No Other Good News

The next one is different. When Paul wrote to a gathering he said hello, and then he said thank you — how glad he was about them, how he thanked God whenever they came into his mind. He did it for Corinth while he was angry at Corinth. He did it for people he had never met. There is no thank-you in this letter. He says hello, and then: “I am amazed that you are leaving so fast.” It is missing because he is too angry to write it. And he is angry because he is frightened for them.

Galatia was the hill country up inside Asia Minor — Antioch in the hills, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe. Lystra is where a crowd came out with garlanded bulls to sacrifice to him and Barnabas as gods, and where a crowd later stoned him and dragged him out of town for dead. He was ill when he first came to those towns, and he says what they did about it. “Become as I am, brothers, because I became as you are. I am begging you. You did me no wrong.” “You know it was because of a weakness in my body that I brought you the good news the first time. What was wrong with me was a hard thing for you to look at, and you did not treat me as nothing and you did not spit. You took me in as if I were a messenger of God. I will say this for you: if it had been possible, you would have dug out your own eyes and handed them to me.” “Where has all that gone? Have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?”

After he left, men came to Galatia behind him. They told the Greeks who had come to trust Jesus that they were not really in yet. Before they could belong they would have to be circumcised — the cutting that had marked Abraham’s family out as God’s — and take the law of Moses on their backs with it: the days, the months, the seasons, the food rules. Become Jews first. Then you may have Jesus. And the Galatians were doing it. They said something about Paul, too: that he was nobody much, not one of the twelve, that whatever he knew he had secondhand from the apostles in Jerusalem, watered down to make it easy for Greeks and keep them liking him.

“There is not another good news. There are only people stirring you up, wanting to turn the good news of Christ around. But even if we — or a messenger out of heaven — brought you a good news on top of the one we brought you, let him be cursed. I have said it before and I say it again: if anybody brings you a good news on top of what you received, let him be cursed.” “Am I trying to win over people now, or God? Am I looking to please people? If I were still pleasing people, I would not be Christ’s slave.”

“The good news I preach did not come from any man. Nobody handed it to me and nobody taught it to me. You have heard how I lived before, in Judaism. I went after God’s gathering past all measure and did my best to wipe it out. I was ahead of men my own age, more on fire than any of them for what my fathers handed down.” “Then the one who set me apart before I was born, and called me by his kindness, was pleased to show me his Son. I did not go and ask anybody’s advice. I did not go up to Jerusalem to the men who were apostles before me. I went off into Arabia, and came back to Damascus. It was three years before I went up to Jerusalem, and that was to get to know Cephas, and I stayed fifteen days. I saw no other apostle, only James the Lord’s brother. I am not lying to you. God is watching me write this.” Cephas is Peter — the same man, and the same word, rock, in the language he grew up speaking.

“Then fourteen years later I went up to Jerusalem again with Barnabas, and took Titus with me. I laid out in front of them the good news I preach among the nations — privately, to the ones who count — in case I was running for nothing. And Titus, who was with me and is a Greek, was not forced to be circumcised.” Men had gotten into that meeting to have a look at the freedom the Greeks had, so they could stop it. “We did not give in to them for one hour, so that the truth of the good news would stay with you. The men who count added nothing to me. James and Cephas and John, the ones people call pillars, saw the work I had been given and shook hands with me and Barnabas — we to the nations, they to the Jews. Only that we should remember the poor, which was the very thing I was keen to do anyway.”

Then he tells them about a supper. Antioch, up in Syria, was where the two kinds of people first sat at one table. Peter came to visit, and he ate there — with the Greeks, their food, their table, every day. Then men arrived from James, in Jerusalem. And Peter got up from the table. He did not announce it. He began eating somewhere else, a little at a time, until he was not eating with the Greeks at all. The other Jews did what he did. And then Barnabas did it — Barnabas, who had found Paul when nobody in Jerusalem would go near him. Even Barnabas got up. So the Greeks watched the table empty out, and got the message. You are not really in. Paul did not take him aside afterward. He said it in front of everybody, to his face. “If you are a Jew and you have been living like the nations and not like a Jew, how can you turn round and make the nations live like Jews?” Then he wrote it down and sent it to Galatia, with the name in it, while Peter was still alive. He thought Peter had been wrong, and everyone watching hurt by it.

Then he comes to one question: is a person put right with God by keeping the rules, or by trusting God? Paul says trusting. He does not say the law was bad. He says it never could do that work. “A person is not set right by works of law but through trusting Jesus Christ — because out of works of law nobody at all will be set right. I have been crucified together with Christ; and I do not live any more, but Christ lives in me. The life I live now in the body I live by trusting the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.”

