Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-january-28-2025
Galatians 1:1-17
1Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— 2and all the brothers and sisters with me,
To the churches in Galatia:
3Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, 4who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, 5to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
6I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. 8But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! 9As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!
10Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.
11I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. 12I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.
13For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. 14I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. 15But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased 16to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. 17I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.
I made a New Year’s resolution this year. I resolved that in 2025, each time we reached a point in the lectionary where the New Testament readings began to come from a different book, I would devote at least one day’s Reflection to talking about that book in general. That means exploring the background of the book and the themes we find in it. You might remember that a week or two ago we spent one day’s Reflection talking about Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. And now the lectionary has begun a series of readings from the apostle’s letter to the Galatians. So today, we’re going to look into the background of that book.
Galatians is different from many of Paul’s letters, in a couple of important ways. First of all, it wasn’t written to the church in a single city the way Ephesians was written to the church in Ephesus, Romans was written to the church in Rome, etc. Instead, Galatians was written to the churches in a region — Galatia was a region in the center of modern-day Turkey. For reasons that still aren’t entirely clear, a tribe of Celts had migrated all the way from Western Europe down into the middle of Turkey and settled there. (That’s quite a migration, by the way – check it out on a map.) The Celtic region they had come from was known as Gaul, and the region they settled in came to be known as Galatia.
The second thing about Galatians that’s different from many Paul’s letters is that it was written to deal with a particular issue in the life of the churches of Galatia. That issue was a matter of great concern to Paul, so he didn’t include a lot of friendly greetings to leaders of the churches and the other personal touches that are found in many of his letters. Instead, Paul launches right into the matter that was bothering him. In fact, some New Testament scholars say Galatians has a structure more like a speech or a sermon than like a letter.
Here’s what was bothering Paul so much: He had passed through the region, and established a number of churches among the Galatians. He had trained his converts according to his understanding of the Christian gospel, which we describe as salvation by faith in Jesus as a gift of God’s grace.
But after Paul moved on in his journeys, another group of missionaries arrived among the Galatians. These missionaries seemed to have been Jewish Christian leaders from the area around Jerusalem. They told the Galatian Christians that if they wanted to follow Jesus, they also needed to follow traditional Hebrew law. That meant eating kosher foods, keeping Jewish holy days, and for the men, being circumcised. It seems that many of the Galatian Christians were persuaded by the Jewish Christian missionaries to begin living an essentially Jewish lifestyle.
Paul was enraged by this development, and his letter to the Galatians is probably the most highly emotional letter he ever wrote. Paul told his Galatian converts that they had exchanged the freedom of following Jesus for a kind of slavery to traditional Hebrew law. He says that they have turned aside from the true gospel — the good news of what God had done in Jesus — and instead embraced a ‘false gospel’. That false gospel called them to rely on their own obedience to traditional law in order to be in right relationship with God.
Throughout Christian history, the letter to the Galatians has been held up as a warning against falling back into traditional ‘religious’ thought that says our relationship with God is based on our own righteousness. Martin Luther, who basically started the Protestant Reformation, said that the error of the Galatians in falling back into obedience to traditional law was the same error the Roman church had made in calling people to what Protestant leaders have traditionally called “works righteousness.”
In more recent times, Christian leaders like the great British theologian Tom Wright have pointed out that this error continues to be a part of church life in our time. Wright points out that the gospel refers to something God has done in Jesus. By that definition, telling people they needed to repent of their sins and live a righteous life in order to go to heaven isn’t really good news. It might be good advice, he says, but it’s not really good news.
There’s something about the promise of the gospel that’s always been a little hard for people to accept at face value. God’s grace, which is defined as God’s unearned favor, seems like a promise it’s too good to be true. So it seems there’s something about our human nature that’s inclined to believe we have to be good enough to receive it. But the point the apostle Paul is making — and in fact it was the point he made throughout his letters — is that the death of Jesus on the cross changed the nature of our relationship with God forever, and no amount of obedience to traditional law can never equal the power of God’s offer of new life in him.
That’s the gospel the apostle Paul wanted his brothers and sisters in Galatia to accept and to place their trust in, and that’s the theme of this letter he wrote to them.
Let’s pray. Lord, you know how hard it is for us to believe you have offered us such a precious gift without demanding that we first prove our worthiness. Help us to rely, not on our ability to obey traditional laws, but rather on your gracious love. Help us to live to please you to express our thanks, not in the false hope being good enough for you. In the name of the crucified Christ we pray. Amen.
Grace and peace,
Henry
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