You Only Have to Die.

Galatians 4:21-5:1.

I.

            The book of Galatians is about the tension and conflict between two different missional strategies in the early church.  There were probably other groups with other missional strategies, but we know about these two mainly because one side was represented by the apostle Paul, who wrote letters about what was going on that the church found to be rather valuable.

            Paul responds to his opponents who seem to have been talking about their conflict in terms of the story in Genesis of Sarah and Hagar, the mothers of Abraham’s two sons.  The aging couple, Abraham and Sarah, got tired of waiting for God to keep the promise that they would have a child, and they convinced themselves of something utterly contradictory to the Bible which is that “God helps those who help themselves.”  They rationalized that surely God must mean that Abraham will have a son by Hagar, who was at that time Sarah’s slave-girl.  They proceed on this plan and Hagar bears a son named Ishmael.  That wasn’t God’s promise, however.  God does eventually keep the promise and also give a son to Sarah, whose name is Isaac. 

            Paul’s opponents contrast the two mothers, insisting that Gentiles may enter into God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah by keeping literally the rules of the Torah, which was later given to the descendants of Isaac.  Thus through the observance of the law they would become children of Abraham too.  Not keeping the law made the Gentiles “children of Hagar,” the one who did not inherit the promise. 

            Paul turns their argument on its head and says that these pious, observant Jews are not spiritual descendants of Sarah at all, but of Hagar, the slave-girl, because they keep people enslaved by their religious laws and their compromises with Roman law.

            The two women represent two different covenants, Paul suggests.  Hagar stands for Mt. Sinai, where the Law was received, and the present corrupted Jerusalem, which leaves people in slavery.  In other words, if the officials in Jerusalem had turned the Law into an oppressive system. 

            Paul also says that the child of the slave-woman was conceived “the normal way.”  Other translations say “according to the flesh.”  When Paul uses these terms he is speaking of the context of slavery.  Hagar had no say in the matter.  Ishmael’s conception was an oppressive, unequal, possibly coercive act in which Sarah gave her slave to her husband.

            So Paul does not demonize Hagar herself or criticize her for anything she does.  In the allegory she simply represents those caught in the

oppressive slave system.

             Indeed, she is an indication of Abraham and Sarah’s profound lack of trust in God.  Granted, there were all kinds of social standards and mores and so forth that were different in those days from Paul’s time, let alone our time.  But the conception of Ishmael happens because of oppression under a regime of slavery.

II.

            Paul then goes on to identify his opponents with this tradition of oppression, exploitation, violence, and inequality.   As if to say that what is important is not whether you are circumcised, or whether you eat pork, or whether you wear two different kinds of cloth, or whether you perform the right religious rituals, or even whether God has made a promise to you and chosen you for a special blessing.  What does matter is whether your behavior reflects the values of slavery and inequality, or a deep trust in the Word of the living God? 

            So: Is Hagar our “mother”?  Are we “children of slavery”?  Are we “born according to the flesh”?  That is, is our identity shaped by the violence, exploitation, inequality, abuse, and cruelty of slavery, where people are just objects to be bought and sold?  Where we are either victims like Hagar or unwitting perpetrators like Abraham and Sarah, who were convinced by this despicable system to lose their own trust in God’s promise?  Spiritually, are we just “born in the normal way,” that is, according to the machinations of the ego and its desires, rooted in fear, shame, anger?

            Paul says that his opponents are the ones still pushing slavery because, in their enthusiasm for the letter of the law, they are supporting Rome’s tactic of dividing and conquering.  The law is supposed to differentiate Jews from Gentiles.  But by emphasizing this distinction between different groups, these missionaries participate in Rome’s incitement of conflict and mistrust, rivalry and competition, between the conquered peoples.  By pretending that they are different, and chosen, and special, and somehow above all these other conquered nations, these Jews are deluding themselves.  They are only tightening Rome’s grip on themselves and others. 

            Instead of their own specialness and uniqueness, Paul insists that Jews like himself should express the solidarity they have with other oppressed and conquered nations.  There is no essential difference between what Rome was doing to people like the Galatians, and what they were doing to Jews.

            This is revealed in Jesus’ crucifixion.  When Jesus dies on the cross he identifies with not just the Jewish victims of Roman terror, but all the people Rome tortured to death in this way for the crime of sedition, and all who suffered as members of conquered nations.  He is indeed thereby even cursed according to the letter of the Jewish law.  Paul realizes that his death is therefore for all; and when he is raised from death and out of Rome’s clutches, he is revealed as the Savior of all.  Not just of Jews; not even just of people; but of all creation.

III.

            This is the good news that Paul preaches.  The death of Jesus Christ abolishes the wall that separates people into different factions: Jew and Gentile, slave and free, even male and female.  That’s what makes his understanding of the Jesus-Movement so much more radical. 

