Another Gospel?

Galatians 1:6-12.

I.

            In this letter, after the initial greeting, Paul gets right to the point.  In his other letters he usually butters up the recipients a bit, thanking God for them and their faith, and so on.  But here he skips all that.  He is angry, frustrated, and worried.  The churches he founded in Galatia are in danger of falling away from the good news of Jesus Christ, and embracing a less demanding, more conventional, watered-down version of the faith... which is part of the argument his rivals are making against him!

            Paul starts by saying, “I'm amazed that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ to follow another gospel.  It's not really another gospel, but certain people are confusing you and they want to change the gospel of Christ.”  The One who called the Galatians by the grace of Christ, of course, is God.  By following these other teachers, Paul says they are deserting God.  And he counters that it is these other teachers, not he, who are changing, distorting, and abandoning the original gospel.

            He insists that he and these other missionaries are not preaching the same gospel but just in a different way, or with a different emphasis.  He says they are preaching a completely different gospel, which is to say, not the real gospel at all but a false one.  Indeed, he would say that what these teachers are preaching is something diametrically opposed to the true gospel… which is one of the reasons he is so disappointed and surprised that the Galatians are falling for it.  It means maybe they didn’t fully understand what he was teaching them in the first place.

            What Paul is dealing with here is not like the difference between Presbyterians, Catholics, and Baptists.  All standard Christians today hold to the same basic essentials.  There are conservatives within every denomination who are more strict and limited about it.  But we are all Trinitarian Christians who follow the outline of the Nicene Creed. 

            I have breakfast every Thursday with a group of clergy, including a Methodist pastor from India, an Episcopal priest, two Presbyterian ministers, a Russian Orthodox priest, and a woman Charismatic Pentecostal preacher, but, as different as we are, we know we share the same gospel.  We have a kind of unity; but we also have, and often celebrate and learn from, our differences.

            But the teachers disturbing the Galatians in Paul’s time were delivering a different gospel, a different faith, something incompatible with what Paul had given them, something incompatible with what Jesus was really all about.  In a word, they were for maintaining the distinction and separateness of being Jewish, and still fearing, rejecting, despising others.  They understood unity as when everyone is like them.  Paul sees that this is a false unity that buys into the divisive competitiveness encouraged and fomented by Rome to keep its many conquered peoples in line.

II. 

            Why is this such a big deal for Paul?  Was it just an ego-centric resentment about some other teachers invading his turf?  Was it petulant puritanical rage about someone doing something different from his way?  Isn’t he overdoing some technical, theological distinctions that don’t really matter to the rest of us?  There were lots of preachers wandering around the area.  They all could not have had exactly the same message; there wasn’t even any New Testament yet, let alone precisely defined creeds and doctrine.  Why is Paul so upset about these particular teachers and their message?

            We will see that it is because the false gospel of these teachers was not radical, costly, or subversive enough, because it denied the central teaching of Paul in Galatians, and the whole meaning of the cross and resurrection, which is that: “We are all one in Christ Jesus.”  We may have our superficial differences, but in Christ Jesus there are no alien, enemy “others,” not even the Romans.  Christ, by his cross and resurrection, has broken down all those walls separating and alienating people.

            I need to say that there is something going on here that everyone involved at the time knew, but doesn’t actually show up in words in the letter.  Judaism was a legal religion in the Roman Empire.  Because of some political negotiations a few decades earlier, Jews were the only people in the Empire who were exempt from having to worship the Emperor as a god.  All the other pagan religions simply included the Emperor as another god in their pantheons.  But Jews, being strictly monotheistic, were not required to do this.  So if you were not a Jew, and you still refused to worship the Emperor, you would be subject to the penalty for treason, which could be death. 

            So part of the argument used by Paul’s opponents in Galatia might have been that by getting circumcised the Galatian men could affirm and prove their new Jewish faith.  They could stick it to the man, the Emperor, whom everybody, especially Galatians, hated, and legally refuse to worship him.  And because of the legal exemption, they would therefore be safe from persecution by the Empire.  It seemed like a perfect solution, except for the part where you had to have part of your body cut off, of course.

            It was not like today where belonging to a particular religion means checking off a box on a form, or repeating some verbal forumla.  Being Jewish meant submitting to circumcision.  If the Galatians didn’t get circumcised and therefore couldn’t prove their Jewishness, and then didn’t worship the Emperor, they could be arrested for sedition.  So submitting to circumcision was not just about getting the Galatians to submit to Jewish law, it was also, and in my opinion more importantly, about submission to Roman law.

            Because even though the Emperor was granting this exemption, anyone who had themselves circumcised so they could get this exemption was still implicitly acknowledging the Emperor’s law and authority, and therefore the Emperor.  It was one way the Jewish law was misused to show allegiance to some power other than God.

III.

            This is Paul’s point.  How can you claim to be against the Empire when you allow your faith to be protected by the Empire’s law?  Paul’s conclusion is that if Gentile Christians were to submit to circumcision, they have thereby chosen to participate in “this present evil age” in which Rome rules.  They would be assenting to Rome’s way of dealing with things, which is to say, they would be tacitly making the confession that Caesar is Lord, which is a denial of the basic Christian affirmation that Jesus is Lord.  They would have chosen to work within the imperial system, the same system that nailed Jesus to a cross.  The whole liberating message of the gospel would be denied and lost.

            That’s why he is so urgent and unequivocal, as he goes on to say, “even if we ourselves or a heavenly angel should ever preach anything different from what we preached to you, they should be under a curse.  I'm repeating what we've said before: if anyone preaches something different from what you received, they should be under a curse!”

