Text for the Week: No More

Scripture: Galatians 3:21-29

²¹ Is the law then opposed to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could make alive, then righteousness would indeed come through the law. ²² But the scripture has imprisoned all things under the power of sin, so that what was promised through the faith of Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.

²³ Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. ²⁴ Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be reckoned as righteous by faith. ²⁵ But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, ²⁶ for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. ²⁷ As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸ There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹ And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

Questions

1. How is Paul using the words law and faith that he can talk about a time before faith when people have clearly had faith in God for as long as there have been people?
2. What does Paul mean in verse 28 when he discusses eliminating the distinctions between Jew and Greek, etc.?
3. Why does Paul call all believers Abraham’s offspring?

Background

Related Scriptures: Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 14:19; Ephesians 2:13-22

Much of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians is addressing difficulties that have arisen in the Christian community because Jewish believers are trying to impose their religious and cultural norms on non-Jewish believers.

The term “disciplinarian” translates παιδαγωγός which refers to a slave who watched over and was responsible for disciplining and helping to educate a minor under that child became an adult. Paul’s use of the term here may imply that Christians who are now adults who remember the lessons and training of the Law but are now free from it’s control and are competent to use that training in their own wisdom.

Throughout Galatians 3 Paul directly connects Abraham to God and Jesus showing that he walked with God through faith before the Law came into being. Paul also does not directly connect the Law to God which is meant to demonstrate how keeping the Law has no direct connection with God, rather direct connection to God comes through one’s faith.

The early Church used a baptismal formula where the leader would baptize the person in the name of God the Father and the person would response “Amen, Abba” making the family connection crucial to a person’s understanding of their identity as a Christian, Paul may well be referencing that in this passage.

Gentiles, slaves, and women are all social categories that were in some inferior in the Greco-Roman (and Jewish) mindsets. What Paul is saying is that each of these classifications that have so much social importance in the world do not carry that same social distinction in Christ.

Reflection

The more things change the more they stay the same, Paul wrote Galatians 3 to confront the conflict in that city between Christians with different cultural backgrounds. The Christians of a Jewish heritage, were trying to impose their religious and cultural heritage on the Christians from a Gentile background, saying you must be like us to be real Christians. This same way of thinking is still a temptation and we see it playing out in our modern world. These early Christians were holding to cultural stereotypes and social hierarchies based on class, race, cultural background, heritage, and gender. The Galatians were trying to perpetuate the hierarchies of Jew being better than gentile, men being better than women, and free being better than slave within the Church. This letter must have been very difficult for Jewish Christians to read and accept. After all, Jesus was a Jew and was pointing people to the God the Jews had known for generations, why wouldn’t it be important to hold to Jewish customs. These customs practiced for centuries had been what had kept Jews close to God in their eyes. How were they supposed to separate their cultural ideals from their beliefs about God and how people must conduct themselves to be called God’s people. Or in shorthand, how are people supposed to connect to God without doing what God told us in our Scriptures.

Like so many other times it is easy for us to see where these first century Jewish Christians were creating a hierarchy that belittled their gentile brothers and sisters or where first century men were participating in the Roman patriarchal system and so excluding women. But it is more difficult for us to recognize where to draw the line in our modern setting, how do I know when I am rightly holding to the standards of Jesus and when am I simply committed to my own cultural biases?

I think this is why Paul appeals to baptism, saying that when we are baptized we become one in our Father, and so the entirety of the community is one family. In other Scriptures Paul will even include the detail that Jesus is the firstborn which takes away any hierarchy among the children, thus leveling us with fellow believers even more. His idea is that because we are all aligned with God on the same footing we must learn to approach fellow Christians not as “other” but as a believer who is different and comes from a different background. And this is why celebrations like World Communion Sunday become important to the Church, like baptism it is a reminder that Christians around the world who share little in common culture unite together around the Lord’s Supper. Communion and Baptism are each a unique symbol within the Church that remind us of our equality before God and our unity in the Father’s family. Paul’s words here move the center of Christian experience and status to the person and teachings of Jesus. He does not tell the Jewish believers they are wrong to commit to their religious heritage, he does not say they should give up their ideas on circumcision or other cultural practices. What he says is that when they became Christians they moved their identity to Jesus, committed to seeing the world through his eyes, and focus on the unity he was trying to create.

This same rule applies to us, no more hierarchies based on cultural ideals, but begin seeing others in the light of the cross. Holding people only to the standard of Jesus and his teachings, focusing on the culture that unites us together while downplaying what divides. This weekend is World Communion Sunday, a day when we celebrate the global reach of Christianity and the fact that people from every tribe, language, nation, and culture will worship around God’s throne. It is a time to be thankful for the rich diversity in God’s family, to pray for our brothers and sisters who face trials and persecution, and to meditate on how they connect to God. Let us take this time to meditate on how Jewish believers laid down their rights in order to elevate their gentile brothers and sisters and how we can look to elevate our own brothers and sisters and learn from them to grow more in love with God and God’s family.