Hello! It’s Friday, and we come to the end of another week of podcasts from STC Sheffield.

It has been lovely to be with you this week, and I’m looking forward to hearing what my friend and colleague Tom Finnemore has to say about the subsequent chapters of Galatians next week. Do make sure to listen to him.

In the meantime, our Bible reading today is Galatians Chapter 3 verses 10-14. I’m going to use the Message translation to focus on the last 2 verses.

“Christ redeemed us from that self-defeating, cursed life by absorbing it completely into himself. Do you remember the Scripture that says, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”? That is what happened when Jesus was nailed to the cross: He became a curse, and at the same time dissolved the curse. And now, because of that, the air is cleared.”

REFLECTION:

From this passage, I’d like us to look at four words: Absorbing, Cursed, Dissolved and Cleared.

Firstly, absorbing.

The picture that springs to mind when I think of something being completely absorbed is kitchen roll!

In fact advertising gurus spend hours telling us just how much more absorbent each new brand on the market is.  The pictures on TV show spills of water, and then a piece of kitchen towel is laid on top, and all the liquid is completely absorbed into it.

I love the way the Message translation uses the word ‘absorbing’ because it helps to give us a much deeper understanding and expression of what Christ does for us.

When it comes to our sin, we sometimes use the analogy of being washed clean by Christ.  And whilst this is obviously true, we shouldn’t conjure up some image of Jesus holding up a hose pipe and spraying us down, or just throwing a bucket of water at us.

Christ doesn’t clean us at a distance, being careful not to get himself dirty.

No, we are cleaned by Christ because he absorbs our sin completely into himself.  We become clean, as he becomes dirty.

And so we move onto the second word: Cursed.

To say something or someone is cursed is quite harsh, jarring language that we don’t often use.  But as Paul uses it so many times in this passage, we can’t avoid unpacking what it means or represents.  I am really grateful to have had a Bible commentary to help me understand this language and imagery before doing the podcast!

Being cursed in this context means being rejected by God, but even more than its meaning, to the Jews hearing Paul’s words, they would link being cursed to condemnation and death.

In the Old Testament, those who broke the laws of God were sentenced to death by stoning and then hung on a stake – a piece of wood, a tree – as an indication that they were cursed.  It was an outward, visible sign to others – a symbol that they had been rejected by God.

This is why Jesus – the Messiah, God’s supposedly anointed one, being hung on a tree – a wooden cross – was so shocking to the Jews.  It meant he had died under a divine curse.  It just didn’t make sense to them that the King of Heaven, the Christ, would die like this.

What they, and us today, need to realise is that Jesus was not on the cross because of his law-breaking.  It was because he had absorbed all of our sin.  He took our curse.

However, as we know, the story does not end with Jesus cursed and rejected by God on the cross.

And so we move onto the third word: Dissolved

I am sure that when most of you think about the word dissolve, you think about what happens when you add sugar or salt to water.

I am not a Chemistry teacher, so what follows is a simple explanation of that – please don’t send me any feedback!

When you add salt to water, the positive part of the water molecule has the power to attract the negative chloride ions of salt, and at the same time the sodium ions in the salt are pulled to the other part of the water molecule.  The charge, or the power,