Into the Wilderness.

Galatians 1:13-24.

I.

            Paul proceeds in his letter to the church in Galatia, to give a very concise, selective, and pointed account of his life in the faith.  Probably he is responding to several charges made against him by his opponents in the Galatian churches.  We can infer what they were saying about him. 

            They said that, in the first place, Paul can’t be a real apostle because he never personally knew Jesus.  After persecuting the church at first, he had to learn the faith from the real apostles in Jerusalem.  Finally, he had a falling out with Peter in Antioch, because he was too radical even for that famously diverse and inclusive church.  He broke with them and went off to do his own thing.  So he was a kind of loose cannon, preaching an unauthorized version of the gospel.

            They apparently said that the real gospel, the one authorized by Peter, James, and John, the Jerusalem leaders, had to do with keeping the Law of Moses in its entirety, from food laws to circumcision.  They understood the mission of Jesus the Messiah to welcome Gentiles into Abraham’s family by making them observant Jews.

            Paul defends himself and his understanding of the gospel by basically telling his story.  First, he talks about his own Jewish heritage.  If it’s zeal for the Law and Jewish tradition they want, well, he has that in spades.  Few people of his generation knew the traditions better than he.  And because of his devotion to Judaism he was a virulent persecutor of the followers of Jesus.  By definition he would have to be, for their movement was inherently contrary to the Law, because they followed and even worshiped a man who had been crucified.  In Deuteronomy 21 it says that anyone convicted of a crime and hanged on a tree is cursed.  The idea that the Messiah would be a criminal, killed by being nailed to a wooden cross, was absurd and blasphemous to an observant Jew like Paul had been.  He had no choice but to do all in his power to stamp out this heresy undermining the unity and integrity of Judaism.

            One could not therefore follow a hanged man and be an observant Jew.  It was impossible and a contradiction.  Just following Jesus at all, was contrary to the Torah.  Period.

II.

            Then something happens to Paul that radically turns his life around.  He doesn’t go into great detail here.  He just says that “God… was pleased to reveal his Son to me.”  In Greek he says “in me,” meaning an interior revelation, a mystical experience.  In several other places Paul refers to this experience as an encounter with the risen and living Lord Jesus.

            So to the charge that Paul didn’t know the historical Jesus, he answers, “So what?  I know the real, risen, present Jesus Christ who emerged in my heart and inspired me with the truth.”  Paul strongly implies that this kind of knowledge is better than having known Jesus while he was alive in the flesh. 

            Actually, he doesn’t want to be distracted by facts about the historical Jesus, filtered through eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry.  When Jesus appears to him, Paul does not immediately go to Jerusalem to confer with the apostles who knew Jesus.  He goes in exactly in the other direction, to Arabia, of all places.

            “Arabia” refers to the area east and southeast of the Jordan, which was and is mainly desert.  This practice of going into the wilderness for reflection and spiritual nourishment is very old in Israelite tradition, at least as far back as Moses and then Elijah, and includes of course Jesus himself, who went into the desert after his experience of God’s Voice and Spirit at his baptism. 

            When a person wants to clear their head and heart, and get closer to God, they go away from civilization, out to the wild places.  This continues to be true for the early church, and eventually becomes the monastic movement in the 2^nd century.

            It might not make any sense to us.  Having a life-transforming mystical experience might send us to, oh, a psychiatrist, or to the library or a school where we can study this phenomenon, or even to church or a religious community.  But for people steeped in the story of Israel’s God, the place to go is the desert.  That’s where you can get clear of all human junk.  A place with no bars, no wifi, no UPS or mail delivery, no cable, no phone, no roads.  A wild place of extremity.  That’s where to meet God.

            Paul knew that consulting the people about this would be useless.  He had to consult with God directly.  And he uses this strategy to validate his ministry and calling and gospel.  His point is that having a mystical experience and spending 3 years in the wilderness is actually more authentic than having learned the gospel from a book, or at a school, or from any people, even the apostles themselves.

            We have lost sight of how trusting in the living God of Israel means trusting in and encountering God in the wild.  We have lost sight of how radically wild God is.  Throughout the Scriptures the point is continually made that our God is not completely comfortable with civilization, or with urban/agricultural domesticated life. Civilization has been an unmitigated disaster for God’s creation.  It tends inevitably towards idolatry, empire, conquest, hierarchies, and kings, markets, money, debt, inequality, exploitation, slavery, injustice, and war. 

            If you want to see the stars you have to get away from the light pollution emitted from cities; so also, if you want to encounter the pure light of the living God the best place to do it is far away from places organized, rationalized, domesticated, and dominated by humans.

III.

            Paul does eventually go to Jerusalem and stays with Peter for 2 weeks, and also meets Jesus’ brother, James.  That must have been a remarkable visit.  Here is this man, whom Peter and James only know by his reputation as an educated and articulate persecutor of the church, who had a violent change of heart in Damascus, and then disappeared for 3 years.  When he finally emerges from the desert, he has this story about how God revealed Jesus, God’s Son, in and to  him, giving him this commission to proclaim him among the Gentiles.

