Galatians 1:6-10 - I 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—
which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you
into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But 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! As 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!
Am 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.
Today we move to Paul’s letter to a
group of churches in and around Galatia (modern-day Turkey). He writes to them a couple years after the
letters to the Thessalonians (55 AD).
The reason for the letter is to try settle a growing movement in these
churches that Paul believes is antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ. To understand the backstory, we need to
remember that pretty quickly after Jesus’s resurrection, many non-Jews had
begun to follow Christ. By the time Paul
writes this letter, there are at least as many non-Jews as there were Jews who
were part of these early churches. Because
of this, an issue arose as to whether or not non-Jews needed to follow the
Jewish law found in the Torah.
Specifically, there were leaders in the Galatian churches who were
requiring new non-Jewish converts to be circumcised and to follow Torah dietary
laws. Paul is distressed by this and
writes to these churches to call them back to the core of the gospel.
You get a sense of this in the
passage above in the opening passage of the letter. Paul laments how quickly they have strayed
from his teaching and began to make up their own new rules. However, this is hardly surprising when we
think about what happens in groups made up of diverse people. When minorities grow to the point where they
are approaching the time when it will no longer be a minority, the majority
invariably begins to find ways to re-exert control. We’re seeing this in our country today as we
approach a time when whites will no longer be the majority (most likely by
2050). The early church was not immune
to this all too human group dynamic, so Paul is calling them out in this
letter.
We’ll have much more to say about
this in the coming days as the whole letter is about this issue. But for now, let us hear the core of Paul’s
correction to these churches. What he is
saying is essentially this; what you are
practicing is not the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is a gospel of your own making.
We can hear this and say, “shame on those pesky Galatians,” but to do that is to miss what Paul would be
saying to us today. The core of the
gospel is from God and we aren’t free to use the Gospel to gain an advantage
over others. Christian Nationalism is an
attempt to do that. Using passages from
the Bible to support unjust immigration policies (ie…putting children in cages)
is an attempt to do that. Those are
extreme examples but this kind of thing happens every day in hundreds of ways
that do not make the news. As we work
our way through Galatians in the coming days, we will dive deeper. For now though, here are some questions for
reflection:
Questions: Have you
ever felt excluded by a rule or practice that was obviously imposed to separate
those who were “in” from those who were “out?”
Do you believe God would ever be behind such a practice?
Prayer: God, thank
you for loving us just the way we are.
Help us to love others the same way.
Amen.
Prayer Focus: Pray
for those who feel excluded by the church.
Song: H.E.R. and
Tauren Wells – Hold Us Together
