Paul's Gospel (Galatians 1 &2)

    “It is no longer I who live, but  it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live...I live by faith in the Son of God.” From Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, chapter 2, verse 20.

    According to our lectionary, for several Sundays after Pentecost this year, we read through Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. Paul can be thought of as a “Fifth Evangelist”, and the Letter to the Galatians is one proclamation of his Gospel. In the Eastern Church, Paul is known as “The Apostle”; this expresses his importance in revealing an understanding of the Gospel which makes it available to everyone in the world.

    In this Letter, Paul is responding to news from his congregation in Galatia, what is now central Turkey, and is calling them back to the Gospel he proclaimed to them. Altho Paul does not name them, and we apparently don’t know who they are, some teachers are following Paul, and attempting to replace the Gospel he is teaching, with another gospel. In that non-Pauline gospel, followers of Jesus are expected to adopt all the requirements of the Law of Moses. Paul proclaims a Gospel of faith in Jesus alone, not one of commitment to the Law, as a prerequisite, so to speak, to faith in Christ. Paul’s Gospel is one of freedom in Christ, not one of adherence to fulfilling legal and ritual requirements.

     Chapter 1 of the Letter, which we read last Sunday, isn’t about Law or Faith; it’s about grace and revelation and, by implication, resurrection. Chapter 1 is about Paul’s authority and its source. It’s about the work of God in Paul’s life, in preparing him to proclaim his Gospel to the Gentiles, and we can hear it as saying something about the work of God in our lives, which makes it possible for us to hear the Gospel, Paul’s Gospel and the Gospels of the Evangelists.

    Paul writes, “I did not receive it from a human source...but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” Paul is claiming here that he has seen and heard the risen Christ himself, from whom he received his Gospel. There is no qualification of this statement. Paul doesn’t give us any room to speculate about what this may mean. A few verses down, he writes, “I did not confer with any human being.” When he gets around to meeting people who know Jesus, he mentions only Cephas (that is, Peter) and James the Lord’s brother. Paul is making it clear that his revelation has come from the risen Jesus himself, and receives confirmation of it from Peter and James. Paul is emphatic about this, as when he writes, “God...called me through his grace [and] was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.”

    The key word in that sentence is ‘grace’. As we know, it means, ‘gift’, ‘favor’, ‘divine assistance’. It is freely given and freely available. The same grace which enables Paul to receive a revelation of Jesus, is the same grace which enables us to receive that revelation. It is grace which enables us to proclaim our faith and to celebrate it in the sacraments and our common life. Paul’s experience is both unique and universal --- unique in that he is given a commission to proclaim the Gospel to the Gentiles, and universal in that the Gospel is available to everyone, and everyone can share in it.

    In the First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, Paul introduces his Gospel; it’s not the whole of it, but it is the core: that Christ died in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, that he appeared to Peter and the Twelve, then to many others, and lastly to Paul himself. In the Letter to the Galatians, in chapter 2, in the section we read today, he adds what we call “justification by faith”, a proclamation that we are free from the requirements of the Law, that there is no need to adhere to Jewish law for those who have faith in Christ. It is clear from the Letter that this is a difficult idea for the Christians in Galatia, but Paul is insistent that they accept it, and the basis of his insistence is his direct, personal experience of the risen Christ. That experience has been so liberating for Paul, that he wants everyone, Jew and Gentile, to experience that liberation.

    “The Gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin”, Paul writes. For some time, many scholars and others have worked hard to reduce Scripture, faith, experiences of revelation to “human origin” alone. But there is no reason for Christians to be intimidated by this tendency. God’s grace is still operative, the liberation that God offers is always available. We may think of the reductionist tendency of our time, as an effort to entangle the Gospel in a new kind of law, a law that forbids any intrusion by eternity into time, that is suspicious of any experience of liberation, of resurrection, which is claimed to come from beyond our usual everyday experience. But Paul’s Gospel proclaims the reality of resurrection, the reality of spiritual freedom from all earthly restriction, the reality of grace, the free act of God in making the risen life of Christ available to us.