            There is no sense that Peter and James tell him he’s nuts, or wrong, or insubordinate, or has a lot to learn, or is somehow inferior because he did not know Jesus in the flesh.  We don’t know how ringing an endorsement Paul got from Peter, but Peter doesn’t stop him from going out as a missionary to the Gentiles in Syria and Cilicia, where he was originally from.

            Paul would certainly have told Peter of his basic conversion from a follower of the Law to a follower of Jesus Christ.  He would certainly have told Peter what he realized about the cross.  That the cross had been the main thing that made him an opponent of the Way of Jesus Christ, because of that stipulation in the Law about being cursed if you’re hanged on a tree.  But when Jesus appears to him, he realizes that at least this part of the Law is no longer valid, and if one part can be no longer valid, then the whole edifice of the Law as a basis for religious life crumbles as well.

            Once he starts thinking outside the box of the Law and his own tradition, he begins to realize how irrelevant, and even counterproductive, that box is.

            When Paul finds Christ emerging within him, and when he then encounters the wildness of God in the wilderness, it must have struck him how the Law had become so domesticated and civilized, so enslaved to human powers and leaders, ideologies, philosophies, economics, and politics, as to become contrary to its original purpose.  Instead of freeing people to live according to God’s will, the Law was being used as a tool to keep people in bondage to the “Pharaohs” of what he calls “the present evil age”.  The Law, the Torah, the holy legal code of his people and faith, had been corrupted so thoroughly that it now was used to serve Caesar.

IV.

            So the good news, the gospel, that he brings back home to Cilicia and Syria is that the wild and free living God has broken into the world in Jesus Christ, a man who was executed for sedition by the Romans.  This man, who suffered the rejection of worldly powers and was even thereby cursed by Jewish Law, defeated both when God raised him from the dead.  His victory changes everything.  It means we are no longer in bondage to Roman power, which had corrupted even God’s Law.  Now it is by trusting in God’s smashing victory in Christ that we are free from fear and death, free from Rome and free from Rome’s strategy of dividing and conquering, into which the Law was made to play.

            For 14 years Paul preaches in the city of Antioch this revolutionary message of freedom and fearlessness in Christ, mainly to Gentiles.  They gain many adherents… but the message is very controversial. 

            In the first place, observant Jews saw how Paul’s gospel went against the Bible.  For at least 500 years, Judaism had been about literally keeping the laws of the Torah.  This is the way their ancestors kept their faith during the exile in Babylon.  This is how they kept the faith when the Maccabees rebelled against the Greeks.  This is how they maintained their distinct identity and avoided being assimilated into the Roman Empire, was the argument.  Judaism without the Law was not Judaism at all, they would say.

            But Paul sees that keeping the letter of the Law can ignore its Spirit and play directly into the hands of the Roman oppressors.  The Torah can be twisted into a divisive, exclusive, collaborationist, document that leaves people in bondage.

            In the second place, Paul’s message of radical equality and unity among all people was a threat to Rome’s hegemony, which depended on hierarchies and divisions, hostilities and classes, and mainly fear of their ruthless and murderous violence.  Worshiping a guy the Romans executed for sedition, and even giving him titles that applied to the Emperor, like “Savior”, “Lord”, and “Son of God”, is seen as the ultimate gesture of rebellion, disloyalty, and independence.

            Such behaviors can get you into deep trouble, as the church would soon discover.  But Paul’s view is that it is better to endure Rome’s hostility than to capitulate to Rome’s authority, especially since Jesus’ resurrection proves that not even death can separate us from God’s love. 

V.

            Two important things emerge for us from this passage.  First, the truest and most reliable experience of Jesus Christ happens to us within us.  No one comes to a mature faith by just reading and thinking.  And “within” does not mean merely in our minds.  True faith is not about what interests us or what our opinions are.  It is something we have to experience.   Within us has in some sense to do with our bodies.  It means really within us, down to our gut.  That’s the only thing that has the power to challenge and transform us down to our core, and send us to a new place.

            This means being open and listening to Christ within us, being ready to have our world shaken and overturned, being ready to respond with repentance:  a transformed mind and moving our lives in a different direction.

            Prayer, especially wordless meditation prepared for in praying the Psalms, is this kind of openness and listening, into which God can emerge within us.

            Secondly, the validation and continued development of this experience and its meaning for us happens best in the wild, undomesticated, uncivilized, natural places of our world.  For God is inherently wild, undomesticated, uncivilized, and natural.  We have to go to these places.  I mean that literally, as in putting our bodies into nature and wilderness.  And I also mean that figuratively, when we deliberately engage with ideas and practices that challenge our own domesticity, comfort, convenience, and complacency.

            What Paul experiences is unthinkable heresy to him.  I wonder if there aren’t some unthinkable heresies through which the presence of the Lord Jesus may challenge and shake and even break us open.  For God is wild, and none of our traditions and theologies encompass God either.

            For the one way we can reliably tell when we have had an encounter with the true and living God is that we find our securities, loyalties, habits, practices, identities, memories, hopes, and plans thoroughly and comprehensively wrecked.  For what God is always calling us to is not just outside the box, it is outside the very idea of the possibility of a box.  For God calls us to be emancipated and free from all boxes.  God would have us emerge together in unity as Gods children, equal, strong, and free.

+++++++