Galatians 3.15-29.
I.
Paul
says that the promise God made with Abraham was like a last will that has but one
beneficiary, who is the promised Messiah, Jesus Christ. That promise was made forever, and,
like a will, it could not be changed or invalidated by any subsequent
agreement. Since the Law came 430
years later, it does not have the authority to overrule or change the original
will or promise. Therefore, the
inheritors of the Promise are not those who keep to the letter of the Law, but Jesus
Christ and those who trust in him and are in him.
The
Law came later, mainly “because of offenses,” that is, for the purpose of
making it clear when and how people were going astray. The Law makes visible when we are
transgressing. We only know that
something is wrong if there is some kind of law against it.
The
more positive purpose of the Law was to give structure to the people’s life
until the beneficiary, the Messiah, arrived. The function and purpose of the Law therefore reminds me of
several things.
When
I learned to play the trumpet, many, many years ago, I worked through my Dad’s
very beat-up and tattered copy of the Arban book, which was then, and I believe
still is, the standard manual for learning the trumpet. The Arban book starts with the most
basic elements of trumpet playing, like how to buzz your lips, and proceeds
from there with page after page of long and often mind-numbingly boring
exercises. By the time you get to
the end of the book, which takes years of practice, you should be a regular Roger
Voisin.
We
can extend this analogy to just about anything. The the grammatical tables and vocabulary lists in a
language book; or the calisthenics, drills, and rules involved in learning a
sport; or learning to cook by following recipes. All of these
systems do two things. They show
you how to do the skill right… but they also end up revealing how far short you
fall in the process. They reveal
what you’re doing wrong.
And
for any of us who have learned anything like this, it doesn’t take long before
we realize that the goal is never fully attained. The finish-line continually gets pushed farther ahead. Once you learn the basics, you move on
to intermediate and advanced. But even
when we get to the end of the Arban book, we are still not Wynton Marsalis by
any stretch. Simply following the
rules doesn’t get us to absolute fluency in a language, it doesn’t make us Michael
Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, or Pele.
I
heard someone on the radio last week describe learning cooking as a girl in
Home Ec class and making something for her grandmother, who was from Romania or
someplace. She followed the recipe
perfectly, but the grandmother found the dish inedible. Her comment was, “You killed it with
the recipe.” After being hurt and
angry for a time, the girl finally asked what the grandmother meant. And the grandmother consented to teach
her how to cook, a process that began not
with learning recipes but with cleaning the kitchen, and then choosing the
produce, and only after developing a relationship with the whole process and
context, actually cooking something.
II.
I
have been reading since I was about 4 years old. I read constantly for years. And I remember how frustrated I was when in like 6th
grade, even though I could read and write good sentences, and spelled
impeccably, a teacher kept giving me bad grades… because I was not good in
identifying the technical parts of speech and grammatical rules. I’m still
not good at that. I could probably
read and write as well as the teacher, but he kept hammering me because I
couldn’t tell an adverb from a participle.
The
point of the recipe, or the Arban book, or grammatical rules is to do the task
well: to cook a meal, or play the trumpet, or read and write. If you can get to the goal without all
these rules, who cares? Isn’t the goal the point?
Paul
is saying that the Galatians got to the goal by God’s gift of grace. They received the Spirit when they
heard and took to heart the good news of the crucifixion and resurrection of
Jesus. They have already received,
at least in part, the inheritance promised to Abraham’s descendant, the
Messiah, Jesus Christ! In effect
they have been given the talent and
the skills, which are evident in the results they produce: the love and unity,
the forgiveness and acceptance, blessing and joy they share together in their
new spiritual community.
But
now these other teachers show up and tell them that this is not enough. They have to go back to the recipe,
they are told. They have to go
back and start at the beginning of the Arban book. They have to be able to diagram a sentence. They have to keep to the letter of the
Law of Moses, starting with slicing off part of their bodies.
Paul
understands that this is insanity.
It would kill the Galatians’ trust in the Lord Jesus if they were forced
to learn the rudimentary steps of something that the Spirit is freeing them to
accomplish among themselves already.
Buddhists
talk about the difference between the moon and the finger that points to the
moon. If you point to something, a
dog will usually express great interest in your finger; it will not usually occur
to a dog that your finger is pointing somewhere else and to look over there. The Galatians had a direct experience
of the moon; but their new teachers are trying to get them to concentrate on
the finger. They have the Spirit;
but their teachers want them to focus on the Law, the whole purpose of which is
to bring people into relationship with… the Spirit.
It
would be like forcing Picasso to do color-by-numbers, or reducing Einstein to doing
long-division.
III.
In
the movie, The Matrix, there’s a
scene where one of the characters has to fly a helicopter. So she makes a phone call and simply
has the program for flying a helicopter uploaded into her virtual brain. She did not have to go through years of
training. She does not have to refer
to the manual. She just receives
it directly into herself as a kind of gift.
Paul
is saying that the Galatians received the Spirit kind of like this: directly, by means of their trusting in
the faith of Jesus the Messiah, the beneficiary of God’s Promise to Abraham,
and seeing their lives re-shaped by the way they lived out this trust together. Not only is it crazy for them now to
imagine that they have to go back and keep the letter of the Law, it is also
counterproductive. It would have
the opposite effect. It would kill
their trust in the Lord, and banish the Spirit from their community.
