the others thought of themselves.  Were they basking in that respect and acclaim?  Or were they humble ministers of the gospel?  You see, what Paul stresses here is something that every gospel minister needs to take to heart—all of us, but especially, I think, pastors.  Paul talks about the “power to be an apostle”.  Energeo he calls it—where we get our word “energy”.  But he’s not talking about some kind of tangible energy for the task, but the divine power behind the gospel call.  Paul knew that the gospel wasn’t something that belonged to him.  It was a message he was entrusted with and the power in it lay not with him, but with God himself.  This is why Paul was fearless in his proclamation, this is why he could stand up in a synagogue and preach to hostile Jews and this is why he could stand in the agora in Athens and preach to hostile gentiles.  Because he knew that the power in gospel proclamation lies with God.  If it were just him, his ministry would never have gone anywhere.  But since the power was God’s, Paul could confidently proclaim the good news of the Messiah anywhere and to anyone.  And to Paul’s relief, even though there were some mixed up people in the church in Jerusalem, Peter and the other apostles believed the same thing—they were, after all, all on the same page.  Peter had been given the same calling as Paul.  The only difference was that Peter had been sent to the Jews and Paul to the gentiles—or as he puts it in verse 7, the circumcision and the uncircumcision.  Paul makes sure we don’t forget the matter in Galatia.

 

In the middle of this, Paul’s description of Peter, James, and John as “pillars” jumps out at me, especially in light of why Paul was there.  Remember, he didn’t go there to hash things out with Peter.  He went to Jerusalem to take the relief money that had been raised in Antioch to help the poor in Judaea.  To talk about “pillars” in this context calls up images of the temple and I think that’s exactly why Paul calls Peter and the others “pillars”.  Because God was building a new temple, as Peter would later write in one of his own epistles.  This time not a temple of bricks and mortar, but a temple made of people—men and women with faith in the Messiah and filled with God’s Spirit.  Peter and the others had been the start of it and, as eyewitnesses to Jesus himself and having been entrusted with the powerful message of Jesus, crucified and risen, they were its pillars—holding up the roof and inviting in the world.  But that temple imagery explains Paul’s concern for the relief money he’d brought from Antioch.  That relief money from Antioch was a real, a tangible manifestation of this idea of new creation.  The temple didn’t just stand by itself.  It stood—and it stand here today right now—as a symbol of God’s intention to make the whole world new and to fill it with his glory.  We see this, on the one hand, as these believers—this new family brought together in Jesus—cared for each other.  But the nature of this family, it’s unity across language, ethnicity, class, and status was underscored for Paul in that these Jewish believers in Jerusalem were willing to receive a gift from the believers in Antioch.  Unbelieving Jews probably would have turned it down.  At least they would have asked questions about its origin.  Did this money pass through the hands of unclean gentiles?  Unbelieving Jews would have looked at this motley group of people in Antioch as an abomination and the Jews there as people-pleasers.  But Peter and his people in Jerusalem saw the gospel, they saw Jesus and the Spirit at work in Antioch and knew the church there to be family, to be their brothers and sisters, even though many of them were gentiles.  Again, all because and only because of Jesus.

 

So that’s our text for today.  We’ll pick up next week with 2:11, one of the most significant passages in the New Testament.  But what’s the takeaway here?  I’ve touched on a few things already, but I want to close with two points that are closely tied together.  First, notice that when Paul was confronted with this problem of a mixed church of Jews and gentiles, he knew that there was one thing and nothing else that resolved this old problem.  That one thing was Jesus, specifically his death and resurrection.  He knew that Jesus’ death dealt with sin and that those who have faith in him have been set free from their—from our—bondage to sin.  We are no longer sinners.  In other places Paul will say things like “once you were” and then he’ll go into a list of a bunch of sins, but then he’ll say, “but now you are in Jesus the Messiah”.  You’ve been freed from sin.  It no longer defines you.  What defines you now, through faith, is Jesus and this new family in which he’s given you a place.  This means that there’s one family.  The cross deals with the Jew-gentile divide, just as it deals with all the things that divide us today.  There is one family and our life as the church should reflect that reality.  It's one of the key ways we inhabit the gospel and lift the veil on God’s new creation.

 

Now, finally, closely tied to that is Paul’s insistence on the power and authority of the gospel.  People were dismissing Paul, saying that he was working for other people or that he got his gospel from other people.  In response, Paul has insisted over and over that his calling and his authority lay with Jesus himself.  Neither the power that was revealed in his ministry nor the authority he had came from him—that is, from Paul.  It was all from Jesus.  Brothers and Sisters, we’re too often afraid to proclaim the good news because we forget that the power of the gospel lies not with us, but with God.  We too often get discouraged when our proclamation of the good news doesn’t produce the results we hoped for, because we forget that the power lies not with us, but with God.  Paul will write in 2 Corinthians that the power that raised Jesus from the dead is the power that continues to work through our proclamation to change hearts, to change lives, to change whole communities, and to tear down the fortresses of the powers that once governed this evil age.  Just as the gospel is about Jesus plus nothing, its power lies in Jesus himself.  He sends us out to proclaim it, but when things happen, it’s not us—it’s all him.  We must never forget that.

 

So Brothers and Sisters, come to the Lord’s Table this morning and be reminded of what Jesus has done for us.  Eat the bread and drink the wine together and remember that by faith in Jesus, we are one family no matter our past.  The things that once separated us fade to nothing in light of our union with Jesus the Messiah.  But come, too, this morning and remember that Jesus not only died, he also rose from the grave.  Remember that in him God’s new creation has begun and that we are part of it.  Remember that his resurrection has changed everything and that it’s now both the lens through which we, his people, see ourselves, see each other, and see the world, but it’s also the authoritative root of our gospel proclamation.  Brothers and Sisters, the same God who raised Jesus from the dead now sends us out, just like Paul, to proclaim the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Never forget that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is present in our gospel proclamation and gospel witness.

 

Let’s pray: Almighty God, who on third day raised your Son from the grave, keep us ever mindful, we pray, that you have invested your gospel with the same power.  Remind us that you send us out, not to proclaim ourselves or our own message, but to proclaim with your authority the life-giving power of your gospel.  Make us faithful to live out that gospel in our life together as your church and make us fearless to proclaim it to the world around us, knowing again that it’s authority and power lie not with us, but with you.  Through our Lord Jesus we pray.  Amen.

The Son Unveiled in Me

Galatians 1:10-17

by William Klock

 

As I was digging around in our crawlspace this week, I found my 1970s Tupperware lunchbox full of my old Star Wars action figures.  Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan and Darth Vader have these neat little light sabres hidden in their arms that slide out when it’s time for them to duel.  At one point I had Luke’s X-wing fighter and I was remembering putting him in the cockpit and flying around the house, looking for the Death Star’s thermal exhaust port.  Luke might have been in the cockpit, but I was going to destroy the Death Star and save the galaxy.  As the week went on I was thinking about our text from Galatians 1and particularly Paul’s background.  I started wondering what sort of games and role-playing young Paul would have engaged in?  Who were his heroes?  Based on what he tells us about himself and from what we know of First Century Judaism and of the Pharisees, it isn’t too hard to imagine Paul playing with his brothers or his neighbourhood friends and taking on the part of, say, Phinehas, Aaron’s grandson.  When the men of Israel were enticed into sexual sin and idolatry by the pagan women of Peor, Phinehas, in an act of holy zeal, ran the ringleader through with a spear, pinning him to the ground along with his Midianite paramour.  Or maybe Elijah.  Even though it seemed that everyone in Israel had turned to pagan idols, Elijah dared to confront the prophets of Baal.  On them mountain top, Elijah taunted them and made fun of their god, then—again with holy zeal—called down fire from heaven.  Or Mattathias, the zealous priest who sparked the Maccabean Revolt.  Antiochus Epiphanes offered him the title “Friend of the King” if he would offer a sacrifice to the Greek gods.  Matthias refuse, but another priest offered to make the sacrifice in his place.  Matthias slaughtered that people-pleasing priest on the altar and called on everyone who was zealous for torah and the covenant to join him.

 

These were the heroes of the Pharisees and all the other faithful in Israel in the days of Paul.  In light of that, it’s ironic that the people in Galatia have accused him of being a “people pleaser”, because that’s exactly what Paul—in his old days—would have called any Jews who weren’t as zealous as him in keeping torah.  Of course, it’s the false teachers in Galatia who are being the real people pleasers, but Paul won’t say that until the end of the letter.

 

So let’s start where we left off last Sunday, with verse 10 of Galatians 1.  Paul has written some pretty scathing words to the Galatians.  He’s outlined the essentials of his gospel and he’s pronounced a curse on anyone who teaches anything else.  And now he writes:

 

Well now, does that sound as though I’m trying to make up to people—or to God?  Or that I’m trying to curry favour with people?  If I were still pleasing people, I wouldn’t be a slave of the Messiah.

 

It’s a safe bet that when you hear someone warning about false gospels and pronouncing curses on those who teach such things, you’re not dealing with a people pleaser.  Paul makes that clear.  And then he turns the accusation back on them.  “If I were still pleasing people,” he writes.  As much as Paul the Pharisee had devoted his life to going after the people pleasers who compromised torah in order to curry the favour of the gentiles, well now, from the perspective of life in Jesus and the Spirit, that old life of his turns out—ironically—to have been a life of people pleasing.  He was a slave to them even though it didn’t seem that way at the time, but now he’s a slave to the Messiah and his only interest is in faithfully proclaiming his message and pleasing the God who sent him.

 

But Paul needs to explain himself a good bit more, so he does something that he doesn’t do very often: he tells them—and us—about himself.  Whenever Paul does tell one of these before and after stories, it’s always to end with Jesus.  He does this in Philippians 3 to make the point that for the sake of Jesus and the gospel he’s given up his privileges.  What he says here comes to a climax later in Chapter 2 as he passionately declares that “I am crucified with the Messiah” so that “I through the law died to the law” because “the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me.”  In the end, none of this is about Paul.  It’s about Jesus and the only reason Paul writes any of this is to defend against the charge that his gospel is of human origin and, therefore, in some way deficient.  So he begins in verses 11 and 12:

 

You see, Brothers, let me make it clear to you: the gospel announced by me is not a mere human invention.  I did not receive it from a human being, not was I taught it; it came through an unveiling of Jesus the Messiah.

 

Literally, “I would have you know, Brothers”.  This is important.  Paul first defended his apostleship.  He was commissioned directly by Jesus himself and he speaks for Jesus and no one else.  Now he defends his gospel.  It’s not something he cooked up himself, nor is it something he got second-hand from others.