    There is also a tendency, which always accompanies religious experience, to turn faith itself into a kind of law, a law of adherence to fixed statements of doctrine, of adherence to rules of behavior, ceremonial and social and moral, to turn local customs into divinely-inspired institutions. We may hear the Apostle’s words as reminders to be aware of this tendency, and warnings not to be caught in it. Paul writes, “I died to the law, that I might live to God.” Freedom in Christ is the source and goal of Paul’s teaching. We may think of law, of any attempt to organize religious experience, as an effort to get God under control, but the freedom of life in Christ subverts efforts like this.

    The Letter to the Hebrews says that faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The important words here are ‘assurance’ and ‘conviction’. There is no suggestion here of rigidity, of an inflexible attitude. Orthodox Christians like to claim that Paul wrote the Letter to the Hebrews; Biblical scholars today don’t accept this, but the claim has a point: there is an affinity between Paul’s experience of faith, and that of the writer of Hebrews --- a confidence, an assurance, in God which does not need Law to support it.

    Paul contrasts law and faith, and exhorts us to do the same, to always subordinate law to faith, not to allow ourselves to transform faith into a new law. The point is to allow the freedom of life in Christ to be always available. The grace, the gift, which made faith available to Paul, is available to us too, and it is that gift that we celebrate in our eucharist today. Our goal is the same as that of the Apostle: always to live in the freedom which God has revealed in Christ.

    “It is no longer I who live, but  it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live...I live by faith in the Son of God.” Amen.
     (St C's, 12.VI.16)

    

     

    

       

The Centurion and his Slave (Luke 7)

    “Turning to the crowd that followed him, [Jesus] said, ‘I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.’” Luke 7:9.

    In the name, etc..

    There are many things to say about today’s Gospel. It is very revealing about relations between Jews and Gentiles, and especially about relations between Jesus and Gentiles and other actors in the story. And of course the story has something to say about faith, about what it is and what it isn’t. And the way the centurion communicates with Jesus, through intermediaries, is interesting and suggestive.

   The centurion sends Jewish elders to ask Jesus to heal his slave. Now a centurion has command over at least a few hundred men, up to two thousand (as I read in Wiki the other day) depending on his seniority and experience. So he is a fairly senior and important person in the army, and in the region where he and his men are garrisoned. This story is especially interesting, when we remember that the Romans are a conquering army, an occupation force, in Jewish lands.

    Do the Jewish elders obey the centurion out of fear, which would be understandable in the circumstances, or out of some other motivation? Not out of fear, no. They respond out of respect and gratitude, for, as they say, “he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.” What a charismatic personality the centurion is, to inspire such respect. And the respect travels both ways; the centurion has enough understanding of the local religion, and devotion to it, to go so far as to build a synagogue.

    The centurion and the elders know Jesus, and they know him as a healer. There is no suggestion of any opposition or hostility between the elders and Jesus, or the centurion and Jesus. The Roman centurion, the Jewish elders, and Jesus are, in this story, members of one community, relating to each other on the basis of a common understanding. This understanding is not spelled out, but it is based on a common respect for the Jewish religion; the centurion is devoted to it and to the Jewish people, the elders maintain it, and Jesus himself has authority in it as a respected healer. There is a mutual respect here which is very striking, and in our period of religious hostility and violence, it can serve as a sign of the direction in which we all need to go. I don’t know how typical this story is, of people and events in Judaea two thousand years ago, but it is at least possible that there was more than one example of cross-cultural communication of the kind we are hearing about in this story. There must have been at least a few communities in which Romans and locals strove to live together in some kind of unity.

    The centurion asks the elders to talk to Jesus on his behalf. I refrain from speculating on any reasons for this, beyond what the Scripture quotes the centurion as saying, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof.” This is not a reason not to talk to Jesus, but it expresses the centurion’s sense of subordination to someone whose authority, at least in the matter of healing, is greater than his own. At the same time, he regards Jesus equally as a commander like himself: “But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed. For I also [like you, he means to say] am a man set under authority...and I say to one ‘go’ and he goes.” And so on.

