“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)
(St C's, 12.VI.16)
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