 

This is worth spending a little time parsing out.  The gospel that you and I know and preach came to us from others.  It was passed down from our parents and grandparents, from our Sunday school teachers and pastors, maybe from a preacher we watched on TV or a book we read.  But somehow all of us here are believers in Jesus the Messiah because someone else proclaimed the good news about him to us and now we—I hope—proclaim it to others.  Even if we first encountered the gospel through the pages of scripture, it came from some other person.  Maybe from Matthew or John or even Paul, but from someone.  Part of the work of the Spirit has been to see that this gospel has been preserved and passed down from one person to the next faithfully.  Even if you or I get it wrong, the Spirit-inspired scriptures are there to set it right again.  But Paul’s point is that he didn’t get the gospel from another human being.  If he’d got his gospel from someone else—even from Peter or James—it’s always possible he got something confused or wrong in the transmission.  If he’d got it from another human, then it’s possible their accusation could stick.  So Paul stresses: “I didn’t get it from anyone else.  It wasn’t taught to me by anyone else.  The gospel came to me directly through an unveiling—he uses that word apocalypse, the same one John uses to describe his “revelation” of Jesus—the gospel came to Paul through an unveiling of Jesus the Messiah.  In other words, Jesus, who was raised from the dead and now enthroned in heaven, suddenly and unexpectedly became visible to Paul.  God’s future was revealed to Paul in the present and it changed everything, because Paul now can’t help but see everything in light of this Jesus whom he knew to be crucified and now knows with absolute certainty, has risen from the dead.  Brothers and Sisters, the reality that Jesus rose from the dead changes everything.  It changed everything for Paul.  It should change everything for us.  It’s the lens through which we should see everything.

 

Paul surely must have told the Galatians the story of his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus.  They already knew the details so he doesn’t recount them all here.  It’s that they’ve forgotten why that day was so important to Paul, so in the next five verses he explains why that event was so important.  He writes in verse 13:

 

You’ve heard the way I behaved when I was still within “Judaism”.  I persecuted the church of God violently and ravaged it.  I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age and people.  I was extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions.

 

Paul’s giving them a before and after portrait of himself.  This is the “before”.  Think of Paul when Stephen was stoned to death for proclaiming the good news about Jesus.  He held people’s coats so they could throw stones.  A few years later he sought out authorisation from the Jewish officials so that he could actually hunt down these Christians and bring them in for “justice”.  Paul wasn’t fooling around.  It helps us understand why and it helps us understand what Saul of Tarsus was all about if we understand what he means here by “Judaism”.  To us “Judaism” means a religion the same way we think of “Christianity” or “Islam” or Buddhism” as religions.  But in the First Century no one thought that way.  Paul certainly didn’t think of “Judaism” over against “Christianity”.  Paul uses this uncommon word Judaismos that seems to have been coined by the author of 2 Maccabees.  It doesn’t just refer to a set of beliefs and practises in the sense that modern people think about a “religion”.  Instead, it describes the Judeans who were loyal to Jewish faith and practise, who actively promoted and advocated these traditional ways of Jewish life, and who actively defended it against the Pagans and, especially, defended it against those Jews who would compromise it for the sake of the pagans—people pleasers.

 

As he says, he was “zealous” for those ancestral traditions.  He was out to purify the Jewish people: to fend off pagan influences, to get his fellow Jews to take a stand for the covenant, and to bring compromisers and people-pleasers to heel.  Paul had grown up with these values.  His heroes were the men of the past who were also zealous for the Lord and for his law.  There are various writings from that time period that give us a sense of how Paul would have thought.  One of the best is the opening chapters of 1 Maccabees, where we read about Mattathias and his rebellion against the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes.  As I said before, Mattathias was a priest, and when the Greeks tried to entice him to offer a sacrifice to their gods, he refused.  When another of his fellow priests agreed to offer the sacrifice, Mattathias had had enough.  He killed that priest right there on the altar, along with the Greek official.  His rebellion went up not just against their pagan Greek rulers, but against any of their fellow Jews who were compromising the ancestral traditions in order to get along with the pagans.  Mattathias’ speech meant to rouse his fellow Jews to action, focuses on the long line of Jewish heroes who were loyal to the Lord’s covenant, from Abraham right down to what was the present day.  Mattathias emphasised especially Phinehas and Elijah.  The later rabbis did the same.  Phinehas had run a spear right through the compromising Zimri and his pagan paramour.  Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal before he slaughtered them and called on the people of Israel to purge pagan influence from the land.  The Maccabees called on that same tradition about two centuries before Jesus, when they went up against the Greeks and against their own people who would compromise with the pagans.  This is what Paul is talking about when he says he was zealous for the ancestral traditions.  I ran around the backyard with Luke Skywalker in his X-wing to destroy the Death Star.  If Paul had grown up with action figures, he’d have had a Phinehas with “real spear action” and an Elijah playset where he could build an altar and call down fire from heaven on the prophets of Baal.  He might have had a little Mattathias, a sword in one hand to take on the Greeks and a knife in the other to circumcise the Jewish people pleasers.  This is the zealous background that drove him to persecute the church.  Paul knew that Jesus had claimed to be the Messiah.  He knew that Jesus had been crucified.  And he didn’t believe the tales for one second that Jesus had been raised from the dead.  As far as he was concerned, Jesus was dead and that meant he couldn’t be the Messiah and all these Jews claiming to follow a dead Messiah, well, they were going to undermine the faith and practise of God’s people.

 

It’s also worth noting how Paul refers to the “church of God”.  It’s literally “assembly of God”.  Paul likes to use this phrase to distinguish the church from the Jews and from the Greeks.  He borrows it from the Greek version of the Old Testament, which talks about Israel as the “assembly of Israel”, “assembly of the Lord”, or “assembly of God”.  And Paul’s point in using it to refer to the church is that now this multiethnic body of Jews and gentiles—now it is the assembly of God.  And not just the local assemblies, but it makes the point that they’re all part of this bigger thing, this bigger assembly.

 

So Paul looks back to his past life and reminds the Galatians who he was.  He was zealous for the traditions of his ancestors.  Not just that, but he was no novice.  He was a diaspora Jew, but he wasn’t like some others who knew just enough of the ancestral customs to get by.  He was steeped in it all and he was utterly devoted to it—again, to the point that he actually sought out permission from the Jewish officials to hunt down Christians in Damascus.  And, of course, that’s when everything changed for Paul.

 

He goes on in verses 15-17:

 

But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, was pleased to unveil his son in me, so that I might announce the good news about him among the nations—immediately I did not confer with flesh and blood.  Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me.  No, I went away to Arabia, and afterward returned to Damascus.

 

This is another point in Paul’s story where we have to be careful.  As modern people we read this and we think about it in terms of Paul “converting” from Judaism to Christianity.  Again, that’s a very modern understanding of “religion” that didn’t exist in Paul’s day.  Paul never stopped being zealous for the God of Abraham, for the law and the prophets, and the promises of God.  He was a faithful Jew and as a faithful Jew he longed for the coming of the Messiah.  He prayed for the coming of the Messiah, for the Lord to come and rescue his people and set the world to rights.  It’s just that when it came to Jesus—well—the idea of a crucified Messiah was blasphemous.  That’s why he hated Christians and persecuted them.  But then the risen Jesus met him on the road to Damascus and it changed everything.  Because suddenly Paul knew that all the stories about Jesus having been raised from the dead were true.  He’d been wrong.  The impossible had happened.  The Jews and the Romans had killed Jesus, they—just as Paul had been doing—ruled him a false Messiah, but then God raised him from the dead and, in doing that, God vindicated his son.  That meant that Jesus really was the Messiah.  The God of Israel proved it.  And for Paul this meant that all the stories he’d grown up with, all the promises of God he’d longed to see fulfilled, all of it, all of them were fulfilled in Jesus.

 

Again, Paul uses that word “unveiled” again.  This same God who had set him apart in his mother’s womb, this same God who had called Paul by his grace—think of that as Paul personalizing what Jews thought of themselves as a people chosen and called by God’s grace to be his people—this same God of Israel had now unveiled his son.

 

And as Paul writes this, if you know the Hebrew scriptures, it’s really obvious that he’s telling his story in a way that will make people think of the old prophets, especially Jeremiah and Isaiah.  Jeremiah wrote about the Lord knowing him and calling him before he was even formed in his mother’s womb.  And when Isaiah writes about the servant—the one who in some places embodies Israel and in other places stands over against the people of Israel—Isaiah writes about the Lord forming him in the womb—calling him and naming him, giving him his prophetic vocation—before he’s even born.  I think Paul calls back to the calling of Jeremiah and to Isaiah’s servant, because when Jesus met him on the road to Damascus he gave him just this sort of divine calling…like the servant, the Lord “formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him”.  And as the Lord said to Jeremiah, “I appoint you a prophet to the nations” and to Isaiah, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

 

So these people in Galatia are claiming that Paul has forsaken the faith and traditions of his people, but what Paul is saying in response is that, one, it was Jesus himself who called him to this work and, two, that he has in no way forsaken the faith and traditions of his people.  To the contrary, he knows those traditions well and in light of this revelation that Jesus really is Israel’s Messiah, then this good news isn’t just for Israel…it’s for everyone.  They think that Paul, in going to the gentiles—or maybe better in the way he’s going to the gentiles—they see him as a people pleaser who is disloyal to the faith and Paul’s saying that, no, it’s just the opposite.  His message to the gentiles is the fulfilment of that faith—the fulfilment of Israel’s calling and of the law and the prophets.  Paul had thought that being zealous for the law meant opposing Jesus, when in fact, in light of Jesus having risen from the dead, being zealous for the law means being zealous for Jesus and even taking this good news to the gentiles.

 

This transformation in Paul and in his thinking points to another thing we might miss—or, in some cases, that’s obscured by some translations—but Paul says that God unveiled his son in me.  We might expect him to say to me, but that’s not how he puts it.  It’s in me and I think Paul chose his words—as always—very carefully.  It’s not just that God commissioned Paul to proclaim the good news about Jesus to the nations, as if it was just about what he said.  It is that, but I think Paul’s key point here is that Paul himself has become a sort of embodiment of the gospel.  This Pharisee who was zealous for God, but in such a way that it made him zealous in his hatred for the gentiles and any Jews who might compromise with them, this Pharisee has been so transformed by the unveiling of God’s son in Jesus, that his zeal for God has been turned upside-down—or maybe we should say, right-side-up—and now that zeal is taking him to the nations with that good news.

 

Now, it took Paul a good while to work this out.  Meeting the risen Jesus forced him into a massive paradigm shift in his thinking and even his identity.  He had questions.  Big questions.  But he stresses he didn’t go to “flesh and blood” to ask his questions or to get help sorting it all out.  Again, people were accusing him of having a human-made gospel and Paul reiterates that it not only came directly from Jesus, but even in sorting it all out for himself, he went to the Lord, not to other people.  Specifically, he says, he didn’t go up to Jerusalem.  That’s what most people probably would have expected him to do.  That’s what I would have done, if I were in Paul’s shoes.  That’s where Peter and James were.  They were the chief apostles and the leaders of the church.  They’d been wrestling with all this good news stuff for a while already.  They were the ones who had spent years with Jesus himself.  They had the answers.

 

But instead, Paul says he went to Arabia—in First Century geography, that meant Mount Sinai.  Why did Paul do that?  Because, again, he knew the prophets.  This time Paul echoes the story of Elijah.  If you’re a First Century man of zeal, it makes sense to follow in the footsteps of Elijah—one of the greatest heroes of zeal.

