June 5, 2016
Galatians 1:11-24

It is really hard to understand what Paul is so upset about in his letter to the Galatians when all we get is a little piece of scripture to read. And, I think it is even harder to understand what he is getting at in today’s pericope if we have no sense of context. (Even if we do have a sense of the context, Paul’s letters are tricky because they show only one side of a dialogue that had nothing to do with us. In other words, they are somebody else’s mail. Paul had no idea we would make scripture out of it.)
I mentioned last week that these churches in Galatia had been infiltrated by a Judaising faction within the early church. Though the Galatians were Gentiles who were brought to faith by Paul’s work of sharing the Good News, they were now being swayed by mixed messages. They were being told that their full inclusion in the true and original church required obedience to at least some of the Jewish practices of the Jerusalem community. For Paul this was unacceptable, a complete abdication of what makes the “Good News” good. It isn’t that he objected to Jewish laws and customs, rather, it’s that he objected to them as contingencies for salvation and inclusion. Salvation is offered through the grace of God and revealed to us in the love of Christ and made real to us through the presence of the Spirit. And, that’s it! When you start putting contingencies in place for this salvation, you take God out of the driver’s seat, you grasp control, and you sacrifice the openness and humility needed to find yourself transformed by and filled with the love that is poured out upon us.
Later in this letter Paul says, “It is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.” As Paul sees it, this is the essence of Christian faith. This is the whole point of what God has accomplished through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ: unity with the eternal God through unity with Christ. But, if you take God out of the driver’s seat you inevitably replace God with your self, and the self cannot do what only God can.
Of course, from today’s little epistle reading it might be hard to believe that Paul has done much dying to self. “The gospel that I proclaimed to you, I received directly through Christ who appeared to me in person. I didn’t seek affirmation, information, or approval from the original apostles or from anyone else for that matter. I was called and inspired by Christ – not people – and so I went out and I proclaimed to you the good news!”
Professor Wendy Farley comments, “We might also be concerned about Paul’s insistence that his teaching comes from no person, that it is authorized by no church leader, and in fact exists in stubborn defiance of its leaders. This is not good news to any religion that endures through time because of the authority of its institutions. Any lunatic can claim that Jesus has revealed himself to her or him.” And, certainly, we’ve heard the stories of such lunatics who do horrible things because God “told them” and because they saw no need to weigh the message against the wisdom of their tradition’s faith community.
If I were to find fault with Farley’s commentary I might argue that she doesn’t pay enough attention to the rest of Paul’s letter. Paul here may be overstating his case, and not so much to build himself up but to credit what God has done and to remind the Galatian churches of what God has done for them. When we keep reading we see that Paul did meet with Peter and the other Jerusalem Church leaders after fourteen years of sharing the gospel with the gentile world. And at that meeting he received the endorsement and the approval of the apostles. He writes, “When they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised, just at Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for the circumcised, and when James and Cephas and John, who were acknowledged pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do.”
What has Paul so enraged, and the reason he emphasizes the independence and divine origin of his calling, is this: Peter went back on his word. Peter offered that right hand of fellowship and then took it back, or so Paul perceived. Peter ate with Gentiles; he sacrificed the contingency of dietary laws and acknowledged the full inclusion of the Gentile world into the peoplehood of God, and then he didn’t. Then, feeling pressure from those who disagreed, he stopped the table fellowship and he kept to himself. This, Paul saw as a horrible betrayal to him and to the gospel, because either God through the grace of Christ had ushered in a new age of salvation for all, or God hadn’t. Either the Gentile churches were in or they were not. Either the people of God were one or they were not. Either grace ruled or it didn’t. Peter’s withdrawal of table fellowship with the Gentiles was an implicit (if not overt) endorsement of those who would put contingencies on grace and would therefore undermine the essence of Christian faith and the missional work that Paul had been so fervently devoting the last fourteen years of his life to.
Now, Peter, no doubt, has his own perspective on the issue, a perspective we do not get to hear. Perhaps Peter felt that Paul was overreacting, that Paul for the sake of keeping everyone happy should be willing to compromise a bit, that perhaps it wouldn’t hurt the Gentile world to take up some of the practices that had guided and defined the people of God for centuries leading up to Christ. Again, this is somebody’s else’s mail. We don’t know Peter’s perspective; we just know that for Paul the issue was crucial. Grace hung in the balance. The core message of the Christian confession was at stake. The mission of God in the world and the whole meaning of peoplehood hinged on this very matter.
I want to end by thinking a bit about peoplehood. For Paul it meant that in Christ, when Christ’s life within us becomes the defining factor for us, we see that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between people – between male and female, between free and slave, between Greek or Jew. The truth at the core of us all is divine in origin. The true meaning of our lives is rooted in grace that comes from beyond us. We are all temples in which the Spirit of God is pleased to dwell.
This makes us miraculously, shockingly special. And, to receive this, to feel it, to know it is incredibly life-giving. But, the truth of grace remains true also for those who don’t see it. The truth is that to be special does not demand that we be unique. All people are God’s people. All people are miraculously, shockingly special. To live that out, to be a community of people who express that truth in what we say and what we do, well, wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing in this mixed up world of ours?!