The
miracle is that by God’s grace the gift of faith was bestowed upon these
Galatians, without their having to go through the normal sequence of learning
the rudimentary rules of the Law and gradually become more proficient with
discipline. They receive the
Spirit simply by placing their trust in the message of good news that they
heard about how Jesus was crucified by the Romans but defeated them by emerging
into a new kind of life.
This
is why the establishment is so put off by Jesus’ and Paul’s teaching. First of all, it seems somehow like
cheating. Like in Jesus’ parable
where the newcomers in the vineyard get paid the same amount as those who
worked in the vineyard all day.
Trusting
in the faith of Jesus means in effect just sitting and waiting and letting the
Lord fill you. It is a not doing. It is a response to what the Lord does
in and with and among you by the Spirit.
The most you have to do is let your old self die so your true self can
be born. And that is a lot. You have to give up all the divisions
and distinctions that we use to judge and fear other people.
And
secondly, this approach scares the people in power because it is so dangerous. It smashes all the ways in which we are
held down, or hold each other down; all the ways we cultivate distrust, and the
fear, anger, and shame that the powers-that-be use so effectively to keep us
enslaved to their agendas and regimes. If this continues, they reason, as did the High Priest
Caiaphas when he encounters Jesus, that it will bring down the wrath of the
Empire and destroy everything they hold dear. Which is absolutely true.
But
when everything we hold dear only serves to enslave us to a corrupt and violent
order, its passing is not a bad thing.
It is in fact a liberating event, and we emerge on the other side of it
unscathed because of our trust in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
IV.
But
in the end, by trusting in Jesus Christ, we do
keep the Law, in Spirit. We can actually do what the Law requires, which is justice, righteousness, and love. But like with an accomplished artist or
poet, this happens not according to
the written rules, but beyond the
rules. The rules – the recipe, the
scales, the grammar, the calisthenics – actually hold you back at this point. Now
we look at the fruits, the effects, the results, the kind of life that is
produced by trusting in Jesus.
This
is something the church has not been willing to look at very much because we
have been such a colossal failure here.
Coming to church is supposed to make us better people. Yet far too many people go regularly to
church for decades and remain just as bad if not worse than they were when they
were confirmed as adolescents.
They are still dominated by fear, anger, and shame. Many people remain at least as violent,
resentful, hateful, nasty, small-minded, and bitter as before. Many even find ways to twist and debase
the good news of Jesus to rationalize and inflate their own greed, bigotry, cowardice,
and narrow-mindedness.
Churches
need to look carefully at what kind of community and people we are
fostering. That will tell us
whether we are really hearing and trusting in the good news of Jesus
Christ. That will tell us whether
the Spirit is with us or not.
Are
we living together according to Paul’s magnificent statement in 3:28, which I
have been repeating on most Sunday mornings when I fill the font? “For as many of you as have been
baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is now no longer Jew or Greek,
slave or free, male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Scholars believe Paul is quoting an
early hymn of the Jesus-movement, something the Galatians would have
recognized. It is one of the
essential key verses in the New Testament.
It
means that God’s action in Jesus Christ, in his crucifixion and resurrection,
has fundamentally changed human life and fulfilled God’s original promise to
Abraham. It means that in him all
have been made one, a truth in which we participate and which we proclaim in
our baptism. Our baptism washes
away all our superficial differences that we make to be so important, and
reveals at our heart and core an essential oneness, in the flesh we share with
the Lord Jesus, and therefore with God. In our baptism our old self symbolically dies and our
new self in Christ, our deepest, truest, and most original self, emerges into
our conscious life.
It
means no one is an alien, an enemy, a competitor, a rival, and the divisions
upon which the Romans depended to keep us broken and under their control, no
longer exist. They never really
existed at all. They were an
illusion produced by our egos to keep us enslaved to fear and violence.
V.
In
Jesus Christ we are witnesses to a unity that is true, but that has not yet
been realized in human society, which still languishes in falsehood. This unity, in which all barriers of
separation have been broken down, is the Promise that God gave to Abraham. That in his descendant, Jesus, all
nations would be blessed. The land
that his heirs, those who trust in Jesus Christ, the beneficiary of his
Promise, inherit is not just a sliver of real estate in the middle-east; it is
the whole planet, all creation, all nations, the whole world. As Jesus says in John 4, the Promise is
not about this or that mountain or temple, but about worshiping everywhere in
Spirit and in truth.
This
is a truth that we demonstrate and proclaim by the love, peace, and justice that
characterizes our life together in the gathering of disciples, and our outward
life, projected and expressed in our engagement with and in God’s creation and
people. It means that not only
have the barriers been dissolved in our own gathering; but also we work hard to
reveal that the barriers have been vaporized everywhere.
For
now there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female… Gay or
straight, native and alien, Black or white, rich or poor, Christian or Muslim
or Jew or Buddhist or Hindu, for all are one in Christ Jesus. All are one in God. All are one in goodness, blessing,
hope, joy, and love.
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