 

Think of the story of Elijah.  After the events on Mount Carmel and Elijah’s slaughter of the prophets of Baal, King Ahab was angry.  Elijah was forced to run and hide, so he ran to Mount Sinai.  It made sense.  That was the place where the Lord had made his promises to Israel.  So Elijah went there.  He was tired.  He was depressed.  Despite all the Lord had done through him, Elijah was done.  He’d lost hope.  He went there to tell God as much.  He’d done everything he was supposed to do and—he thought—he’d failed.  He declares to the Lord, “I have been very zealous for the Lord of Hosts.”  (Notice how much that sounds like Paul.)  But the Lord wouldn’t let go of Elijah.  He wouldn’t accept his resignation.  Instead, he sent him to the wilderness of Damascus (again, sound familiar?) and there Elijah would be given the task to anoint a new king and a new prophet.

 

So Saul of Tarsus, zealous for the Lord, on his way to Damascus, is met by the risen Jesus.  It was the most natural thing in the world, for Paul, to go from there to Mount Sinai, to take his zeal to the Lord, and to wrestle with the God of Abraham—to work it out until it all made sense again in light of Jesus the Messiah.  And from Mount Sinai, Paul says, the Lord sent him back to Damascus (just like Elijah) to announce the new king: Jesus the Messiah.

 

So Paul’s point is that after he met Jesus, he didn’t go to Jerusalem—as his enemies seem to think he did.  He didn’t go to work this all out with the original apostles.  He went, as Bishop Wright puts it so well, “he went off to do business with God, and he came to do business for God.”  And this business was to announce to the whole world that this Jesus, who was crucified and risen, Israel’s Messiah, is the world’s true Lord.  Paul includes these echoes of the old prophets to show how rather than being a betrayer of Israel, he’s actually smack in the middle of God’s Israel-shaped promises.  In calling back to Elijah, Jeremiah, and Isaiah, he’s making the point that if anyone is being disloyal to the God of Israel or to the covenant—well—it’s definitely not him.  The real betrayers are those who reject God’s calling of Paul and his commission to take the good news of Jesus to the nations.

 

That’s as far as I’ll go today.  There’s a bit more to Paul’s introduction and his telling of his own story, but we’ll look at that next week.  So what does this mean for us?  Brothers and Sisters, notice again how everything for Paul is about Jesus the Messiah and how Jesus’s resurrection from the dead is the lens through which he sees everything.  It ought to be the same way for us.  We need to be clear about what the gospel is and then we need to live in that gospel, live in this story with Jesus as its centre.  The gospel is the good news that this Jesus who was crucified has been raised from the dead and that he’s the world’s true Lord.  His death for sins has won the victory over sin and death and inaugurated God’s new creation.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s the story, that’s the reality we need to live with and to live in.  Consider how it reshaped Paul.  He was zealous for the Lord, he was zealous for the covenant, he was zealous for the scriptures—for all the right things, but in the wrong way.  Meeting the risen Messiah didn’t mean throwing it all away; it meant refocusing that zeal through a different lens—through Jesus.  For others—I’m thinking of those who came from a zealously pagan background—inhabiting the gospel was different in that it meant throwing everything away.  Or maybe it meant seeing the world, seeing life, seeing others through the new lens of Jesus rather than the lens of the old pagan gods or their old sinful ways of life or through the corrupt systems of the present evil age.  Inhabiting the gospel and reorienting ourselves and our lives around Jesus isn’t an easy thing to do.  Even Paul had to go to Sinai for three years to wrestle with the reality of the risen Jesus.  But however hard it is and however long it may take, Brothers and Sisters, it’s essential that we do this—we personally and we the church.  Part of being gospel people—of being slaves of the Messiah, as Paul puts it—means taking every thought captive to Jesus the Messiah and filtering it through this gospel lens.  Every thought, every value, every priority, every act, every bit of our zeal and turning it over and turning it inside-out, deciding whether we keep it or throw it away or rethink it in light of the good news about Jesus the Messiah.

 

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, as you’ve unveiled your Son in Paul, you have also unveiled him in each of us.  We pray now for the grace to be faithful to this gospel calling and this gospel life—that your Son, Jesus, would truly be unveiled to everyone around us by the gospel work you are working in us by the power of your Spirit.  Keep Jesus, his cross, and his resurrection always before us, keep our eyes focused on him, and by your Spirit, help us to truly live in your good news.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

People Pleasers or Slaves of the Messiah?

Galatians 1:1-10

by William Klock

 

The other day the phone rang.  I answered it and a stranger on the other end asked for Veronica.  I passed the phone to her.  I wondered who it was, but I didn’t get much help from Veronica’s end of the conversation.  It was all “Mmhmm” and “Yes” and “Okay”.  I had no idea who it was or what it was about.  In contrast, while walking to the church I ended up following a woman who was having a very loud conversation with someone on her cell phone.  I couldn’t hear the other person, but I had a pretty good idea what he or she was saying based on the responses this woman was angrily yelling into her phone.  Things like, “Oh!  So I’m being dramatic?” and other things I probably shouldn’t repeat in polite company.  We do this reading between the lines when we read St. Paul’s epistles.  In them we have one side of a conversation and, thankfully, it’s a lot more than “Mmhmm” and “Yes” and “Okay”.  In fact, it’s a lot more like “Oh!  So I’m being dramatic?”  And it’s not too hard, if we go slowly and think about the context, to piece most of the conversation together.  And so Paul begins his letter to the churches in Galatia writing, “Paul, an apostle…”  And then before he’s even begun, he breaks off right there, because he has to defend himself against their attacks on his apostleship.  “My apostleship,” he writes, “doesn’t derive from human sources, nor did it come through a human being.  It came through Jesus the Messiah, and God the Father who raised him from the dead.”  We know at the get-go that someone in Galatia is challenging Paul’s credentials.  I think we get an even better sense of what’s going on if we jump ahead to verse 10 of Galatians 1.  What Paul writes there doesn’t get enough attention.  We’ll come back and fill things in, but in verse 10 Paul writes to them:

 

Well now…does that sound as though I’m trying to make up to people—or to God?  Or that I’m trying to curry favour with people?  If I were still pleasing people, I wouldn’t be a slave of the Messiah.

 

Three times he says the same thing: Am I trying to make up to people.  Am I trying to curry favour with people?  Am I trying to please people?  So we know someone in Galatian is accusing Paul of abandoning the divine message of the gospel and, instead, preaching a merely human message that will tickle people’s ears and win him friends.  Anyone who knew Paul should have known better, of course, but this is how it is.  Now there’s actually a text—one that would have been well-known in the Jewish word of the First Century—there’s a text that really sharpens the focus of this whole “people pleasing” accusation and that gives us some context for this whole dispute.  It stands out, because this Greek phrase Paul uses for “people pleasing” is essentially the same as another word that pops up in the Greek version of Psalm 52:6 and in the fourth of the Psalms of Solomon.  Psalms of Solomon is a little collection of eighteen psalms from the First Century B.C. and the First Century A.D., probably written by Pharisees or by people very much like the Pharisees.  And there’s this Greek word that isn’t actually Greek—anthropareskos—that was made up by Greek-speaking Jews and outside of Paul’s writings, shows up only in those two other texts.  That fourth “Psalm of Solomon” is titled “A Psalm about the People Pleasers” and it’s about people who compromised God’s law, cutting corners here and there, in order to suck up to their pagan neighbours.  It speaks of men who would even enter the homes of pagans and fraternise with them.  That might not seem like a problem to us, but it was something faithful Jews did not do.  But once you got out into the real world, out of Judaea, a lot of Jews found it hard to get by in life while completely avoiding contact and fraternisation with gentiles.  In the Psalms of Solomon, the finger seems to be pointed at the corrupt Jewish rulers—people like the Sadducees, the Hasmoneans, and the Herodians.  To the faithful in Israel, these people were selling out the covenant by compromising God’s law in order to ingratiate themselves with the pagans.

 

And, we need to be clear, people like the Pharisees weren’t angry about the compromise of the people pleasers because they were legalists who were trying to earn their way into heaven through good works.  There’s been long tendency to read Galatians in that kind of light ever since Martin Luther.  Luther read the works-righteousness of the medieval church into Paul’s adversaries.  And Luther was doing much what St. Augustine had done, when he read his own disputes with the heretic Pelagius into Galatians.  Pelagius, too, taught a sort of works righteousness.  As much as Pelagius and the medieval church did pose real problems, that sort of works righteousness wasn’t at issue in these First Century disputes. The reason faithful Jews were obsessed with keeping the law was because they knew that God had chosen them, delivered them from Egypt, put them in the promised land, and called them to be holy—and that this was all for a greater purpose that would somehow involve God, one day, setting this fallen world to rights.  They were trying to be, in Jesus’ way of putting it, the “on earth as in heaven” people.  There was a later rabbi who said that if all Israel would keep the torah for a single day, the Messiah would come.  The Pharisees had very similar ideas.  They also believed very firmly—because they knew the story of the Lord and Israel—that if Israel failed to keep the torah, if Israel flirted with pagans and their idolatry the way Deuteronomy warned them not to, the Messiah would not come and God would not establish his kingdom.  Not only that, but the very pagans with whom Israel compromised would destroy Israel and carry the people off into exile, just as the Babylonians had done six hundred years before.  I hope that helps us to understand what’s behind this accusation made against Paul that he’s a “people pleaser”.  It’s not just that he’s risking the salvation of some gentile believers in Galatia, but that he’s putting in jeopardy the whole destiny of Israel—and probably even the world.

 

In the First Century, Jews were faced with a crisis, and it was important to know who was “in” and who was “out”.  Who were your allies and who were the wicked risking another disaster.  The “people pleasers” were most definitely on the side of the wicked.  They pretended to be on God’s side, but their compromises proved otherwise.  It’s important for us to remember, too, that this was the mindset in which Paul had been steeped as a Pharisee.  This is the mindset that drove him to persecute the first Christians.  And now Paul is being accused of being one of those very people pleasers.

 

So why would anyone accuse Paul of being a people pleaser?  Well, wherever Paul went, he was preaching that anyone who believed in this Jesus, who was crucified, died, and rose again…that anyone who believed that he is Israel’s Messiah and, therefore God’s King, this faith is the sign that that person is part of the people of God.  It didn’t matter what their ethnic background was.  That was it.  Faith in Jesus the Messiah.  Period.  This is what Paul’s epistle to the Galatians is all about.  Faith in Jesus the Messiah.  If a gentile believed, he was as much a member of the family as a Jew who believed.  He didn’t need to be circumcised or to have any of the other signs that marked out Jews—not diet or Sabbath, not rules about who you could or couldn’t eat with.  But to a lot of people this marked Paul out as a people pleaser.  He was compromising the law and the covenant.  That made him a traitor.

 

I’ve begun with this, because I think it helps us understand where the focus of Galatians lies.  Ever since Luther, our tendency, at least in our Protestant circles, has been to read Galatians as a letter about how we are saved and as a warning about the dangers of legalism or of mixing works with faith.  The theology in that is right, but the perspective isn’t where it should be and I think when we put Galatians back in the proper context and get a look at it from the proper angle, what we discover it's really about is community—about who the people of God are and what marks us out.  And in that light, the problem isn’t just “legalism”.  Paul reminds us that what marks out the people of God is faith in Jesus the Messiah and that trying to define the community by any other means is to make it about something other than Jesus—to set up a false gospel.