    The centurion’s confidence in himself and Jesus as commanders, and his confidence in Jesus’s ability to do what he asks, at a distance and without even the centurion’s asking Jesus himself directly, Jesus pronounces to be an unequalled, amazing demonstration of faith. As we know, faith means trust, and the centurion clearly trusts Jesus without qualification. Now note what is happening here. The servant, or slave, has not apparently asked for anything himself, as far as we know. No one has discussed the servant’s faith or the lack of it. There is no suggestion that the servant has to do or say anything to be worthy of the healing that the centurion is asking for. And the centurion proclaims his own unworthiness even to have Jesus in his house, even though the elders proclaim his worthiness. The centurion deflects this praise. So there is no connection whatever between the supposed worthiness of the centurion or his slave, and the outcome of the request. And the request is for a slave, someone of the lowest status, of no importance in the social order. How stunning this request must have seemed, so unlike what may have been the usual attitude to slaves, as unimportant and expendable.

    Social status, moral worth, and faith are not intrinsically connected. Faith does not have to be proven by signs of worth or importance, and it can be demonstrated on behalf of others. The faith of the centurion is directed, so to speak, away from himself and toward his slave. That is a sign of true faith, that it is not self-seeking in any way, and has nothing to do with our usual worldly considerations of worth.

    So this story communicates to us two important truths: first, that cross-cultural and inter-religious respect and communication are possible, and, in our period of religious warfare, essential. Second, that faith in such an environment is possible, and that we are called to direct our faith away, as it were, from our own self-centered concerns, toward those who may be of little account in the world, who are waiting for a sign from us of their worth in God’s eyes.

    “Turning to the crowd that followed him, [Jesus] said, ‘I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.’”

    In the name, etc..

    

    

God from God, Light from Light (John 17)

    “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” From John’s Gospel, chapter 17, verse 21.

       In the name, etc..

    Today’s reading is the conclusion of the long prayer of Jesus, which takes up all of chapter 17. It is a prayer not only for those who are present with him, but also for “those who will believe in me through their word,” as Jesus says, “that they all may be one.” The prayer is one for unity not only of the people immediately around Jesus, but also for that community extended in space and time, and, indeed, extended also in eternity. There is no limit to this prayer. The purpose of the unity, if I can put it that way, is “that the world may believe that you have sent me.”

    What is the nature of the unity that Jesus is praying for? How does it help “the world” believe that the Father sent Jesus? And what is the purpose of the unity that Jesus is praying for?

    The unity is something deeper than mere agreement or conformity. Nowadays, unity in the church, and among the churches, tends to mean polite acknowledgement of carefully worked out theological and jurisdictional agreements, with the aim of regulating inter-church relationships. Such unity is worth working for, of course, but it is only the beginning of an approach to the kind of unity Jesus is talking about.

    The Nicene creed points toward the nature of the unity when it describes Jesus as “God from God, Light from Light...of one Being with the Father.” Father and Son are one in being, in a relationship so close that they are unified in purpose. There is a metaphysical bond between them that is beyond the words that we can come up with to refer to it. The unity is the mystery of the inner life of the Trinity that we are being drawn into, when Jesus prays that we may be one, as the Father and the Son are one.

    How does the unity help the world believe that the Father sent Jesus? It helps by revealing that the unity is actually love, when Jesus prays “that you have sent me and loved them even as you have loved me.” The unity, then, is not merely a metaphysical reality, in some remote eternal realm, but a living experience of love into which we are being drawn and in which we can participate. God, in other words, is not remote from us in eternity, but is available to us in a personal experience of love. And he wants that experience of love to be known.

     And now to our third question, the purpose of the unity. We’ve already heard it: the love between the Father and the Son. Jesus prays “I made your name known to them...so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” This is the goal of our Christian lives: unity with God in Christ, in love. Every experience of love and unity in this life, is a precursor, a preparation, a hint of the ultimate experience of loving unity with God. It is what the whole human race is called to, and what some people, whom we call saints and mystics, attain to in this life. They remind us, as in fact we remind each other in our eucharistic liturgies all the time, that God in his infinite love has made us for himself. That is the nature, the purpose, of the unity in love which Jesus has revealed to us.

    “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.”  

      In the name etc..