            Paul is not interested in maintaining the outward expressions of historic specifically Jewish identity and tradition.  He doesn’t care much about what is safe legally, what works politically, or what will sell.  He takes the Bible more spiritually, claiming that there is a deeper law than merely the superficial “written code.”

            This deeper meaning is revealed to Paul and his communities by the Holy Spirit and is not dependent on establishment Jewish scholars and bureaucrats, who had basically sold out to Rome anyway.  Paul encourages new Gentile converts to follow Jesus by erasing all differences, hierarchies, classes and castes, and to keep the revolutionary, liberating spirit of the Torah, as Jesus himself does in his ministry of radical inclusiveness, indiscriminate healing, and open welcoming.

            Paul knows that the Jesus Movement cannot work within the Roman legal system, which was corrupt and evil to the core, without compromising the truth of God’s good news.  And the exemption from emperor worship that Rome granted to the Jews?  That is just a back-handed way to worship the emperor.

            Paul’s way is far more costly.  It refuses the emperor’s protection and affirms that death is far preferable to accepting any gracious deal that would acknowledge or in any way legitimate his power.  It is to proclaim that Jesus is Lord! and that Jesus is the only authority, and that following Jesus necessarily means rejecting and denying all other authorities.  Paul’s approach basically dares the law to arrest, try, and punish the followers of Jesus. 

            Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous saying, that “when Christ calls you he bids you come and die,” is what Paul means.  There is no way out of the outer oppression of Rome, or the inner oppression of the power of the flesh or the ego, except by death.  You have to die.  Everybody dies; but you can either die as a slave of the regime of exploitation, selfishness, greed, violence, and inequality, having your life devoured to feed the appetites of the Owners and the Masters, or you can die with Jesus Christ and be reborn with him by his Spirit in a new life that the Owners and the Masters can’t snuff.  You can die to death, and be reborn to freedom! 

IV.

            “Christ has set us free for freedom,” writes Paul.  “Therefore, stand firm and don’t submit to the bondage of slavery again.”  That is the choice that is always before us: freedom or the bondage of slavery.

            When Paul quotes Sarah where she says, “Throw out the slave woman and her son,” he means that we have to remove from our souls the corrupting and lethal ideas and ways of thinking that spawn a society of Masters and slaves.  He is telling the Galatians, “Don’t let these people lock you back up in bondage to the emperor, either the one in your head or the one in Rome.  Get rid of their ideology of inequality, and division, their rationalizations of cowardice and violence, their incitement of your fear, anger, and shame.  God did not create the world for one small group of Owners and Masters to have all the wealth and power, and for the rest to fight over the scraps.  Do not be ruled by greed or covetousness, by envy or exclusion, by hatred or by prejudice.  Throw all that out of your mind and your midst!”

            We think, “Who would ever choose slavery over freedom?”  It seems like a no brainer.  But in fact we are making that choice all the time.  Just as subservience to the emperor was the price of admission to Roman society, so we gain access to our own society by our submission to values and practices that maintain and support the inequalities and divisions, the exploitation, injustice, and violence that pervade our own “present evil age.”  There is almost no way to get through a day without selling our souls and bodies repeatedly to a globalized regime of terror bent on killing and impoverishing people and destroying the earth, while making a few people obscenely rich.

            Freedom is hard.  Freedom is expensive; it costs your life.  It costs all your habits, addictions, traditions, rituals, allegiances, sensibilities, and relationships.  What do we imagine Jesus is talking about when he says we have to take up our cross and follow him?  Or when he says we have to renounce our families?  Or when he says we have to give up all our possessions?  The Kingdom of God is like a pearl that someone sells everything they have in order to purchase. 

            Most people prefer not to pay this price.  They want what Paul’s opponents are selling: cheaper grace, easy answers, gradual improvement, working within the system, and being told they’re better than everyone else.  They want to be comforted, unchallenged, certainly unthreatened, and to be assured that since Jesus paid the price, we are off the hook.  Our affluence, our lifestyle, our economics and politics, all are unvexed by any inconvenience.  They think we can make disciples without transforming hearts or our world.

            Paul knows that Jesus’ call is not an avoidance of conflict; it is a way through conflict, and even death, to freedom.

V.

            It is Paul’s understanding that became the way of following Jesus; it was also Jesus’ understanding, of course.  The disciples stood firm and did not submit to the bondage of slavery.  And the church grew spectacularly, exponentially, explosively.  People could not sign up fast enough to join this faith that demanded their whole life in return for freedom.

            What they receive is real freedom.  Not the “freedom” to get rich by exploiting your neighbors; not the “freedom” to force your will on others; not the “freedom” to ignore the plight of suffering people.  Those are twisted ways we think of freedom.  They are really just manifestations of different kinds of bondage to evil powers.

            But what followers of Jesus receive from him is freedom to love, freedom to participate in God’s life, freedom to do what is right, and the freedom to give your life for others, even as Jesus Christ gave his life for the life of the whole world.

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