Paul’s letter to the Galatians is one of the most powerful testimonies in the New Testament to the centrality of Jesus Christ in our salvation. In a word, he is to us: everything.
Paul was a Jewish rabbi. To him, the Jewish law was everything. He would have obeyed every one of its commands. To use the familiar Jewish idiom, “Even to a rabbi he was a rabbi.” He pursued Christians to distant cities because he believed that they were blasphemers who deserved to be stoned to death. He could not conceive a life of holiness without obeying every tiny regulation of the Law. Yet here he is now saying that “By the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified.” By justified he means being freed from all sin, made righteous in the sight of God. What could have made him take such a U-turn in his life?
Paul, after his tremendous conversion experience on the road to Damascus, realised how all-embracing the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was, how totally sufficient it was for our salvation. If we still need the Law, he reckons, then the death and resurrection of Jesus is not sufficient. But, he says, this patently absurd. Jesus, to quote John, is “the Lamb of God who takes away (all) the sins of the world.” Paul may not have used those words, he may in fact not ever have read them, since they were probably written down after his martyrdom, but he would heartily have endorsed them, for Paul is saying the very same thing in his own way. Paul expresses himself in an extreme way in his letter to the Church at Philippi: “For Jesus Christ I have accepted the loss of everything, and I count all else as rubbish if I only can have Christ.” Where we read “rubbish” Paul actually uses the word “dung”. That is how uniquely Paul sees the role of the Lord Jesus in our salvation.
What does this mean for the Church in our time and place? A great deal. Modern people are so often caught up in “issues” such as “a green earth” or “justice and peace” or “a nurturing environment” that we no longer give preference to the Word of God. We try to hi-jack Jesus to our point-of-view, often by asking the question “What would Jesus have done/said?” after which we put our own opinions into his mouth. We no longer search earnestly after his truth in scripture and prayer. We seek out scriptures which confirm our prejudices; we use prayer to tell him what he should be doing. We do not ask him what he expects of us; we tell him what we expect of him. We say, with increasing frequency, “I can’t believe in a God who…” as though it is we who determine what God is, rather than discovering through faith who he is.
We need to find our way back to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who reveals himself to us in and through the person of the Lord Jesus, who died and rose from the dead that we might be freed from sin and death. If what he has done for us is really sufficient, then we should have no hesitations in following his mother’s advice to “do whatever he tells us.” It is he who will give purpose, meaning and effectiveness to all the issues that confront us, not vice-versa. All these issues are thorns in the flesh that we suffer constantly in daily life. But in this especially we should follow Paul: “…there was given me a thorn in the flesh to keep me from exalting myself! Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you.”
His grace is sufficient for us. We will never resolve the world’s problems by own unaided efforts. But by his grace, and by it alone, will lasting, not to say eternal, solutions be found.
Fr. Phillip