 

So the accusation against Paul, in a nutshell, is that he’s got a gospel of human origin—that he got from someone else or that he made up himself—but a gospel that they think has been watered down to make it more palatable to the gentiles, that makes it too easy for the pagans to call themselves people of God.  If we understand that, then we’ll understand these first verses.  This is why Paul breaks off after writing, “Paul, an apostle…”  Remember how be breaks off suddenly and adds:

 

(My apostleship doesn’t derive from human sources, nor did it come through a human being; it came through Jesus the Messiah, and God the Father who raised him from the dead.)

 

Some teachers had arrived in Galatia from Jerusalem and they’ve told the people there not to listen to Paul.  He’s not a real apostle.  He wasn’t there in the beginning with Jesus.  He never knew Jesus.  Instead, they should listen to them, because they got their gospel—at least so they claim—from the men who walked with Jesus for three years, real apostles like James and Peter.  And so Paul reminds them that he, too, had an encounter with the risen Messiah.  Paul would still be a Pharisee if it hadn’t been for that miraculous encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus.  And it was in that encounter that Jesus himself commissioned Paul to take this good news to the gentiles.  In fact, it was seeing Jesus risen from the dead that convinced Paul of the truth of the gospel.  So he goes on:

 

Paul, an apostle…[verse 2]and the family who are with me; to the churches in Galatia.  Grace to you and peace from God our Father and Jesus the Messiah, our Lord, who gave himself for our sins, to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of God our Father, to whom be glory to the ages of ages.  Amen.

 

Paul…and the family who are with me.  That’s the church in Antioch.  First Paul stresses that his apostleship is as from Jesus as that of any other apostle and now he stresses the relationship that he and the church in Antioch have with these churches in Galatia.  They were accusing him of being a people pleaser, of being a traitor, of being a false brother and here he reaches out with verbal arms and embraces them and reminds them that in Jesus they’re all family, all brothers and sisters.

 

“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and Jesus the Messiah our Lord.”  Paul has this amazing way of making everything about Jesus and the gospel.  In the Greek world they greeted each other with the word chairein, which meant “to rejoice”, but in a letter basically just means “greetings” or “salutations”.  This is, for example, how James opens his epistle.  But Paul exchanges chairein for charis, the word for “grace”—from God the Father and from Jesus the Messiah—grace to you.  He adds the Jewish greeting of shalom as well: that means “peace”.  But even his word order here in his greeting sets the tone for the whole letter.  It’s not grace and peace to you; it’s grace to you and then peace.  Because the sum total of God’s position towards humanity is grace and this is manifest uniquely and finally in Jesus the Messiah.  Everything begins with God’s grace poured out in and through Jesus.  Even the peace we know and the peace we look forward to in the age to come, even that comes as a result first of God’s grace.

 

Paul then follows this up with a four-faceted summary of the good news.  First, Jesus gave himself for our sins, (second) to rescue us from the present evil age, (third) according to the will of God our Father, (four) to whom be glory to the ages of ages.  Amen.

 

Jesus has rescued us from the present evil age.  What does that mean?  Well, when the Jews looked at history, they divided it into two ages.  There was the present evil age dominated by sin and death and full of pain and tears and then there was the age to come when God would fulfil his promises to set the world to rights and where his people would live in his presence forever.  The present evil age is dominated by dark powers that enslave humanity through idolatry and sin.  We worship idols, giving to them the glory we were created to give to God, and we rebel against him—that’s sin—and our sin tightens the chains those idols have on us and on creation.  While we were bound up in the present evil age, Jesus came to our rescue, writes Paul.  He seems to have Isaiah’s song of the suffering servant in mind as he writes this, because it’s this suffering servant who represents Israel and who gives his life to break the chains the idols have cast around God’s people.  He dies for their sins and breaks sin’s power and he leads the people in a new exodus—into the age to come.  I like the way Tom Wright often reminds us that Jesus’ resurrection isn’t an odd or one-off event within the old world, but rather it’s a launching and defining event of God’s new world.  Paul’s gospel, his good news, is that Jesus has dealt with the sins that chained us as slaves in the dark and bloody temples of the idols, and he now leads us out into the sunlight, into the beginnings of God’s new world.

 

Now, here’s why this is so important in Paul’s letter to the Galatians.  Remember that for Jews, the problem with gentiles was that they were idolaters.  There was one true God, the God of Israel, but the gentiles instead worshipped idols and they lived and behaved sinfully, as idolaters do.  This is what made them unclean and so offensive to the Jews.  This why good Jews wouldn’t go into their homes or eat with them.  There were some gentiles who saw the Jews and were attracted to their purity of life and joined up.  But to do that, they had to be circumcised.  It was a dramatic (and painful) sign that they were leaving behind the idolatrous pagan world and becoming part of Abraham’s family.  But—and this is vital to understanding Galatians—Paul’s point is that the gospel tells us that on the cross Jesus defeated those evil powers when he dealt with the sin that put us in their chains.  This is how there can now be one family.  This is how the gentiles can be welcomed into this new Israel.  Again, If God has defeated the idols, the dark powers of the evil age, then the gentiles, the pagans can trust in the God of Israel and become part of Jesus the Messiah’s family.  And, second, because Jesus’s death has dealt with sin, then those who believe in him and who become part of his family, they are no longer “sinners” or idolaters.  The thing that separated Jews and gentiles has been dealt with by Jesus at the cross, and so membership in his family is by faith in him alone and nothing else.  To add anything else to that—like circumcision or any of those other things that marked out the Jews—to add anything else is to detract from Jesus and to lose the gospel itself.

 

And then points three and four of Paul’s gospel summary: The cross wasn’t some accident of history.  This was God’s plan all along.  What Jesus has done reveals the faithfulness of God and that, in turn, brings the gospel back to the glorification of God.  We often make the gospel about us, but for Paul the gospel is always and only about God.  God has redeemed us and in that he shows his glory and this is why we give him glory and praise.  The gospel begins and ends in with God.

 

So that’s the gospel in all its magnificent glory.  We can hear the shock and the disappointment as Paul goes on in verse 6 and following, rebuking the Galatians.  He writes:

 

I’m astonished that you are turning away so quickly from the one who called you by the grace of the Messiah, and going after another gospel—not that it is another gospel, it’s just that there are some people stirring up trouble for you and wanting to pervert the gospel of the Messiah.  But even if we—or an angel from heaven!—should announce a gospel other than the one we announced to you, let such a person be accursed.  I said it before and I now say it again, if anyone offers you a gospel other than the one you received, let that person be accursed.

 

It’s not just that these churches have gone astray.  That would be bad enough, but it’s how quickly after he left them that they’ve turned away.  The language suggests that Paul might be comparing his own astonishment to the astonishment of Moses at how quickly the Israelites went from praising the Lord for his miraculous deliverance at the Red Sea to creating and worshipping a golden calf.  As dumbfounding as it was to Moses to find his people dancing around an idol, Paul is dumbfounded at how quickly and how easily the Galatians have been led astray to another gospel.  And Paul quickly amends that, because, really, there is no other gospel.  There’s the gospel.  Everything else is just is a lie.

 

Also, the language Paul uses to write of them “turning”, that has its own shameful undertones.  The word he uses is one used in the Greek Old Testament to describe desertion.  In 2 Maccabees there’s the poignant story of seven brothers whom Antiochus tried to force to eat pork, killing them one after the other when they refused.  When it’s down to the youngest of them, the text says that Antiochus tried to entice the boy to “turn form his ancestral ways”.  (Or course, the boy refused and became a martyr.)  This is the same language Paul uses here and I think just to stress his point.  This probably corresponds to what we read in Acts about “certain persons from James” who arrived in Galatia not long after Paul and Barnabas had returned from their mission there.  Paul had seen these people devoted to Jesus and to the gospel, he’d seen them transformed by it, and now he’s shocked that they’ve turned from the gospel—and so quickly and easily.  If they’re going to accuse him of being disloyal to Israel’s traditions, he turns that accusation right back around on them.  They’ve been disloyal to, they’ve deserted Jesus.

 

He’s not into the details of their corrupted gospel yet, but he says here that they’ve turned from the one who called them by grace.  They’ve turned from God himself.  Paul puts the emphasis on grace as manifest in Jesus the Messiah.  God’s call is an act of pure grace.  His sending of Jesus is a pure act of grace.  The God of Israel has finally sent his Messiah as a gift of pure grace—and Paul now points his finger at these people and says—And you’ve turned away from him!

 

So what was their “other gospel”?  We have to do more reading between the lines and it won’t be fully fleshed out until we get through the rest of the letter, but the best way to look at it may be to see these new teachers not so much preaching a different Jesus, but preaching Jesus as the culmination of a different story.  Paul was preaching Jesus as the fulfilment a story in which the God of Israel defeats the powers of sin and death to rescue his people from the present evil age, but these folks seemed to be preaching Jesus as an add-on to Jewish life as it already was—maybe Jesus as the fulfilment of some Jewish nationalist hope or agenda: maybe a message that fired up zeal against the gentiles, for example, instead of announcing to them the grace made available in Jesus.

 

And I think it’s likely that Paul had in mind what “gospel” meant in the Roman world.  To the Greeks and Romans, “gospel” was the good news announced about the accession or the birthday of Caesar.  Caesar’s new cult was spreading like wildfire through Asia and that included Galatia.  It’s not that the Christian there were in danger of worshiping Caesar.  The danger was that they would embrace torah to save themselves from persecution for not worshiping Caesar.  To refuse to worship Caesar—not to mention all the other gods—would be a bit like marching the wrong way, carrying the flag upside-down, and saying unpatriotic things in the middle of a Canada Day parade.  But in that culture, not only was it disloyal, if and when calamity struck the city or the country, you’d be the one to get the blame for it, because you’d angered the gods.  But the Jews, they were uniquely exempt.  The Jews would rather die than worship an idol, so after all the trouble they’d caused him, Caesar had granted them an exemption.  And those first Christians started claiming that exemption for themselves.  They were, after all, Jews.  Even the gentile converts claimed it.  But then to claim to be Jews, well there was pressure to start acting like Jews, too—and that became a problem.

 

And so Paul announces: Anathema!  A curse.  The real gospel, the true gospel is about how, in Jesus and his death and resurrection, God has dealt with sin and inaugurated a new age.  That’s why it’s good news.  But these new teachers, they’re not just veering off course a little.  They’re completely wrong.  They’re telling a different story.  They’re not announcing the good news that God’s new creation has started.  No, they’re just giving advice about how to live and get along in the present evil age.  There’s no good news there.  As my New Testament prof, Gordon Fee, used to put it, they’d gone backwards from AD to BC—going from the bright sunlight of God’s new day, back into the darkness of the old.  No, Paul says, if any—even if an angel from heaven—proclaims anything other than the good news that I’ve proclaimed, let that person be accursed.

 

Brothers and Sisters, it’s really very simple.  It’s about Jesus and Jesus alone and it’s faith in him that defines the people of God.  There is an organic relationship between faith and works such that real faith will always show itself in our lives.  We know good trees because they bear good fruit.  But as much as good works borne of faith mark us out, the thing that makes, the thing that defines us as the people of God is faith in Jesus.  That’s it.  Nothing else.  Whenever we add something else—whether it’s circumcision as in Galatia or some other thing or set of rules, when we establish some ethnic or cultural criteria, when we set up some kind of personal or ecstatic or emotional experience that stands alongside Jesus—we diminish Jesus and we rob God of his glory and we lose the gospel.  The solution, I think, if we listen to Paul, is to keep our eyes focused on Jesus and the cross.  Over and over Paul comes back to Jesus, declaring things like “who loved me and gave himself for me”.  We need to do the same.  Every week the Lord offers us a reset when he invites us to his Table.  Here we recall and participate anew in those events by which Jesus the Messiah gave himself for our sins, to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of God our Father.  Here we’re reminded of grace, to go into another week with our eyes focused on Jesus that we might live to the glory of our gracious God and for the sake of his kingdom.  Here we’re reminded again that it’s all about God’s grace poured out in Jesus.  It’s not about us, it’s not about who we are, it’s not about what we’ve done or will do, it’s all about and only about Jesus.

