The Grace to Choose Love
(Galatians 5:1-15)
When we respond to the grace of God by putting out faith in
Jesus, we also make a commitment. To
receive the salvation God gives is to pledge to something. We enter into a covenant in which there is a
promise we make.
What is that promise? When you and I say, we are with Jesus, what are we committing to do
for the rest of our lives?
Paul makes the following statements:
“If you let yourselves
be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you.”
And
“In Christ Jesus,
neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing
that counts is faith working through love.”
Neither
circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; Paul is not talking
about a procedure done to the foreskin of boy babies. That procedure is a representative action
that points to the real matter at hand.
The procedure marks someone as a Jew – or it did in Paul’s time and
place. Jews were different and one of
the ways they stood out was circumcision.
Sabbath keeping was also distinctively Jewish. So too was the reading of the scriptures –
our Old Testament. These actions marked
the Jews off as strange in the eyes of Africans, Greeks, and Romans in the
first century Greco-Roman world. For
Jews themselves, it meant they were special.
Now Paul, speaking the Gospel of
Jesus, says, yes, we Jews are special.
But, the circumcision, the Sabbath-keeping, the law – none of it is
needed any longer because all of it has led to this moment. God has come in Jesus. Jesus has fulfilled the law. So what formerly marked us as God’s people no
longer does. Now the marker is baptism –
baptism into Christ.
To remain in the circumcision, the
former way, is to fail to enter fully into Christ. Christians sin. Those who do not follow Christ, occasionally
do good things. Who is in with God, and who is not – these
things sometimes are difficult to know.
In terms of identifying people, uncertainty abounds. I don’t know who in the church is truly with
God or is not with God, and I don’t know who outside the community faith I meet
in a secular environment is actually a Christ-follower. I cannot judge people. None of us can.
But this is certain. You and I can only be pointed in one
direction at one time. To be pointed
toward God is to follow Jesus, even when we fall off the path. Even when our choices are bad and we appear
lost, if we are oriented toward God, we are attempting to follow Jesus.
To point ourselves in another
direction and to follow the lead of some other authority is to remove Jesus
from our lives. The issue at stake in
Galatians was authority. Someone told the
Galatians that they could be of Christ, but the law was still the final authority
so circumcision was a necessity, even for adult Gentiles who converted to
Christ. Paul responded with a resounding
“no!” The law cannot be an authority
because Jesus is the authority. To
grant authority to the law is to take it away from him. Hence the assertion in chapter 5 verse
2. “If you let yourselves be
circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit.”
What authorities in our lives occupy
the place that belongs to Jesus? Paul
did not say circumcised persons were cut off from Christ. Paul himself was a Jew all the way. Jews could keep Sabbath and read the Torah
and be Christ followers. But they had to
allow that all authority is his and they had to recognize that Gentiles could
come to God through Christ without becoming Jewish. We have to recognize that Jesus is the
ultimate authority. If he only is a
small part in our lives, he is of no benefit.
Jesus is either Lord – master, and we belong to Him as his possession,
or we are lost.
“If you let yourselves
be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you.”
The second statement,
from Galatians 5:6 is …
“In Christ Jesus,
neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing
that counts is faith working through love.”
We are saved by faith. We are saved by the faithfulness of Jesus and
we are saved from sin and death when we put our complete trust in him and
confess our sins and give our lives to him.
The love acts in Jesus coming as a
man and dying on the cross. God’s grace
comes and comes, in waves, as we realize what faith makes possible. Due to grace we have faith. Faith leads to salvation, which is freedom
from sin and freedom from the demands that we live under the law and make acts
of penance when we fail to do so. This
entire movement – from law to faith, from process to relationship – this is the
essence of grace. It leads to love.
In God’s new dealings with humanity,
now defined by Jesus and our acceptance or rejection of him, the only thing
that God cares about is faith working through love. And we know love by how we treat people and
how we see people.
Of the many implications the coming
of Jesus has for every human being, one is the freedom we have in Christ. The only obligation on us is love. As verse 14 states, “The whole law is summed
up in a single command, ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ We may suppose in writing this Paul is
quoting Leviticus 19:18.
However, the Leviticus passage,
right out of the law Paul says we no longer need, does not declare that all
commands are found in this one. The
Leviticus command is definitely ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’ but Leviticus
does not assert that this is essence of the entire law. Who did that?
Jesus.
The Gospels were not written until
at the earliest, the 60’s. Paul’s
letters were all completed by the time the first Gospel, Mark, was written
down. So how does Paul know Jesus’
unique interpretation of the law? He
could not pick up a copy of Mark and flip to chapter 12 where Jesus says, “You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and
with all your mind. And you shall love
your neighbor as yourself. There is no
other commandment greater than these” (Mk. 12:30-31). He did not walk with Jesus. He was not there when Jesus taught this way
of understanding God’s law. So how did
know?
In all likelihood, what we read in
the gospels, circulated orally in churches before Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
wrote it down. The similarity of Paul’s
teaching to Jesus’ teaching, and even the wording, suggests that the very first
Christian communities taught that the totality of Israel’s confession as the
people of God came to fruition in Jesus and the essence of the law is
love. This also means we have the teaching
of Jesus and it has not changed from the first days of Christianity to
now.
Thus our life of following Jesus
runs along a progression that begins with us realizing how much we need
God. We are sinners and when we know
that, then we turn to God are forgiven, released from sin’s hold. Then we have freedom - freedom only to be
found is that given by God in Jesus. From
realization to forgiveness to new life, a new life of freedom we then arrive
back at the start.
I began saying …
When we respond to the grace of God
by putting our faith in Jesus, we also make a commitment. To receive the salvation God gives is to
pledge to something. We enter into a
covenant in which there is a promise we make.
What is that promise? When you and I say, we are with Jesus, what are we committing to do
for the rest of our lives?
We commit to living in love and
loving our neighbors. This is the
ultimate end of the freedom we have. We
are free to choose. Leander Keck calls
Galatians a “manifesto of Christian freedom” (The New Testament Experience of Faith, 113). But this does not mean ‘anything goes.’ That’s chaos, not freedom. ‘Anything goes’ describes the path of the
projectiles when a bomb explodes in a house.
Who can say where the sink will land or in what direction the roof
shingles will fly? That ‘anything goes’
way of thinking that many people think they want ends in destruction. When humans try go live out the ‘anything
goes’ approach to life, it is their lives that get destroyed.
Freedom comes with a responsibility:
the responsibility to make right choices.
For followers of Jesus Christ, there is just one choice. In whatever situation in which we find ourselves,
we have committed to determine what love would do and then do it. We have committed ourselves to love.
Paul says, “[We] were called to
freedom brothers and sisters; only do not use freedom as an opportunity for
self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another” (5:13). Grace leads to confession, confession leads
to forgiveness, forgiveness leads to faith, faith leads to new life and to
freedom, and freedom leads us to, in Christ, choose love.
Paul’s grand concern was that his
readers would not understand what distinguished them as people of God. He feared that in reaching for the law they
were turning away from faith dependence on Jesus. Turning to the law, they turned to that which
does not save and also draws them away from the one does save.
How will the world know who is of
God? How in our context will those
around us know that we belong to Jesus?
Paul answered this directly. “The
Whole law is summed up in a single commandment.
‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (5:14).
Jesus also answered directly. He told the disciples and he tells us, John
13:35, “By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for
one another.” We have received God’s
grace. We are his. We don’t need to do anything to accomplish
it. But we have made promise and we need
to keep it. We are to love one another,
all people that meet. Grace is divine
grace when it leads us to live in love.
AMEN
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