Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-june-6-2024
Galatians 3:1-14
Faith or Observance of the Law
1You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. 2 I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? 3 Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? 4 Have you suffered so much for nothing – if it really was for nothing? 5 Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?
6 Consider Abraham: “He believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”
7 Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham. 8 The scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed through you.” 9 So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.
10 For all who rely on observing the law are under a curse, as it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.” 11 Clearly no one is justified before God by the law, because “the righteous will live by faith.” 12 The law is not based on faith; on the contrary, it says, “The person who does these things will live by them.” 13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.” 14 He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.
Today’s reading – like our reading for a couple of days ago – comes from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. And also like that earlier reading, this one has an important lesson for us, but it’s a lesson that takes some careful consideration, because it would be easy to misunderstand the apostle’s meaning. And in fact, many Christian readers have misunderstood that meaning since this letter was originally published.
Just to review the background of the Letter to the Galatians, Paul was writing to the church he had established in the city of Galatea. As in many of the places where Paul established churches, the population of Galatea was largely Gentile, not Jewish. (In fact, historians say the Galatians were actually Celts, maybe descendants of Celtic recruits into the Roman army.)
But as we said earlier in the week, the leaders of the early church had agreed that Gentile converts to faith in Jesus did not need to keep all the Jewish practices like being circumcised, eating kosher foods and performing purity rituals. The traditional religious practices were what Paul had in mind when he wrote in this passage about “keeping the law.”
One of the central themes of Paul’s ministry – a theme the rest of the leaders of the church came to agree with – was that it’s faith in Jesus as the Messiah, and not the observance of these traditional practices, that justifies people in God’s eyes. This message seemed to be established among the Galatian Christians. But after Paul went on from Galatea, some other Jewish Christian leaders came to town. These leaders apparently started telling the Galatians that they need to do all those things – including being circumcised – if they wanted to be saved. They basically taught that you needed to be a Jew if you wanted to be a Christian. And it seems that lots of the Galatians believed them.
Paul found this message deeply offensive and just plain wrong, as you can tell from the tone of this passage. In our reading, Paul reminded the Galatian followers of Jesus that trying to “save themselves” by observing the law of Moses was futile. That would require faithfully keeping the whole law – and our natural human sinfulness makes it impossible for any of us to do that. And since those who try to live by the law are bound to fall short, they will bring punishment on themselves. Or, as Paul puts it here, they will bring a “curse” on themselves.
But Paul says that we can escape this curse, because Jesus has already taken it upon himself. An ancient curse – all the way back to the earliest days of the Hebrew people – pronounced a curse on one who is “hung on a tree.” And Jesus, in his crucifixion, was declared by Paul to have accepted that curse on behalf of all those who would believe in him. So accepting Jesus as the Lord of our lives and devoting ourselves to living by his teachings does us more good than trying to keep all the practices of traditional Hebrew law.
Now, it needs to be said that Paul would not have said that there’s no moral aspect to following Jesus. Paul understood that being a follower of Jesus includes striving to live a moral life, living in a way that expresses our love for God and for our neighbor. But for those who have really given our hearts to Jesus, living a moral life isn’t something we do to ‘earn our way into heaven.’ Instead, living a moral life is an expression of our thanks to God for the new life we have in Jesus, a new life that is a gift we receive by God’s grace. And we need to remind ourselves regularly of what the New Testament actually means by “grace” – the un-earned favor of God.
So, as Paul says, we would be foolish to rely on our own righteousness, or on our ability to faithfully keep a complicated series of religious rituals. It’s much smarter to rely on the promise of new life made to those who commit their hearts to following and serving Jesus, living by his teachings and in imitation of him..
Let’s pray. Lord, you know how we foolishly put our faith in our own ability to live a “religious” life, instead of trusting in the promise you have made in Jesus. Change our hearts day by day, and nurture our faith in him as the Lord and Savior of our lives. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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