 

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, you have poured out your amazing grace on us, giving your Son as a sacrifice for our sin and rescuing us from the bondage of the present evil age.  We should be overwhelmed by your grace and by your Son, but we confess that we too often lose our focus on him.  By your grace, set our eyes again and always on Jesus, that we might perpetually be amazed by your grace, so that we are never tempted to diminish your glory by adding anything else to the gospel.  In his name we pray.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

St. Luke 17:11-19 & Galatians 5:16-24

by William Klock

 

Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, St. Luke tells us.  Making his way there from Galilee for the last time.  And along the way, he passed through the borderlands between Samaria and Galilee.  Galilee was up in the north.  And as much as everyone talked about going “up to Jerusalem”, that was because it was up in the mountains.  Jerusalem, in the territory of Judah, was way down south.  In between was Samaria.  No self-respecting Jew cut through Samaria.  They went around.  Because the Samaritans were filth.  As I said last week, they were the Jews who went wrong to begin with way back when they broke from Judah and established their own illicit temple at Shechem, on Mount Gerizim.  But they’d gone from bad to worse when they intermarried with the pagans then compromised torah with various pagan influences.  The Jews despised the Samaritans (and the Samaritans didn’t feel very kindly towards the Jews in return).  So Jesus and his disciples skirted through the borderlands.  Still, being so close, there was no telling who you might meet along the way.

 

But, says Luke, as Jesus was going into one particular village he was met by ten men far worse than any Samaritan.  Ten men with leprosy.  They knew the rules.  They stayed some distance away, but they approached as close as they dared.  They were unclean and they were outcasts.  Leprosy in the Bible could be any one of a multitude of contagious skin diseases, and according to the torah, if a priest certified you had such a disease, you were cut off from everyone: from your family, from your friends, from the community.  They had to go off and live in their own little colonies on the fringes of civilisation.  If they were lucky, their friends and family might bring them food and leave it at a distance.  But maybe worse still, they were cut off from the covenant community—from the people of God.  They were unwelcome in the synagogues.  They were cut off from the temple because they were unclean.  That meant they were excluded from the Lord’s presence and from the sacrificial system that provided forgiveness of sins.  And they were cut off from the Passover.  You had to be ritually pure to participate in that too.  To put it in our terms: they were cut off from the church and the sacraments.

 

And there wasn’t much sympathy for them.  Do you remember the blind man who Jesus and the disciples encountered in John 9?  The first question from the disciples was, “Who sinned?  This man or his parents?”  That’s the lens through which people looked at lepers and cripples and the destitute.  They wouldn’t be in such a state if they hadn’t done something to offend the Lord.  Leprosy was sort of a sign that God’s judgement had fallen on you early.  I hope that gives you a sense of just how hopeless these men would have felt.

 

But for the first time in a long time they had a glimmer of hope.  They heard that Jesus was passing through town.  The good news that Jesus was preaching, the stories about him healing the sick and even raising the dead, they’d spread far and wide—even to the leper colonies.  Wherever he went, Jesus was making sad things come untrue and wiping away tears, and so they went to him.  Maybe he’d make their sad things come untrue, too.  And so they stood at a distance.  Again, they weren’t allowed to get close.  I’d bet they’d probably been taught lessons in the past about getting too close to healthy people, to good people—who had cursed at them and thrown rocks at them.  Knowing how Jesus’ disciples could be sometimes, it’s not hard to imagine some of the having already picked up some nice, heavy, pointy rocks to throw—just in case.  So they stand at a distance and they call out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

 

That got Jesus’ attention.  That title “Master”, that they used.  That’s usually what his disciples called him, but he didn’t hear it very often from other people.  People called him “rabbi” or “teacher”, but this “Master”—it had the sense of rabbi or teacher, too, but it was something you called someone whom you knew also had authority.  Again, they’d heard about the things Jesus had done.  They knew that somehow and in some way he had authority over sickness, disease—even over death itself.  And so they call out to him in faith: “Master!  Have mercy on us!  Show us compassion!  Wipe away our tears.  Make our sad things come untrue!  We know you can, because you have mastery over sickness and death.”

 

And in response, Jesus said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”  He doesn’t heal them.  Instead he sends them to the priest.  But it makes sense if you understand that it was the priests who were trained according to the torah to evaluate these diseases and to determine whether someone was healed or not.  Eventually, they’d have to go to see the local priest one way or another if they wanted to be admitted back into the community.  So Jesus sends them to do the very thing they would have to do if they were healed.

 

The way Luke tells the story draws a pretty unmistakable parallel with the story of Naaman in 2 Kings 5.  Naaman was the commander of the Syrian army back in the days of the Prophet Elisha.  Naaman was also a leper.  But he had a young Jewish slave girl in his house who told of this prophet.  Naaman eventually went to see Elisha, but Elisha refused to see him.  Instead, the prophet sent Naaman a messenger, who told the commander to go and wash in the Jordan River.  Naaman was furious.  He was mad that Elisha wouldn’t see him and he was mad at being told to wash in a dirty Jewish river, as if it were somehow better than the rivers of his own country.  But eventually, in faith, Naaman went and washed in the Jordan.  He went down into the waters and rose up healed of his leprosy.

 

In the same way Elisha told Naaman to take a step of faith, Jesus tells these men to do the same.  Go to the local priest.  It seemed like a waste of time.  He’d just have them hold out their hands and feet, their arms and legs, have them uncover their heads—and there would be all the sores and the priest would tell them they were still unclean.  But because of what they’d heard about Jesus, they went on off in faith to see the priest anyway.

 

I think Luke—a gentile—frames the story this way, drawing the parallel with Naaman, for a reason.  Earlier in Luke, Jesus had rebuked the people of Nazareth by reminding them of Naaman and Elisha.  He said to them, “There were many lepers in Israel in the time of the Prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian” (Luke 4:27).  In other words, because of their lack of faith, Israel was missing out on the Lord’s deliverance.  Instead, it was the outsiders who were hearing and receiving the good news: the tax collectors and sinners, Samaritans and gentiles—even lepers.  It’s as if Jesus knew how each of these men would respond.

 

They came to Jesus in faith and in faith all ten of them go off to see the priest.  And Luke writes that “as they went, they were healed.”  What they asked for in faith, Jesus gives.  Think of what that meant.  Once the priest had given them the all clear, they could return to their families and to their community.  They could go to the synagogue.  Once again, they could know God’s forgiveness of sin at the temple.  They could eat the Passover and know they belonged to the Lord.  And yet, Luke writes, one of them—only one—seeing that he’d been healed, turned back and gave glory to God at the top of his voice.  He fell on his face at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.  And, Luke adds, he was a Samaritan.

 

Jesus’ miracle highlights who he is and what he’s come to do.  Jesus’ miracle highlights the faithfulness of the God of Israel to his promises.  The healing of the ten lepers, like all of Jesus’ miracles, proclaims the coming of the promised and long-awaited kingdom.  In Jesus the Messiah, the God of Israel is doing what he promised and beginning to set the world to rights.  This is astounding.  And yet these nine men seem to take it for granted.  We’re not privy to their motives and neither was Luke.  Maybe they were just so overwhelmed by excitement and joy that they forgot.  Maybe they were afraid to go back lest the miracle be undone.  Maybe they planned to go back later, but then they saw the priest and he warned them.  By this point Jesus was a marked man.  Maybe they were afraid to be associated with him.  But whatever their motive, they highlight the plight of Israel.  Like the people of Nazareth, they took Jesus for granted.  They wanted their own personal messiah to do tricks for them.  At least these men didn’t reject Jesus, but in the end they seem to take the mighty works of God for granted.  There’s no thanksgiving.  They don’t glorify him for what he’s done.  They just take his blessings and run.  Which is ironic, because they were Jews, named after Jacob’s son, Judah, whose name in Hebrew means “praise”.

 

And then there’s that one Samaritan in the lot.  We don’t know his motives either.  Samaritans weren’t particularly interested in Jewish messiahs.  He went with the others to see Jesus just because he was desperate and ready to give anything a try.  And this Jewish Messiah healed him—an outcast and an outsider—and he was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude.  Jesus owed him nothing, but gave him everything.  And so he can’t not go back.  He falls at the feet of Jesus and gives him thanks.  And I think this is the reason only Luke tells us this story, because he too was an outsider—not a leper, but a gentile.  The God of Israel owed him nothing.  The people of the God of Israel treated him like trash.  But in Jesus the Messiah, the God of Israel had given him everything.

 

We get a sense of this as Luke finishes the story.  Jesus asks the man, “There were ten of you healed, weren’t there?  Where are the nine?  Is it really the case that the only one who had the decency to give God the glory was this foreigner?”  We get the sense that Jesus wasn’t just talking to the Samaritan man, but to a larger crowd.  The gratitude of this foreigner became a rebuke on Israel.  The people whose name means “praise” are just standing around watching a miracle, while this Samaritan glorifies their God.  Jesus had warned them before that God could raise up children for Abraham from the stones and now, here, one of those stones cries out in praise and thanksgiving.

 

And then, turning back to the man, he said to him, “Get up and be on your way.  Your faith has saved you.”  All through the story, Luke describes these lepers as being cleansed.  Their diseases made them unclean and now they’ve been healed, cleansed, and restored.  But in those final words to the Samaritan, Jesus says, “Your faith has saved you.”  Maybe the change from cleansed to saved is because he’s a Samaritan.  No amount of healing would make him an Israelite or permit him into the temple, but he’s still been delivered from his disease.  But I think that there’s something more to the choice of words.  Maybe it’s Luke emphasising, as he records in Greek what Jesus would have said in Aramaic, maybe it’s Luke emphasising that this man had experienced the same thing he had—that through faith in Jesus, this man who was an outsider and who was despised not just for his disease, but for who he was, this man who could never be part of the old people of Israel, had nevertheless been given a place in the age to come, in the future world of the God of Israel, in that place where our tears are wiped away and everything is set to rights and where the people sing forever and always the glory of God.  This no good Samaritan hated by everyone who mattered, suddenly found himself that day a child of Abraham and of the God of Israel.

 

He was transformed.  The promises made to Abraham were fulfilled, even if in a small way with just one person, the promises made to Abraham were fulfilled that day as that Samaritan man knelt as Jesus’ feet and glorified God.  He went back to Samaria a different person.  I fully expect he went back to Samaria proclaiming the glories of God, all because of gratitude for what Jesus had done for him.  In that, he showed up Israel and, I think, he shows us up.

