Paul's Letter to the Galatians

As we are about to hear from St Paul over the next few months, and in particular his letter to the Galatians for the next few weeks, I thought it might be useful to reflect on his core insight and message in this letter our freedom in Christ. (Season after Pentecost)

You may like to read what I have written for the Second Sunday after Pentecost.

Second Sunday after Pentecost

Paul was a devout Jew and most surely would have started every day of his life with the threefold dawn blessing: “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe who has not created me a gentile; Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe who has not created me a slave; Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe who has not created me a woman.”

How did this same man reach the point where he could declare: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”? For Paul there was a complete conversion from one who gave thanks for being Jewish, free and male, an interpreter and beneficiary of the law to one who found himself in Christ with all others who relied on faith and not practice of the law.

Let us circle back around to explore a little to how Paul got to here and why it is so important to us.

Paul’s experience and views are terribly important because for better or for worse Paul wrote most of the New Testament. Even though it is now contested that he did not necessarily write all 13 letters ascribed to him, maybe as few as 7 letters, he is still the single biggest contributing author to the New Testament so his understandings have a huge impact on our theology.

Despite his central importance the church has long had an uneasy relationship with Paul. On the one hand who cannot be moved by his insights such as the one we just heard. But on the other hand many of us find some of his social statements terribly – well first century! Not so surprising really given that he was a first century man. Like many of us I have had a difficult relationship with Paul. Over the years I have grown to find him a person of convincing faith and great spiritual insight while still very much a man of his times with the human limitations that we all suffer from.

Paul as an apostle seems to have seen himself as having a threefold claim to authority. Firstly he was a zealous Jew, a Pharisee – one who paid particular attention to detailed practice of the law (not just the Ten Commandments we recite but the 613 commandments detailed throughout the Hebrew Bible). Secondly Paul did not receive his knowledge from human sources but from his mystical encounter with the risen Christ.Thirdly Paul suffered for the gospel. He did not merely pass on the gospel but he lived, suffered and eventually died for it. He was shipwrecked, flogged, imprisoned and suffered some mysterious ailment.

So, Paul began as one who was zealous for the law and became convinced that the law could not be fulfilled and that it is by faith in Christ we were set free from the law of sin and death. He works out much of his argument in his letter to the churches in Galatia. He grapples with the issue of the law and faith until

he reaches the conclusion that for freedom Christ has set us free!

Now that’s wonderful and alarming all at the same time. For many of us what a wonderful thought, that we are called into a freedom from the law. Personal freedom, isn’t that the rallying cry of my generation? But what about what people do with their freedom? Looking at the evening news or at a local committee meeting or our extended family get-togethers aren’t there some people we wouldn’t want to give too much freedom to? Indeed, if we are truly honest with ourselves most of us are not sure that we should have too much freedom.

Now Paul does not mean open slather by freedom. Someone who so frequently tells his converts what to do and what not to do is not promoting open slather. So, what is this freedom that Paul speaks so passionately about? Freedom is a state of being, a state of the heart and ideally also social and political - even though often people need to experience an internal freedom even while still in external enslavement or captivity. Paul seems to understand that only those who are in union with the divine, those who are clothed in Christ, can enter into this expanded way of being that is not against the law but beyond it.

It is so difficult to understand I think because we need to hold several paradoxical truths at the same time. It is only when we have grappled with the laws of righteousness that we become aware of how much we need freeing even from good laws. The one who came to fulfil the law is the one who sets us free from this law of sin and death. And to top it off this expansive freedom is given to us so that we can become servants of one another.

This is not the freedom of anything goes, of personal fulfilment at the expense of other. This is the freedom of love, of service - if you like the freedom of a higher order of law: the law of love. It is the freedom of citizenship of the kingdom of God rather than this society. It can only be held in holy tension. To be free without this deep responsibility, this responsiveness to others, is anarchy. To be a servant of another without this freedom is captivity and enslavement. Only held together can we human souls be free to expand toward love rather toward self aggrandisement or annihilation.

No wonder most of church history has seen us committed to following the rules, and enforcing our understanding of the rules and their amendments, onto one another in the hope that while a rather blunt instrument at least the rules are somehow fair, or at least good for the group even if not for the individual. While Paul’s freedom sounds attractive if it needs to come with such servant hood then maybe just sticking to the rules, the law, is not so bad!

Trouble is once you have glimpsed freedom, once you have acknowledged the yearning for freedom, anything less is too constraining. Once you have tasted the exquisite taste of love nothing else satisfies, no matter how terribly one fails. Why is it so terribly hard to reach, or to stay, in that expansive state of mind and heart?

Part of it seems to me to be that we have been too well trained by the law to think in terms of right and wrong and are so well trained in arguing our rights or our right perspective. But being right is not the same as being in relationship.

Sometimes another tradition can illumine our own. Rumi, the Sufi poet said: “Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” We cannot be free while we are troubled by proving that we are right and you are wrong; we cannot serve others while we are working out if they are right or wrong. That state of freedom that is married to perfect loving service of each other is that field beyond right and wrong. Let us meet each other there.

Let us meet each other there in the bread and the wine, the body and the blood of the one who gave his perfect freedom to become one of us. Let us meet each other there in the sharing of God’s peace. Let us even seek to meet each other there in the work of being church and neighbours.

Even so, come Lord Jesus Christ, come set us free so that we can love most fully.

This is my work informed by everything I have heard, read and experienced. I am indebted to the wisdom of others. This week I am especially grateful to:

Marcus J Borg and John Dominic Crossan “The First Paul: Reclaiming the radical visionary behind the Church’s conservative icon”, SPCK, London, 2009.