Taken Off the Market.

Galatians 4.1-20

I.

            Paul is saying that when we don’t know better, we have an excuse.  But when we are given knowledge of the truth, it is inexcusable to turn back to ignorance.  There was a time, he says, when “we” were under the world’s domination system… and he interestingly includes himself; Jews would not normally have considered themselves “under” a world system defined by paganism.  But he does.  It is part of his agenda to break down what he now sees as an artificial distinction between Jews and Gentiles.

            But once we know the truth of our unity in Christ that he has just described at the end of the last chapter, there no reverting to not knowing it.  In ignorance we have a certain innocence; but now, to go back to that? knowing what we know?  It is something for which we are now responsible. 

            It’s like in the film, The Matrix again.  You can’t easily go back once you have taken the red pill that shows you the true nature of your existence.  The Galatians took the red pill when they accepted Paul and his revolutionary message about the man the Roman’s crucified but who still lived in spirit. 

            At one time, the Galatians were pagans.  That is, they were subject to the religion of the empire.  Every locality and ethnicity in the empire had its own religion, rituals, gods, and festivals.  All of these were under the shadow of the emperor’s umbrella so that emperor worship was the one unifying practice across the whole empire.  So for every local holiday, there was this added and required component of reverence and veneration for the emperor and his regime.

            This system was quite pervasive.  Remember that this was a time before mass media when even books were rare.  The empire had to maintain its domination over people by other means than controlling the cable news networks.

            There were monuments and statues and temples that the empire constructed and placed in strategic locations, to remind the people who was in charge.  This was particularly effective for the Galatians as the Romans put statues around of dead and dying Galatians, so they wouldn’t forget their defeat and subjugation. 

            There was this whole calendar of carnivals and commemorations in which everyone was expected to participate by decorating their homes, going to parades, and attending huge ritual meals at the pagan sacrifices.  Just about the only way ordinary people ever got any meat to eat at all was by going to the various temples for religious celebrations.  That’s why the issue of eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols was such a big deal in the New Testament.  If you ate the food you were not just participating in the pagan ritual, but you were expressing your allegiance to the emperor’s government, which paid for the festival.  The emperor was buying you and your loyalty by letting some of his wealth trickle down in the form of these carnivals.

            For someone to opt out of all this was to risk ostracism or even arrest.  It was a religious and political statement that would have been taken as an act of sedition.

II.

            Only circumcised Jews were given a grudging exemption from all this.  They were considered atheists, anti-social, and weirdos, but a deal had been worked out by which they were permitted not to participate.

            But this exemption came at a cost.  The emperor required that Jews across the empire pay for a twice-a-day sacrifice in the Jerusalem Temple in the emperor’s name, where the Jewish high priests prayed for the emperor and his regime.  In that way the emperor ensured that even the notoriously non-compliant Jews would remain loyal subjects.  They were not required to worship the emperor openly and publicly; but they did worship the emperor implicitly and under the table.

            And there was circumcision as an identifying mark.  Part of Paul’s point is that this is in effect a sacrifice of part of your own body to the emperor, because by it you get to participate in the emperor’s “gracious” exemption from having to worship him. 

            One of the reasons Jews were considered odd was that they would rather do that than join in what were basically wall-to-wall parties.  I mean think about it.  The Romans are saying that if you don’t attend the free street fair with feasting and dancing and live music and theater shows and general wild and crazy fun with all your family and neighbors, we’ll arrest you.  But if you really want an exemption you can satisfy us by showing that you have had a particular part of your body cut off, proving your Jewishness.   

            Paul’s opponents want the Galatians to become Jews.  They want them to take this deal.  They contend that this is the best and safest way to get out of worshiping the emperor.  It’s a way to be subversive but within the system, and without getting into trouble with the law. 

            Paul answers that there is no difference.  Either you worship the emperor as a pagan, or you worship the emperor through the back door as a Jew by availing yourself of the emperor’s permission and exemption.  Either way you’re submitting to the emperor’s system, authority, and rule.

            In his other letters, Paul will address at more length the question of attendance at these festivals.  Here he expresses disappointment that the Galatians are tempted to go back to participation in this whole system, either by joining in pagan festivals or having themselves circumcised.  To Paul it almost doesn’t matter which of these you choose.  If they submit to circumcision they are worshiping the emperor just as surely as by attending the festivals.  You are just as much the emperor’s slave by attending his above board festivals as by becoming an authorized, official, State sanctioned Jew.

III.

            Paul then refers back to his initial encounter with the Galatians.  He was apparently passing through Galatia when he got sick, and was taken in and cared for by these people, even though he was a stranger and a Jew.  He alludes to a possible problem with his eyes.

            He reminds them of the grace they showed to him by not rejecting or excluding him, and how this reflected in advance what he would share with them about the inclusive, welcoming grace of God.  “I have become like you,” he even says, while urging them to imitate him in his trust of God in Christ.