 

Brothers and Sisters, you and I have been confronted with the same saving mercies of God.  We have known his forgiveness and his deliverance through Jesus, who gave his life for us and then rose from the grave.  We not only know his common graces every day in the air we breathe and the food we eat, but we know the life of God’s kingdom through the gift of his indwelling Spirit.  Every Sunday he invites us to his Table to participate once again in this great exodus from sin and death that Jesus has led us through in our baptism.  And too often we take it all for granted.  He invites us to his Table, but we don’t come.  He incorporates us into his family, but we neglect our brothers and sisters or we treat them poorly.  He gifts us with the fruit of his Spirit, but we instead cultivate what Paul, in our Epistle from Galatians 5, calls the works of the flesh.  Paul knew this is what happens when we lose our focus on Jesus and Jesus alone.  The Galatians were adding to Jesus.  Jesus plus torah was their gospel, but in the end it took their eyes off Jesus and they stumbled spiritually.  Their problem probably isn’t our problem, but there are a  thousand other things that can distract us from Jesus and from what God has done for us in him.  As I said last week, sometimes we just become so focused looking at the path beneath our feet that we forget to look up.  We let ourselves become consumed with the things of this old age that is passing away, with the troubles and difficulties of life, with what we should eat or what we should wear, that we stop seeking after the kingdom of God and his righteousness.  And before we know it, we’ve lost our gratitude.  We stop singing the glories of God.  We stop living the life of the Spirit.

 

So Paul wrote to the Galatians and exhorted them in 5:16, “Let me say this to you: live by the Spirit, and you won’t do what the flesh wants you to.  For the flesh wants to go against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.  They’re opposed to each other, so that you can’t do what you want.  But if you are led by the Spirit, you’re not under the law.”

 

Again, their problem was Jesus plus torah.  We might be trying to do some other variation of Jesus plus works or Jesus plus love of money or Jesus plus worry over inflation or Jesus plus my worldly activities—again, there are a thousand things that can pull us away from Jesus.  Whatever our combination is, losing sight of Jesus, compromising our loyalty to Jesus, is going to work out in losing the life of the Spirit and the warning sign is when we start living the old life of the flesh.  Paul goes on and says, “Now the works of the flesh are obvious.  They are such things as fornication, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, strife, jealousy, bursts of rage, selfish ambition, factiousness, divisions, moods of envy, drunkenness, wild partying, and similar things.  I told you before, and I tell you again: people who do such things will not inherit God’s kingdom.”

 

Brothers and Sisters, the people who will inherit the kingdom are the people who already value it today—the people who have been made new already by Jesus and given the life of the Spirit, because it’s Jesus and the Spirit who will—and are presently—making us fit for God’s new world.  And those people, Paul writes, are characterised by the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control….And those who belong to Jesus the Messiah, they crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”   But we need to go one verse further with the Epistle.  Paul writes to them, “If we live by the Spirit, let’s line up with the Spirit.”  You can’t claim to have the life of the Spirit while living out the works of the flesh.  And the way we do that—this is the heart of Galatians, which Lord willing we’ll start working through next Sunday—the heart of Galatians is this message of Jesus and Jesus alone.  We need to set our eyes on him and as we set our eyes on him, our hearts and minds will follow.  We need to be like the Samaritan leper in the Gospel, with our focus intent on the amazing things that God has done for us in Jesus.  We need to have his incarnation, his cross, his shed blood and his resurrection and his ascension always before us.  We need always to remember that we who had no share in his inheritance, have through Jesus been made sons and daughters of God.

 

Brothers and Sisters, this why we immerse ourselves in his word, that we might always be reminded of his great mercy towards us.  And this is why we come to his Table every Sunday.  Like the Israelites celebrating the Passover every year to participate for themselves in that great saving act by which he delivered them from Pharoah’s bondage and made them his people, so we come every week and participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus, we participate in this great exodus in which, by his shed blood and his rising again, he has delivered us from our bondage to sin and death and made us his sons and daughters.  Come to the Table and remember the mighty, saving works of God.  Come to the Table and be refreshed by Jesus and the Spirit.  Look up to Jesus and the cross, then go out in the power of the Spirit to proclaim is glories.

 

Let’s pray: Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and love; and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

 

A Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity

St. Luke 10:23-37 & Galatians 3:16-22

by William Klock

 

Jesus had commissioned seventy disciples to preach the good news throughout the cities and towns of Israel and when they came back to him they were excited.  Wherever the good news went, amazing things happened.  Above everything else, the seventy rejoiced that at the name of Jesus, even demons obeyed.  And Jesus rejoiced with them.  “I know,” he said.  This is what the prophets foretold.  Isaiah and Ezekiel told of their visions in which the Satan fell like lightning from heaven.  It’s happening now.  God’s kingdom is breaking in, God’s light is driving away the darkness, and it is toppling the rulers of this present evil age—and you’re a part of it.  And with that in mind Jesus said to them, “Don’t rejoice that spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

 

Having your name written in heaven—that meant being written in God’s great book that you belong to him, that you are one of his people.  And Jesus draws a connection here that I don’t think we really emphasises often enough and that’s that God’s people are marked out in the present by their kingdom priorities and their kingdom life.

 

Jesus is hinting here—actually, I think it’s more than just a hint—that in him, the God of Israel was renewing Israel and creating a new people.  Because the Jews already believed their names were written in heaven, but Jesus hints that something is changing.  That it’s not just about being the biological children of Abraham or about keeping torah, but that it’s now connected with this good news and with him—with the Messiah.  The long-awaited age to come, the age when the Lord would judge the wicked and set the world to rights, in Jesus the Messiah it was breaking in as the prophets had foretold.  And so Jesus—and these are the first words of our Gospel today beginning at Luke 10:23—Jesus turns from the crowd to his disciples and says to them, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see.  Let me tell you, many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see, and they didn’t see it; and to hear what you hear, and they didn’t hear it.”

 

But then, Luke says, a lawyer got up and put Jesus on the spot.  He knew what Jesus was saying and it really bothered him.  Because everyone knew that God’s people are marked out in the present by their keeping of the law: by things like circumcision, sabbath-keeping, and diet.  Maybe Jesus was the Messiah, maybe God’s kingdom was breaking in, but this suggestion that Jesus’ disciples had their names written in heaven because they were somehow connected with Jesus—that they were “in”—well, that meant that others were “out”.  So the lawyer stood up and shouted at Jesus, “Rabbi, what should I do to inherit the life of the age to come?”  He was sure his name was written in heaven, but if Jesus was calling that into question, he wants to know what criteria Jesus thinks mark God’s people out in the present.  Was Jesus really excluding good, torah-observing Jews like him?

 

And Jesus, as is the way with rabbis, responded with another question: “What is written in the law?”  And it’s easy to imagine the exasperation on the lawyer’s face as he answered the question they’d all learned the answer to as little children: “You shall love the Lord your with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your understanding; and your neighbour as yourself.”

 

And Jesus responded, “Well said!  Do that and you will live.”  The lawyer frowned and grit his teeth.  No, no, no.  If that’s what it’s about, then we’re all on the same page, but Jesus is clearly saying that his disciples will see the age to come and that others might not.  The lawyer wants to know how or where Jesus is drawing the line.  Who’s in and who’s out?  More than that, he knows Jesus is wrong and he wants to get his error, his heresy out into the open for everyone to see.  So he throws out another question, “Ah!  But who is my neighbour?”

 

“And Jesus rose to the challenge.  ‘Once upon a time,’ he said, ‘a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and was set upon by brigands.  They stripped him and beat him and ran off leaving him half-dead.’”

 

Everyone knew the road.  Very soon Jesus would be travelling it himself, going the other direction, up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover—and to become the new Passover himself.  That road was steep and windy and notorious for the brigands hiding in wait for unwary travellers.  The wise travelled in groups or well-armed.  Travelling it alone, like this man did, was foolish.  This lawyer, listening to Jesus, would be shaking his head and thinking to himself that anyone dumb enough to travel that road alone was a candidate for a Darwin Award.

 

But Jesus goes on.  “‘A priest happened to be going down that road, and when he saw him he went past on the opposite side.’”  Now, you and I shake our heads and think, “What a horrible priest!  How could he not stop to help the man.”  But we only think that way because we’ve been shaped by the gospel and by Jesus and the Spirit.  The cross of Jesus has taught us mercy.  That God would not only humble himself, but would shed his blood on behalf of his rebellious children has taught us mercy in a way never understood before the gospel.  But that lawyer—and the crowd and maybe even Jesus’ disciples—they lived in the dark world on the other side of the good news of the cross.  They saw nothing wrong with this priest passing by the man.  The priests kept themselves ritually pure.  They had to in order to enter the temple.  Even though this priest is going in the opposite direction—probably on his way home from serving his rotation in the temple—he still kept himself pure.  He couldn’t tell if the man was dead or alive and if went over, rolled him over, and found him dead, well, then he'd be impure.  That was okay for normal people, but not for a priest.  And everyone knew this.  And, again, no one had a problem with it.

 

“Then,” said Jesus, “a Levite came by the place.  He saw him too and went past on the opposite side.”  He might not be a priest, but being a Levite, he too served in the temple.  Again, he’s going the opposite way—like the priest, he’s probably on his way home from serving in the temple.  But, still, being a Levite, he can’t chance becoming impure.  And, again, this was all normal and good and right as far as most people were concerned.

 

“But then,” said Jesus, “a travelling Samaritan came to where he was.”  Everyone frowned at this.  Samaritans were filth.  They were the Jews who intermarried with the native Canaanite peoples when the people of Judah were in exile.  They worshiped at their own illicit temple at Shechem and they compromised torah with pagan practises and pagan philosophy.  They were traitors of the worst kind.  Just being on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho meant he was fouling the promised land with his impure Samaritan feet.  And yet, Jesus said, “He came over to the man and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.  Then he put him on his own beast, took him to an inn, and looked after him.  The next morning, as he was going on his way, he gave the inn-keeper two dinars. ‘Take care of him,’ he said, ‘and on my way back I’ll pay you whatever else you need to spend on him.’”

 

“Where’s Jesus going with this?”  Everyone was thinking.  “What’s his point?”  There’s no way this would happen in real life.  But that’s kind of the point.  Jesus looks the lawyer in the eye and asks, “Which of these three do you think turned out to be the neighbour of the man who was set upon by the brigands?”  Jesus is going make the lawyer come out and say it.  And the lawyer does, because there’s no escape for him.  “The one who showed mercy on him,” he said.

 

“Well,” Jesus said to him, “you go and do the same.”

 

So what just happened?  Jesus brilliantly turned the prophecy of Isaiah 6:1-11 into a parable.  I don’t think anyone figured that out until the lawyer answered the final question and said “The one who showed him…mercy.”  And as soon as that word “mercy” was out of his mouth, I expect it sank in.  Hosea 6 is where the Lord, through the Prophet, rebukes the people of Israel because their love for God is “like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away.”  It’s the prophecy in which Hosea accuses the priests of acting violently against the helpless saying, “As robbers lie in wait for a man, so the priests band together; they murder on the way to Shechem; they commit villainy” (6:9).  The Prophet denounces the “evil deeds of Samaria” (7.1).  And that’s why Jesus puts a Samaritan in the centre of his story.  It flips everything around.  As Jesus tells it, it’s now the people of Judah, and especially the priests and Levites who are acting violently against the people.  This is why, when Jesus cleanses the temple he condemns the priests for having made it a “den of robbers”.  As the unfaithful northern kingdom of Israel had been judged by the Lord, so judgement is now barrelling towards Judah and Jerusalem and the temple and its priests.  The Lord is indeed, in Jesus, preparing to judge the wicked and to set the world to rights.  The long-awaiting age to come is breaking in.  As the Lord promised through Hosea, he will come to heal his people, to bind up their wounds, to revive them after two days, and to raise them up on the third day (6:1-2).  But whom will he heal and revive and raise up?  Whom will he take with him into the age to come?  The answer: Only those who share his values and his priorities and the values and priorities of the age to come.  In Hoses 6:6 the Lord declares those well-known words, “I want mercy and not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than whole burnt offerings.”  I want mercy.  And I think those well-known words of the Prophet came crashing down on that lawyer like a metaphorical ton of bricks as he gave his answer and said, “The one who showed him mercy.”