            Those are very strong words indicating what is at stake here.  The problem is not so much that the Galatians are choosing to become Jewish.  Jewish missionaries had been at work across the Empire for decades.  Neither is the problem that new Galatian Christians are choosing to become Jewish.  At this time what we know as Christianity did not exist.  The Galatians by responding to Paul’s ministry thought of themselves as having become Jews, by adoption into Abraham’s family.  The apostles were all Jews and they saw themselves advocating a reform movement within Judaism.  Neither Paul nor Jesus ever thought of themselves as no longer being Jewish.

            His opponents are upset with him because Paul lifts the requirement of circumcision, which they feel makes his evangelistic job a lot easier than theirs.  They are saying he is watering down the gospel, making it less demanding, just to please people, just to cater to their comfort.  They think he’s lowering the standards by telling Gentiles they can be Jewish without the bother, pain, and dangers of circumcision in an age when there was only rudimentary anesthesia and no antibiotics, or awareness of microbes, at all.

            Circumcision had been the brake on the spread of Judaism that the Romans counted on when they exempted Jews from having to worship the Emperor.  How much traction could a religion really get, if one of the requirements was to slice off part of your most intimate and sensitive organ?  But if Jews stopped requiring that, if somehow it became acceptable to be Jewish without it, then how would the Empire really be able to tell who is Jewish and therefore exempt from the law about worshiping the Emperor?  They could revoke the exemption entirely and that would place the whole Jewish faith in jeopardy!  Jews would then have to choose between faithfulness and death.  And they didn’t want to have to do that.

IV.

            Paul knows this… but he doesn’t care!  In fact, for him, it is a selling point.  Being Jewish means affirming with your whole being the one God whose main act is liberating the Israelites from the slavery of Pharaoh’s empire.  Judaism had been a notoriously anti-imperialistic faith for centuries.  And to become Jewish without submitting to circumcision, that is, without accepting the protection of Roman law, is a way to separate yourself from the whole idolatrous, imperial State, and this doomed “present evil age.”  That’s why he says his gospel is not of human origin: human political reasoning and logic has no place in his system.  It doesn’t make any normal sense to join a community that might instantly make you an enemy of the State. 

            Plus, if they are saying he’s watering down the gospel by not requiring circumcision, Paul’s response is that the true gospel he preaches is actually more demanding because it potentially places one’s whole body at risk, not just a tiny piece of it. 

            How can anybody possibly think he’s trying to “please people” with a gospel that basically, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, invites people “to come and die”?  How can it possibly be construed as “telling people what they want to hear” when Paul talks about a Messiah who was arrested by the Romans for sedition, convicted in the usual bogus trial, flogged and mocked by soldiers, who then nailed his body to two pieces of wood and stuck him out in the hot sun until he slowly died, suffocated by his own weight.  How can that be a Messiah, a Savior?  This is exactly what people did not want to hear, which is why the Romans continually reminded them that this is the consequence of opposing, even of not worshiping, the Emperor.

            Paul charges that it is not he, but his opponents who are really trying to “please people” and deliver a palatable, reasonable, safe, version of the gospel, one that doesn’t get them on the wrong side of the Romans.  Their version is safer because it maintains the divisions in society that were enforced between Jew and Gentile, or “Greek”.  At some point Paul realized that Jewish law, instead of being a way to maintain a faithful resistance to the Empire, as it had been in Babylon, had been twisted into a way to support and validate the laws of the Roman oppressors.  It had been coopted by Rome and had ironically become just another tool in the enslavement of people by the Empire.  Instead of setting them free as God intended, the Jewish law had become an instrument of their own enslavement.

V.

            People joined Paul’s gatherings not because he was the enemy of Rome, but because like Jesus he refused to have enemies at all.  He knows that Jesus Christ comes into the world to reconcile people to each other and to God.  But empires thrive by dividing and conquering, by playing groups off against each other, and by fomenting competition, hostility, and suspicion between different interests.  Not to mention sheer ruthless terroristic violence.  Empires need foreign enemies as a focus of the people’s fear, and they need to keep the various conquered peoples from ever uniting against them. It is Jesus’ refusal to have enemies that made him dangerous to Rome and made them kill him as an enemy.  Or if his attitude spread, the Empire could not stand.

            Paul’s calling is to make that attitude spread.

            That is our calling too.  We are to live without enemies in a world that demands that we have enemies.  We are to live in cooperation in a world that demands competition.  We are to live in forgiveness in a world that demands retribution and punishment.

            Such a deliberate stance contradicting common sense and going against the grain of society often makes those who follow Jesus outcast, branded as traitors, cowards, naïve, or foolish.  This kind of lifestyle could not be invented by humans because it goes against the grain of our deluded, sinful, nature.  Paul says this message and practice come from God.

            “Am I trying to win over human beings or God?” he writes.  “Or am I trying to please people?  If I were still trying to please people, I wouldn't be Christ's slave.”  That is, he would not be a slave to a Jewish man executed for sedition by the Romans.  It is inconceivable that this would please anybody.  As if people would say, “Oh yeah, let’s all go be slaves to this loser; that’ll sell.”  “Brothers and sisters,” he goes on, “I want you to know that the gospel I preached isn't human in origin.  I didn't receive it or learn it from a human.  It came through a revelation from Jesus Christ.”

            The man the Romans executed because he refused to have enemies did not stay dead.  He rose to new life, breathed his Spirit into his followers, and now leads them.  He frees us from the fear that would keep us enslaved.  And he empowers us to live in the world without enemies, at peace with all, working for justice and peace, inhabiting a new world that is coming.

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