            Paul restates for them the good news he originally preached to them, that “when the fulfillment of the time came, God sent his Son, born through a woman, and born under the law.”  That is, when the imperial bill became due, God sent the Son to be the payment on our behalf.  God paid the tax, the tribute, the ransom demanded by the oppressors and kidnappers, the emperor and his minions.  “You were bought with a price,” says Paul several times in his other letters. 

            By this time his use of the term “law” refers both to the Jewish Law and to Roman law, indeed to the whole principle of dominating, coercive legalism in which people are forced unknowingly to serve “the world’s system,” or “this present evil age.”  It is this law, instituted by the conquerors, that demands the regular tribute or payment from the oppressed population.  It is a debt unjustly imposed by a dominating power that has trained us to imagine that it is just the way things have to be. 

            Paul says that God’s Son, Jesus Christ, emerges into this enslaved world for one purpose, “so he could redeem those under the Law so that we could be adopted.”  The word for “redeem” in Greek is exagorazo, which literally means “to take off the market.”  It’s not just to buy, which is agorazo; it is to buy permanently.  Jesus Christ comes into the world to de-commodify the world and people; he comes to remove people from the rat-race of buying and selling, competition and inequality.      

            We are taken off the market because God, in Christ, paid the ransom.  Christ is the ransom.  But unlike when you pay the ransom to kidnappers and they thereby have incentive to kidnap someone else, in this case the ransom explodes in their face by being resurrected and not staying in their grasp.  The empire is like a monstrous Moloch-monster that demands to be paid in the blood, the life of oppressed people.  But then God comes into the system and pays in God’s own blood, which is the life of the whole world, which is life itself.  This life cannot be possessed or managed or exploited or bought at all.   

            So instead of the people’s life locked up in their portfolios, God’s life becomes a virus that spreads through the whole system the good news about the One who was crucified but who was thereby set free to infect the whole empire with freedom.

IV.

            “And you know this,” Paul says to the Galatians, “Because you got infected too!  You caught it in what you heard from me but you were already receptive.  Your resistance was low to begin with, as shown by your acceptance of me when I was this sick, Jewish, stranger who showed up in your town.”

            The virus is adoption as God’s children, which frees us from being the emperor’s slaves.  Therefore, Paul writes, “Because you are [now God’s] sons and daughters, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!”  The virus is the Spirit that is blown into the world by Christ’s resurrection, dissolving and wiping away our false selves and revealing our true nature as God’s children.

            Our old humanity, enslaved to the empire whose barbed-wire tentacles strangled our communities and even our hearts, is washed away by the Spirit.  For Paul, this happens in baptism, and people emerge from the water finally recognizing and crying to the living God, the Maker of heaven and earth: “Abba!  Father!”

            How could the Galatians even consider going back?  Is the grip of slavery that strong, that even after having tasted freedom, we could be convinced to revert to being dominated, exploited, tortured, and repeatedly bought and sold by the Owners and Masters of this world?

            We ask that question.  But we know the answer.  It is yes.  The grip of slavery is that strong.  We know this.  Because we are still there, most of the time.

            Paul is writing to us, folks.  Because even though we know what to say, theologically.  And we cognitively affirm that we were bought with a price with Christ’s blood, shed for the life of the world.  Yet I fear that the emperor, Caesar, the Owner and Master, Baal, Pharaoh, Satan, by whatever name we use, that power still snarls in our hearts.  We know he still manages the world.

            Paul says God has redeemed us, taken us off the market.  But I wonder if we aren’t all too eager to remain in, and of, and on the market.  All too eager to sell ourselves to the Owner and Master in return for the cheap and fleeting pleasures of his carnival.  All too eager to let the system deem us and define us according to its self-serving categories.  We stay divided, at enmity with each other.  We justify and rationalize inequality, injustice, violence, war, exploitation, oppression, and the greed, anger, fear, and selfishness that spawn these horrors.  We get nostalgic about a past that never existed.  And we just want the church to help us get by and cope.  And we certainly do not want to believe or be informed that we are actively participating in mass murder.  Every. Day.

V.

            Paul understands that the Jesus Movement is a nonviolent insurgency designed and intended to provide an alternative to the coercive terror in human hearts and communities perpetrated by “the world’s system,” “this present evil age,” “the principalities and powers,” those spiritual forces and their human agents claiming to be our Owners and Masters. 

            Jesus Christ comes into the world to blow open the path to a new way of life, a way of freedom and justice, a way of peace and equality, a way of kindness and gentleness, a way of forgiveness and love.  We can’t get there if we continue to sell ourselves to the highest bidder.  We can only get there when we realize that we have been redeemed.  We have been taken off the market. 

            And that now, in the words of the Heidelberg Catechism: “I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.  He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.  He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.  Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.” 

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