“You unthinking Galatians! Who put the evil eye on you? Jesus Christ was posted up in public in front of your own eyes as crucified. Tell me only this one thing: did you get the Spirit by keeping the rules, or by hearing and trusting? Are you so senseless? You began with the Spirit — are you going to be finished off by flesh? Did you go through all of that for nothing?” Then he goes back to Abraham, who trusted God and had it counted to him as being right — four hundred and thirty years before there was a law of Moses to keep. “Know then that the ones who trust — these are Abraham’s sons.” The promise came first. The law came after, and a later thing does not cancel an agreement already made. Why the law at all, then? It was added because of the oversteppings, he says, and it worked like the household slave who walked a child to school and kept him out of trouble — until the one the promise was about arrived. “Now that the faith has come, we are not under the guardian any more. You are all sons of God through trusting, in Christ Jesus. As many of you as were immersed into Christ have put on Christ. There is no Jew or Greek. There is no slave or free. There is no male and female. You are all one in Christ Jesus.”

He tries it another way. An heir who is still small is no different from a slave, though the whole estate is his — managers run him about until the day his father set. “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent out his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to buy out those under law, so that we could be taken in as sons. And because you are sons, God sent out the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So you are not a slave any more. You are a son; and if a son, then an heir.” “Once you did not know God, and you were slaves of things that are not gods at all. But now you know God — or rather, God knows you. So how is it that you are turning back to the weak, poor things you came out of, wanting to be their slaves all over again? You are watching days and months and seasons and years. I am afraid for you. I am afraid I wore myself out on you for nothing.” “My children — I am in labor with you all over again, until Christ is formed in you. I wish I were with you right now so that I could change my tone, because I am at a loss about you.” He also takes an old story — Abraham’s two sons, one by a slave woman and one by his wife — and uses the mothers as a picture of two agreements, one that bears children into slavery and one that does not. Then he lifts a line straight out of that old story and hands it to them: “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman will never inherit along with the son of the free woman.” “So, brothers, we are not children of a slave woman. We are children of the free woman.”

“For freedom Christ set us free. So stand there, and do not let the yoke of slavery be put back on you.” A yoke is the bar laid over the necks of working animals. Then, because freedom is a word people run with, he says at once what it is not for. “You were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not turn the freedom into an opening for the flesh. Through love, be slaves to one another. The whole law is filled full in one sentence: you are to love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite and eat one another, watch out that you are not finished off by one another.” “You were running well. Who cut in on you? A little yeast works all the way through the dough.”

“Walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out what the flesh wants. What the flesh wants is against the Spirit, and what the Spirit wants is against the flesh; the two are set against each other, so that you do not do the things you want to do.” Then he names both crops, so nobody can pretend not to know which is which. First what grows on flesh: “Sexual wrongdoing. Uncleanness. Shamelessness. Serving idols. Sorcery. Hatreds. Fighting. Jealousy. Fits of rage. Selfish ambition. Splits. Sects. Envy. Drunken bouts. Wild parties. And the things like these — about which I tell you beforehand, as I told you before, that people who do such things will not inherit God’s kingdom.” Then the other, one at a time, the way you set fruit out on a table: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. There is no law against any of that.” “If we live by the Spirit, let us walk in line by the Spirit. Let us not become people who are full of empty glory, poking at one another, envying one another.”

“Brothers, even if somebody is caught out in some wrong, you who go by the Spirit are to mend such a person in a gentle spirit — and keep an eye on yourself while you do it, so that you are not tested too. Carry one another’s loads, and that way you will fill up the law of Christ.” And then he says: “Let each one test his own work, and then his boast will be in himself alone and not in somebody else; for each one will have to carry his own pack.” “And let the one who is taught the word share all good things with the one who teaches him.” “Do not be led astray. God is not sneered at. Whatever a person sows, that is what he will reap. Let us not get tired of doing what is good, because in its own season we will bring the crop in, if we do not give out. So then, while we have time, let us work what is good toward everybody, and most of all toward the household of the faith.”

He had been dictating, the way people did, with somebody else holding the pen. At the end he took it. “Look at the size of the letters I am making, writing to you with my own hand.” “The people pushing you to be circumcised only want to make a good showing in the flesh, so that they will not be hunted for the cross of Christ. They do not even keep the law themselves. They want to be able to boast about your bodies. Let me never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. A new creation is everything.” “From now on let nobody make trouble for me. I carry the marks of Jesus on my body.” Some were made in their own towns. “The favor of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen.” And that is the end. There is no thank-you at that end either.