Paul and Peter had been haggling over details about who could believe in Jesus Christ and how they should go about it. Both Paul and Peter were Jews by birth, as were all the earliest believers. For the first years following Pentecost the followers of Christ were another Jewish sect. That broke down after persecutor Saul became evangelist Paul and after Paul got rebuffed by his Jewish brothers in some of the father flung cities of the empire where diaspora Jewish were living.
Paul found growing acceptance of the gospel among non-Jews, traditionally called Gentiles. That’s when Paul, Peter, and the other apostles started disagreeing over the scope and methods of telling the good news.
Jerusalem and Judea were Jewish. Why wouldn’t Christians be Jews? Yet, being Jews by birth was not enough for salvation. Paul was being both ironic and sarcastic when he refers to “Gentile sinners.” This was the scornful name Jews applied to Gentiles. Peter had learned that Gentiles could receive the gospel and the Spirit, but his actions had conveyed a “holier than thou” attitude in line with the teaching that Gentiles were still “sinners” unless they became Jewish. But both Peter and Paul knew better.
The Council of Jerusalem, described in Acts 15, began the theological wrestling which carried on for a number of years. The lingering issues had to do with how did non-Jews live out the gospel. Paul and his faith communities struggled with this for a long time, as evidenced by his writings to the Corinthians.
The more or less final pronouncement was “Just Jesus.” Each person could use their own conscience about their own observance of Jewish ritual practices, but they should also temper their words and practices to consider the strengths or weaknesses of sisters and brothers in the community.
As Paul wrote the Galatian believers, he allowed his anger to show. He felt that Peter betrayed the agreement they had that allowed Jews and non-Jews to be equal partners in the early Christian community. If we think of a traditional practice as essential for faith, we then exclude from our community lovers of Christ who practice differently than we do. This would have been catastrophic for Paul—and for all of us non-Jewish Christians.
As we look out on the organized religious landscape in our country and in other parts of the world, we find that this two-millennia-old controversy has never been resolved. American Roman Catholic theologian Thomas Merton once wrote, “the things on the surface are nothing. What is deep is the Real. We are creatures of Love.”(1) Unfortunately, those who think about these things don’t agree on what are surface things and what are deep things. The rest of us more often than not cling to what someone else told us to.
Given the tenor of today’s church world, Paul’s word to the Galatians could be rephrased with the same satire and scorn: “We are born Christians—we’re not unbelieving sinners.” The way Paul addressed some of the members of the churches he birthed suggests that he himself would author that revised statement. All of us who claim Christ need to hear again Paul’s words. Eugene Peterson’s Message paraphrase is very explicit:
“We know very well that we are not set right with God by rule-keeping but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ. How do we know? We tried it—and we had the best system of rules the world has ever seen! Convinced that no human being can please God by self-improvement, we believed in Jesus as the Messiah so that we might be set right before God by trusting in the Messiah, not by trying to be good.” (Gal. 2:16) [The Message]In the few verses of today’s reading Paul sets out two very great themes of his understanding of the gospel. Paul declares several times a person is made righteous (set right, justified) not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. That is the heart of the gospel.
Justification is what a computer’s word-processing program does to the margins. It straightens up the words so they are in a right relationship to the page.(2) This is what God does for sinners who are out of line. Messy human lives get straightened out and put in right relationship with God through Jesus Christ. The grace of Jesus Christ makes it happen for all. Jews are justified by grace. Gentiles are justified by grace. Christ alone has done what obedience to the law in general and circumcision in particular could never do: he has straightened out human beings with God and one another, resulting in a new community.
People are not justified by Jesus and the works of the law. Circumcision isn’t an issue today. What is the issue is that salvation is never a matter of Jesus and something else: not Jesus and certain cultural practices; not Jesus and a certain spiritual practice or theological perspective; not Jesus and a particular income level; not Jesus and a specific denominational brand; not Jesus and one political party; not Jesus and being good enough. Just Jesus. If anyone or anything else can be said to justify the sinner, the gospel is derailed, and, in the words of Paul’s devastatingly abrupt conclusion, “Christ died for no purpose.”(3)
Grace is always “just Jesus.” Grace is always outside ourselves and we can do nothing to earn it. Law on the other hand, is always within us. “Do I measure up?” “Am I behaving in the right way?” Psychologist Henry Cloud writes:
“It is interesting to compare a legalistic church with a good AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] group. In the church, it is culturally unacceptable to have problems; that is called being sinful. In the AA group, it is culturally unacceptable to be perfect; that is called denial. In one setting people look better but get worse, and in the other, they look worse but get better.”(4)Denial. That’s were the Galatians were headed if they were to follow the distorted gospel that was “Jesus and.” “Jesus and” is bad news. “Just Jesus” is truly what the good news is based on.
People who try to live by “Jesus and” are grasping at life. Paul declares: “I have been crucified with Christ” (v. 19). This crucifixion is not simply a historic event that happened two thousand years ago on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Paul means to say that it happens every day in the lives of followers of Jesus. The verb form in Greek indicates that this crucifixion is an ongoing activity rather than a once-and-done event.
In our culture we are fixated on self. Paul says no to that. We must look beyond ourselves to Christ. We are to die to ourselves (“I no longer live”), that Christ may live in us (“Christ lives in me" [v. 20]). Crucifixion is not the end; it leads to new life in Christ. Christ is alive today in believers and in the body of Christ which is the church.
That is a very different model for an organization in today’s world where the ruling paradigms come from the Wharton Business and Yale Law Schools. The Gospel cannot be codified in those ways. So what may need to be crucified in us is the notion that we need Jesus and a certain kind of structure, or Jesus and a certain number of people, or Jesus and the right color wallpaper, or Jesus and a certain kind of music or prayers or bulletin type face. The very ministries and methods we hold so dear may need to be crucified—because Christ is alive! The ongoing challenge is to pay attention to what the living Christ is up to.
There is hope. All we need is just Christ. If Christ is alive, then out of death comes new life and renewed purpose. Every week we pour the water into the font, reminding us that grace has already been given, reminding us of our death and new life in Christ. In baptism we are drowned, buried, and dead, and rise again to new life. This is Christ’s work by the presence of the Spirit and the will of God.
Just Jesus. That’s all.
(1) Thomas Merton, Spiritual Master: The Essential Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992), 237.
(2) Heidi Husted Armstrong, “Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press), Year C, vol. 3, 134.
(3) Ibid., 136.
(4) R. J. Grunewald, “Distortions of the Gospel,” http://www.rjgrune.com/blog/distortions-of-the-gospel, retrieved June 9, 2016.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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