Exploring the Scripture

Last week’s lection focused on justification by faith rather than by obedience to the law. Paul continues comparing law and faith by presenting the law as a necessary guardian and disciplinarian before Jesus’s arrival.

Paul was a Jew and a Pharisee, trained to obey all Jewish laws strictly. He had studied the centuries-old rabbinical interpretation to apply the laws to everyday life. He was a keeper of Jewish customs and traditions, and he honored them. Until he met Christ, he would have viewed life under the law as freedom.

Paul’s encounter with the Risen Christ transformed him. He understood salvation as a gift from God, unconditional and life-affirming. In retrospect, he saw the law as a guardian of the customs and traditions he had honored. More than that, it had been a strict discipline, dictating right and wrong behaviors and making life uncomfortable. It could reveal where the people had gone astray, but it could not provide a satisfactory cure for those sins.

For Paul, the law came to represent confinement. Grace was freedom. Faith was a way of seeing the world—and life—through the lens of grace.

When Christ came, faith allowed all people to access God’s grace and live anew as children of God. There no longer was a need for a disciplinarian. Thus, the Gentile Christians to whom Paul wrote did not have to follow the Judaic traditions, laws, and customs to be full-fledged, active, and accepted Christians. Grace made them whole, just as grace made the Jewish Christians whole.

Being baptized into Christ meant they were “clothed” with Christ (v. 27). “Wearing” Christ’s presence as a cloak mitigates all the superficial distinctions that separate people, such as ethnicity, gender, and class. All those who are baptized Christians are of equal worth. “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (v. 28). The differences continue to be there, but they no longer define the individual. Christ defines each of us. The small groups to which a person belongs become secondary to the primary community of Christ.

Paul’s radical inclusiveness must have thrilled the Gentile Christians and threatened the Jewish Christians. God had promised the Jews that they were God’s chosen people from ancient times. As children of Abraham, they inherited all the promises God made in his covenant with Abraham: a multitude of offspring, a land of their own, and a special relationship with the Divine. But Abraham’s covenant did not include Gentile nations or peoples. Jewish Christians believed they still inherited those promises from their Jewish roots through Jesus, Abraham’s heir.

Through the years, the Jewish people publicly, loudly, and self-righteously renewed the dividing walls that separated them from Gentiles. Gentiles were outcasts, impure, religiously, and morally inferior to Jews.

But Paul declared that in Christ all divisions were abolished. Because they belonged to Christ, who was Abraham’s heir, Gentile Christians were considered children of Abraham. They were entitled to the promises made to Abraham and were equal to Jewish Christians. Their behaviors did not need to be governed by a disciplinarian, only by Christ, whose Spirit lives in them. They are new people creating a new community.

Our congregations inherited that call and challenge to be a new, inclusive community.

Project Zion Podcast

Hosts Karin Peter and Blake Smith consider how this week's scripture connects to our lives today.

LISTEN

Central Ideas

1. Paul presents the law as a necessary guardian and strict disciplinarian, a forerunner to Jesus’s arrival.
2. For Paul, the law came to represent confinement. Grace is freedom. Faith is a way of seeing the world—and life—through the lens of grace.
3. Being clothed in Christ mitigates all the superficial distinctions that separate people, such as ethnicity, gender, and class. All are equal in God’s eyes.

Questions to Consider

1. What acts as a guardian or disciplinarian in your life? How can you center your life in Christ free you from that bondage?
2. What does it mean for you to be “clothed in Christ?” What does it mean for your congregation?
3. What would be the modern equivalent for “children of Abraham and heirs of his promises?” What promises can you claim as a Christian?
4. How is your congregation living Galatians 3:28?