Today’s message from Galatians 2:15b-21.
The setting:Â Paul, the Pharisee-turned-evangelist, is very worried that someone has come in behind him to change the message from one of life-changing good news (gospel) to one of religious particularism (another gospel which is no gospel).
Paul’s Revelation
He makes it clear that the message he has been spreading through the world did not come to him from a human source, but “by revelation of Jesus Christ.” Not that he had not, after his remarkable meeting with Christ on the Damascus road, checked in with those who had known Jesus during his earthly ministry; he had, and had found that his message was consistent with theirs.
Someone’s been messing with the message!
Some of the new believes in the Church at Jerusalem have not yet understood the scope of the message that gave them life, and want to impose additional conditions on the new-found faith of their non-Jewish counterparts out in the wide world, of whom the Galatian churches form a part.
This “other gospel which is not a gospel” makes the claim that while faith in Christ is a good start, it is incomplete without the entire traditional package — we would now call it the “judeo-Christian tradition” — including rules about circumcision of males, dietary practices, and all the other things that go with their (superior [?]) religious tradition.
Later in the letter, Paul says that his Galatian friends have been “bewitched” by this alternate message:Â one that relies on “the works of the law” rather than “the faith of Jesus Christ.”
In chapter 2 he gets down to cases: even Peter (Cephas, the Rock), who should know better because he was among the first to whom God revealed clearly that the Gentiles (ethne, nations) are included in the scope of Christ’s message, having been shown in a vision that “what God has cleansed you must not call common”, is temporarily led astray by these well-intentioned preservers of their particularist tradition. This had happened at Antioch, the first multi-ethnic, multicultural church, one that could not be identified by the nationality of the members, because what brought them together was something else, namely Christ. It was for this reason that “they were first called Christians (Christ-ones) at Antioch”. There some were later persuaded to separate themselves from their brothers and sisters in faith, because of the social and political pressures of their more traditionalist friends from Jerusalem. Peter was one of those who changed position under such pressure. For this, Paul had, he says, “opposed him to his face, because he was in the wrong.” So Paul recounts his argument to Peter, and makes it his argument to the Galatians as well.
The good news:
It’s not about religion
The Jews who have become believers in Christ know full well that their religious background and practice is insufficient to bring them into right relationship with God. Why, then, impose those failed requirements on those who have come in to the faith from a different place?
It’s about life!
So for the punchline (v. 20) Paul does not speak about right or wrong, or morality, or the need to uphold good, traditional values; he speaks in personal terms about a transformed life. Faith in Christ does not lead one to a life of continued bondage to sin, because that old life is over; neither does it lead to a life of religion (Latin: regulare, living by rule). It leads to something else: the death of the old self, and a new life that is intimately dependent on the life of the risen Christ “in me”. The believer himself is a living incarnation of Christ, just as Jesus was a living incarnation of the Father. It is this transformed and trans-formative life, not a tradition, however good and holy, nor a rule or religion, however superior, which saves.