 

There was no mercy in the heart of the priest and no mercy in the heart of the Levite—and there was no mercy in the hearts of the people of Judah who saw nothing wrong with the priest and the Levite leaving the man to die.  For that matter there was no mercy in the hearts of people who saw the Samaritans as unredeemable, reprobate scum.  And that was the heart of the problem.  And that was the problem that Jesus came to fix.  Because the only people who will have a share in the age to come—in the kingdom of God—are the people who share the values and priorities of God.  The people who are poor in spirit, who mourn the state of the world, the meek, the people who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the pure in heart, the peacemakers—and the merciful.

 

Everyone wants to see evil judged and removed from the earth and everyone wants to be part of the age to come when God has set everything to rights, but very few want—or even recognise their need—to first be transformed by the life of that kingdom.  Like so many in Judah, we want to enter the age to come as we are.  We don’t want to change.  As much as we want to see everything made right, we still hold tightly to the very things, the very values, the very systems, the very sins, the very gods that have made the world the mess it is.  And we can be relentlessly unmerciful in our condemnation of everyone else we don’t think meets our standards.  We can be relentlessly unmerciful to everyone we think is the problem.  All while forgetting that we’re all the problem.  We’ve all contributed to the mess the world is in and if God were to set the world to rights and then transplant us into it as we are, well, we’d just ruin it all over again—because we’re the problem—every last one of us.

 

But when we let go of it all.  When we take hold of Jesus in faith as Messiah, as the one who died and rose again triumphant over sin and death, he not only washes our sinful past away, he also plunges us into the Spirit, into the very life of God.  And in doing that, Jesus makes us fit for the life of the age to come.  Not instantly, of course.  It’s a process.  But through word and Spirit he makes us new bit by bit, just as he does the same with this world as he sends us out with his good news to spread his kingdom bit by bit until one day the knowledge of the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.  One day that glory will fill us to—like the blood that courses through us from head to toe—and we’ll be fit for the kingdom.

 

And because of that, Jesus’ people should be known for having a wide view of God’s mercy.  That’s what the people of the northern kingdom lacked when the Lord warned them through Hosea that he desired mercy above sacrifice.  And it’s what the people of Judah lacked when Jesus told his parable about the good Samaritan.  Maybe instead of calling the it the “Parable of the Good Samaritan” we should really call it the “Parable of the Unmerciful Priest and Levite”.  In both cases, the people of Israel and the people of Judah, they of all people, should have had a sense of the Lord’s mercy.  This is where our Epistle today, beginning at Galatians 3:16, can help us understand.  St. Paul stresses God’s promise to Abraham and how it was fulfilled in the family of the Messiah—this people made up of both Jews and gentiles.

 

Paul writes in Galatians 3:16, “The promises were made to Abraham and his seed”—that is, his family.  It doesn’t say ‘his seeds,’ as though referring to several families, but indicates a single family by saying ‘and to your seed,’ meaning the Messiah.”  There was a group of Jewish Christians in the Galatian churches that were pushing for Gentile believers to be circumcised and, at least superficially, to keep the torah and Paul’s letter to them is a rebuke and an exhortation.  On the one hand he rebukes them for falling backwards into torah and on the other hand he exhorts them to press forward by faith in Jesus the Messiah, because it’s faith, not observance of the law that marks out the people of God.  Abraham had no torah.  He just had faith in the promises of God.  Torah, the law, that came hundreds of years later.  The law, Paul writes, was a good thing, but temporary—like a babysitter meant to keep the Jewish people out of trouble until God’s promises were fulfilled through them in Jesus.  Why?  Because they were the unique people, called and set apart by God—by faith, Paul stresses—to carry God’s promises to the nations.  In light of that, they should have remembered all along that God’s plan was to redeem not just Israel, but all of humanity.  And knowing that, they should have been a people with a heart for the lost and a people of mercy.

 

Brothers and Sisters, it is an awful thing when people who have themselves experience and known the amazing mercy of God become unmerciful.  The Lord rebuked Israel and Judah for their lack of mercy, but it’s even more awful when we who have known God’s mercy through Jesus fall into unmerciful patterns.  Maybe we become self-righteous.  Maybe we become jaded and cynical.  But whatever form it takes, we sinners who have known the amazing mercy of God through the blood of Jesus poured out at the cross, we outsiders who have known the amazing mercy of God by being grafted into the vine of Israel, we who were dead who have been filled with God’s own Spirit, we have no business being unmerciful.  To the contrary, because of the great mercy we have known ourselves, rivers of mercy ought to be flowing from us to the world.

 

But, somehow, our eyes fall.  Instead of looking up, we look down.  Instead of keeping our eyes focused on Jesus, we’re distracted by the things around us.  Like the guests in another of Jesus’ parables, we’re invited to his great feast, but we have excuses: I’ve bought this parcel of land and I need to go have a look at it; I’ve bought a yoke of oxen, and I need to go collect them; I’ve just got married, and well…I can’t come.  The systems, the philosophies, the values, the gods of the old age that is passing away—the things we once forsook for Jesus—entice us back.  Maybe it’s the troubles and trials of life that cause us to lose perspective and doubt Jesus and to doubt God’s faithfulness.  Whatever it is, we take our eyes off of Jesus and we begin to stray and we begin to lose hope—like someone shuffling along a mountain trail with his eyes on his shoes, missing the glory to be seen all around.  And to us Paul practically shouts, “Look up!”  (That’s Colossians, not Galatians, but it doesn’t matter.)  Look up!  You’ve been raised with the Messiah, so set your sights on things above, where Jesus sits at the right hand of God.  That’s what should mark out the people of God.  And as we look up, as we find our hope in Jesus, as we find our identity in Jesus, mercy flows.  The Spirit’s fruit grows.  And we don’t just pray “on earth as in heaven”, but we become the “on earth as in heaven” people.  That’s what the people of Israel should have been in Hosea’s day.  That’s the Priest and the Levite and the lawyer and all those other people in Judah should have been in Jesus day.  Thanks be to God that he gave his son to set them to rights and to make it possible for us, by faith, to be grafted into that family.  And so that’s what we ought to be too.  On earth as in heaven people.  Brothers and Sisters, the Lord invites us to his Table this morning, once again to participate in the great exodus in which Jesus, by his blood, has led us out of our bondage to sin and death.  Come to the Table and know again his mercy.  Eat the bread and drink the wine and know the goodness, the graciousness, the lovingkindness, the faithfulness of our God.  Then, renewed with a send of his glory, go out and take heaven, take his glory with you to the world.

 

Let’s pray: Almighty and merciful God, by whose gift alone your faithful people offer you true and laudable service: Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity

2 Corinthians 3:1-11

by William Klock

 

One morning back in my Macintosh technician days my boss walked up and put a resume on my bench.  “Does this look suspicious or is it just me?” he asked.  He pointed to the guy’s work history.  Every one of his previous employers was defunct, but somehow he had the personal email address of every one of his old bosses.  If that wasn’t odd enough, all of them had Yahoo and Hotmail email addresses using similar formats.  It was pretty obvious.  Every one of those email addresses was made up and would just go back to him and he could write his own references.

 

Of course, the whole point of a reference is that someone—who is either known personally or known by reputation—someone else is vouching for you.  They did this in Paul’s world just like we do today.  Jews, especially in the diaspora, would carry letters of recommendation indicating that other Jews could trust them.  In the pagan Greco-Roman world it was common for your patron to supply you with a letter of recommendation.  But writing your own recommendation, well, that kind of misses the whole point.  But that seems to be what the Corinthians are accusing Paul of doing in today’s Epistle.  They read parts of his first epistle to them—parts like Chapter 9 where he defends himself as an apostle—and they took it as inflated self-commendation.  But now, people in Corinth have been making false accusations against him too, so he’s going to have to do the same thing all over again.  We can hear his frustration as he writes to them, beginning Chapter 3 of Second Corinthians:

 

So, we’re starting to “recommend ourselves” again, are we?  Or perhaps we need—as some do—official references to give to you?  Or perhaps even from you?

 

Maybe he should get one of his other churches—maybe the brothers and sisters in Ephesus—to write him a letter, vouching for him.  But Paul shouldn’t have to do that.

 

Paul had a difficult relationship with the Corinthians.  When he left them in ad 50, the church was very supportive of him and his mission, but over the next several years their attitude towards him soured.  The church grew, new preachers arrived, attitudes changed.  Paul wrote to intervene in their struggles over leadership and to rebuke them for allowing pagan idolatry and immorality to get a foothold in the congregation.  They patted themselves on the back for being free in the Messiah and Paul rebuked them saying that this isn’t what freedom in the Messiah means.  Of course, they didn’t appreciate Paul’s rebukes and so he became persona non grata in Corinth.  He wrote to them and they responded with a “Thanks, but no thanks, Paul.”

 

So Paul responds sort of facetiously: “Am I going to need a recommendation before you’ll listen to me?”  That would be a bit like telling our bishop that he needs a recommendation from some other church before we’ll let him visit or preach here.  Others might have shaken the dust from their shoes at that point and left the ingrates in Corinth to themselves, but not Paul.  He has a pastor’s heart.  He cares too much for them.  And he answers not to them, but to Jesus.  I don’t think they actually asked for a letter of recommendation, but he offers one anyway—but not like any other—because Paul knew that the gospel commends itself.  So he writes to them:

 

You yourselves are our letter…

 

They rejected him.  They’ve told him not to come around and not to write to them anymore to give advice.  They’ve disrespected and insulted him.  And Paul writes: I don’t need a letter of recommendation to prove my credentials as an apostle and servant of Jesus.  I don’t.  Because you people yourselves are my letter of recommendation.  You people, even though you’ve rejected me, you’re the proof of my gospel credentials.

 

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all.  It’s quite plain that you are a letter from the Messiah, delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of beating hearts.

 

Brothers and Sisters, if that’s not grace I don’t know what is.  Paul doesn’t need a letter written in ink on paper.  These messed up, confused, infuriating people are nevertheless filled with the life of the Spirit promised in the gospel.  For all their faults and for all their inability to see how they’ve been shaped by their culture in their rejection of him, their joy in the Lord and their hope in the good news is the result of Paul’s ministry to them and that says everything about Paul that needs to be said.  Despite their imperfections and immaturity, their transformation by and their life in Jesus and the Spirit, make them his credentials.

 

That’s pretty astounding and it says something about the power of the gospel and Paul’s expectation of its power to transform people, even when they looked hopeless and even when they’re still far from perfect.  These were people he rebuked for putting the wisdom of the Greeks over the truth of the gospel.  These were people he rebuked for tolerating a church member who was sleeping with his step-mother.  These were people he rebuked for dragging each other through the courts, for divorce, for not treating each other as equals, for abusing spiritual gifts, for abusing the Lord’s Supper, for having crazy, disordered worship.  The list is a long one.  And yet despite their multitude of failings, he says, “You want to see my credentials as a gospel minister, as an apostle?  You’re it.”  Paul could see the gospel at work in them.  For all their faults, they were not the people they had once been.  As he had written to them in his first epistle, no one affirms that Jesus is Lord apart from the transforming work of the Spirit.  Paul could see through the flaws and immaturity and knew that they believed, that they loved Jesus, that they were full of the Spirit.  He had proclaimed the good news about Jesus to them and it had done its work, it was continuing to do its work, and he was confident, it would in time complete its work.  This is important.  Sometimes we look at other Christians or other churches and they’re a mess and we’re tempted to write them off completely.  Brothers and Sisters, be careful.  Is Jesus being proclaimed as Lord?  If he is, that means that the gospel and the Spirit are at work there.  Maybe the gospel and the Spirit have a lot of work yet to do.  The Corinthians needed correction—a lot of it.  But Paul didn’t write them off.  They had the gospel.  These aren’t the other folks Paul warns about who were preaching another, a different gospel.  That’s a whole other problem.  But the Corinthians received the gospel and the gospel is a powerful thing.  It is the power of God to save.  Now, word of caution.  Their context was different from ours.  This was a first-generation church living in the days when these things were still being worked out.  We don’t have that excuse today.  But still, no one, no church is perfect, but if the gospel is there, we should be confident that Jesus and the Spirit will be with a church to correct and to bring maturity.

 

But how could Paul look at these messed up people in a messed up church and be so sure?  He could, because he knew that God is faithful.  Because he knew the story and because he knew the promises of God.  And so Paul reminds the Corinthians of Jeremiah 31 and of God's promise to Israel there.

 

In those days Israel was in exile.  Israel had been unfaithful to God.  She had been unfaithful to her covenant obligations.  She had refused to trust in his goodness and she had prostituted herself to foreign kings and to foreign Gods.  So the Lord had judged her and allowed the Babylonians to conquer her, to destroy Jerusalem, to tear the temple down to the ground, and to carry the people off into captivity, away from the land they’d been promised—and most importantly, away from his presence.

 

But that was not the end.  Through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord promised the people that he would redeem them.  They may be covenant-breakers—like a cheating spouse—but he was not.  He would always be faithful to his promises.  And so one day he would restore Israel by establishing a new covenant.  There would be a new agreement between the Lord and his people.  There would be a new marriage between Israel and her Lord.  He had established the old covenant through Moses when he gave Israel his law, written on stone tablets.  But that law carved on stone did not have the power to give the people the real life they needed and that the Lord desired for them.  And so the Lord promised a new covenant that would restore Israel.  The new covenant would deal fully with the sins of the people—that’s what the cross of Jesus is about.  And the new covenant would give the people the new life they needed in order to truly be the renewed people the Lord wanted them to be—to remake humanity into what we were meant to be—God giving his people his own life, transforming their hearts and minds in a way that the law written on stone was never able to do.  In this new covenant, the Lord promised through Jeremiah, he would write the law on their hearts—he would give his people his own Spirit.

 

That was the story and that was the promise.  And when Paul looked at the Christians in Corinth, even though they were confused and muddled and had rejected him, he could write to them and say that they were his letter, they were his credentials, because the life of God’s Spirit was evident in their life as a church.  They themselves were a letter from Jesus the Messiah.  The powerful work promised through Jeremiah and the other prophets was manifest in the amazing work that the Spirit had accomplished in them.  Think about that.  Some of them had been Jews—the same sort of Jews that Paul himself had been when he persecuted Jesus’ people.  Some of them had been Greek pagans, worshipping idols, offering incense to Caesar, deeply involved in a degenerate culture.  But Paul had brought them the good news that Jesus is Lord.  He preached Jesus’ death and resurrection.  And they had been transformed.  The Spirit had moved them to repentance and given them a totally new life.  The living God had written something powerful on their hearts and they would never be the same people again.  And the pagan world around them could see it even if these people couldn’t see it themselves anymore.  Again, think about that.  Think about your own stories.  Think of the way you were once met with the good news.  Think of the forgiveness you have found at the cross.  Think of the new life Jesus has given you.  Just like the Corinthians, each of us has a long road ahead of us as we grow into a mature faithfulness to Jesus and his lordship, but Jesus has poured his Spirit into us. In our baptism he has plunged us into the Holy Spirit and we are not the people we once were—and neither were the Corinthians.

 

And so Paul goes on, getting back to his credentials, writing in verses 4-6:

 

That’s the kind of confidence we have towards God, through the Messiah.  It’s not as though we are qualified in ourselves to reckon that we have anything to offer on our own account.  Our qualification comes from God.  God has qualified us to be stewards of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit.  The letter kills, you see, but the Spirit gives life.

 

All the proof of Paul’s faithfulness as a minister of the gospel, as a minister of God’s new covenant is right there in the work accomplished in the Corinthians by Jesus and the Spirit.  It’s not that Paul is competent himself.  He merely showed up in Corinth and preached the good news as he’d been called to do by Jesus himself.  But as a result of Paul preaching the good news of Jesus and the kingdom, God’s new creation had unfolded right there in a powerful and very visible way.  The “letter”—the old law written on stone—brought death, but the Spirit now poured into these people had given them life.  In his resurrection Jesus unleashed life into the world.  All Paul did was preach that good news and where he did that the Spirit brought transformation—the Spirit brough the life promised by God all those centuries before.

 

As frustrated as Paul was with the Corinthian Christians, the fact that they were Christians—well, Paul knew it was by the grace of God.  They’d been transformed and in that Paul saw the glory of God, the glory of the cross, the glory of gospel, the glory of Jesus and the Spirit.  Paul has been absolutely swept up and away by it all.  God’s amazing faithfulness and his glory revealed in the cross and the empty tomb and in Jesus and the Spirit have captivated Paul.  It drives him on and it’s the lens through which he sees literally everything.  But the Corinthians just aren’t seeing it anymore.  They’ve been distracted by worldly things and by their petty disputes.  And so having declared how they themselves are the proof of God’s faithfulness and the power of the gospel, in verse 7 he now goes on, trying to get them to look up again.  To forget the cheap and dingy things that have distracted them and to get them captivated again by the glory of what God has done in Jesus and the Spirit.  He says to them:

 

Think about it: If the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone, came in glory, so glorious in fact that the children of Israel couldn’t look at Moses because of the glory of his face—a glory that was to be abolished, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory?

 

From waxing eloquent about the glory of the new covenant, Paul takes them back to the dark days of the old.  And yet, as much as we might (and they) might think of the old covenant times, the time before Jesus and the Spirit, as dark, Paul reminds them of Moses face when he came down from Mt. Sinai with the law.  Moses had been in the presence of the Lord and he came down the mountain with his face radiating the Lord’s glory.  It was so bright, so brilliant, so radiant of the holiness of God that the people pleaded with Moses to cover his face.  As glorious as it was, it was just too much for them to look upon.

 

And Paul’s point is this: If the law carved on stone came down from the mountain in such amazing glory, if the old covenant carried that much glory, how much more glorious is the ministry of the Spirit and God’s new covenant with his people?  He goes on in verses 9-11:

 

For if the ministry of condemnation was glorious, how much more does the ministry of justification abound in glory?  In fact, what used to be glorious has come in this respect to have no glory at all, because of the new glory which goes so far beyond it.  For if the thing which was to be abolished came with glory, how much more glory will there be for the thing that lasts?

 

Like the Christians of Ephesus who, in Revelation, are described as having lost their first love, the Corinthians had lost sight of the glory of the Holy Spirit’s ministry.  It wasn’t that they’d lost the Holy Spirit.  That’s impossible.  It’s the Spirit who binds us to Jesus, he’s the one who unites us to his life, he’s the one who renews our minds and regenerates our hearts, turning us from everything that is not Jesus and giving us the desire and the faith to take hold of Jesus with both hands.  You cannot be a Christian without the Holy Spirit.  But somehow they’d lost perspective.  The Spirit had empowered these people remarkably, they had no shortage of gifts, but they’d lost sight of the gospel, Jesus was no longer their centre, and they misused and abused those gifts.  And they’d slowly let the values of Greek culture creep in to displace a gospel-centred life.  Somehow they’d lost sight of the glory of God revealed in Jesus and the Spirit.  Does that sound familiar?

 

Brothers and Sisters, we can all too easily fall prey to the same sorts of things.  Our own culture infiltrates the church in many, many ways.  It compromises our call to holiness and we become worldly in our living.  It creeps into our churches, too.  Our culture is overwhelmingly commercialistic, materialistic, and individualistic and too often, without even realizing it’s happened, we start building our churches around these things.  We treat the gospel like a commodity to sell.  We displace it with programs and we tailor our preaching to appeal to our culture’s self-centred individualism.  Programs can be good and useful in accomplishing the work of the church, but most of the time these days they’re treated as sales tools.  But God doesn’t give us programs.  He gives us his word.  Through the ministry of the Spirit he caused his word to be written by prophets, apostles, and evangelists so that we can know him and proclaim him to the world.  And in Jesus he sent his word to become flesh—not to give us programs or gimmicks or to tickle the itching ears of sinners—but to die for our sins and to rise again to unleash life into the world.  A church should never have its identity tied up with anything other than the gospel.  A church is a place where the word is faithfully preached and the sacraments faithfully administered.  That was the definition the Protestant reformers developed.  What constitutes a church?  A church is a body of believers that preaches the word and administers the sacraments.  But today it seems many preach everything but the word and the sacraments are often side-lined or even sometimes considered optional.  As ministers of the gospel, we—and that’s both you and I—are not called to be flashy, we’re not called to preach the pop-psychology and self-help that our culture obsesses over, we’re not called to be motivational speakers, we’re not called to preach health and wealth.  We’re called to proclaim that Jesus has died and risen and that he is Lord.  We’re called to summon the world to repentance before the throne of Jesus the Messiah.  And we’re called to leave behind and to sacrifice everything that is not Jesus, everything that is not of his kingdom.  We’re called to back-up our proclamation by living the life of the Spirit, by manifesting the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control that the Spirit bears in our lives.  We’re called to live justly and to do mercy.  We’re called to use the giftings of the Spirit not for our own ends, but for the sake of the gospel and for the well-being of the Church.  We’re called to be gloriously counter-cultural: being poor in spirit, mourning sin, living in meekness, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, being merciful, and making peace—even when it means rejection and persecution.  As people filled with God’s own Spirit, we are the earnest of God’s promise and work of new creation.  By our preaching and by our lives, we’re called to lift the veil on God’s new creation, to pull God’s future into the present so that the world can have a taste of it—and see the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord.  Brothers and Sisters, it’s this Jesus-centred and Spirit-empowered life that manifests the glory of God to the world, that makes us the light of the world and the salt of the earth—that marks us out as the people of God.

 

Let us pray:  Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve:  Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Saviour; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.