Questions of the Cross: Division

Galatians 3:15-29

On my drive home from church on 95-N I pass by a billboard which has been under care of some Christian congregation for some time. The message it currently displays, in garish colors and seemingly snarky font, reads “Real Christians obey Christ’s commandments.” Every time I drive by this billboard, I feel a little sick, my face contorts. Maybe this is due in some part to the fact that the billboard is stationed just after driving through the sulfurous fumes of the paper mill, but I have this guttural aversion to the way that this group has decided to share the gospel. I think it would be fun if we pooled our money and bought the billboard immediately behind it: “Real Christians make billboards and bumperstickers.”

But let’s think about the original billboard again, for a second. What are Christ’s commandments? “Love God and love one another.” How has this billboard somehow managed to make that seem so unappealing? Leads me to wonder whether I have ever been so unappealing in my proclamation of the gospel. Probably so.

“Love God and love one another.” How can those of us who are called by the cross to live by this commandment be so divided in how we go about doing it?

That’s today’s question: Why is division in our church and nation despite the message and desire for unity in the cross? I’ve decided to look at Galatians today because it is a letter addressed to a divided congregation: divided in both national and spiritual identity. You may remember me talking about the difference between the Gospel of grace and the gospel of “good-enough.” Paul is writing to a people who have turned to trust “good-enough” and have fallen out of faith in the Gospel of grace. What I call “good-enough” or the “ways of the world” Paul calls “the elemental spirits of the world” or in another translation “the weak and worthless world system.”

Paul’s letter begins in standard fashion, greeting the Galatians in the grace and peace of God the father and the Lord Jesus Christ, “who gave himself for our sins to set us free from this present evil age [from this weak and worthless world system]”. But immediately after this greeting, Paul criticizes them for abandoning the gospel of grace. “I am astonished,” he says, “that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.” Much like my reaction to the billboard, I imagine Paul contorting his face in disgust at the behavior of his beloved Galatians.

So to the question “why so much division?” I ask this in return: do you mean now? or then? I think the answer would still be the same. Our current national partisanship, our battles over national identity and immigration policies, and other similar divisions over opinion, idea, or interpretation of law are the same struggles that Paul faced in sharing the Gospel outside the traditional confines of the so-called “People of God.” At this point: “Israel” has been wandering through wilderness; they've taken over a land inhabited by other people through what some might call a discomforting claim of “manifest destiny”; they have received a law from God by which to live; they have built a temple at which to worship; that temple has been destroyed and they have been driven from their "homeland"; they have lived as exiles; they later returned to the questionably attained “homeland” as immigrants. Then, from there, as the Roman Empire expanded and trade routes along with it, these ancestors of “Israel”, migrated outward into other territories.

A few of these Jews ended up in the territory of Galatia, which was annexed to the Roman empire and expanded to become a Roman province in 25 BC.[1] These are some the folks whom Paul visited and shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to whom he writes a letter, sometime around 53-55 AD, in which he raises a question: What does it mean to call yourselves the people of God? The answer used to be easy: Israel were God’s chosen people. But against this backdrop of wilderness wandering, territorial takeover, temple building and temple tumbling, exile and diaspora, and immigration and migration over generations and generations: at this point, what does it mean to claim to be God’s chosen people? The kingdom no longer remains, the temple no longer remains, only the law, the torah which they received from God, remains. As I mentioned, the Jews in Galatia were only some of the folks with whom Paul shared the Gospel. Paul is extending the Gospel beyond the community of the torah, beyond the Jews, and to the Gentiles. There are some who see Paul’s Gospel and cringe. The gospel, they claim, is incomplete without the law. Real Christians, they claim, obey ALL of God’s commandments, first and foremost symbolized by keeping the command to be circumcised.

This is where we find ourselves in the 3rd chapter of Paul’s letter, in the middle of Paul’s argument for a new understanding of what it means to be the people of God in light of God’s promise which has been fulfilled in Christ. It’s obvious to Paul that “national and ethnic considerations no longer count…Christ is the one who has caused the redefinition of the people of God.”[2] But the torah, the law, has been Judaism’s distinguishing symbol, it made Israel to be Israel. Commentator Charles Cousar highlights the challenge Paul faces in redefining what it means to be a child of God. “If Paul is to present a different criteria [apart from the law] for determining who constitutes the people of God, he cannot avoid discussing what place the law will occupy in the redefinition.”[3]

The promise came first, Paul says. And that promise is fulfilled in Christ and is Christ. God said to Abraham, “I will make of you a great nation…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” This promise was made 430 years before the torah showed up and is not annulled by the law. At this point, Paul takes our question, “Why division?” and takes a step back, “Why then the law?” The answer: because, division. Why division? Well, we transgressed the will of God, we pitted ourselves against one another in opinion and power. Why division? Because we’re human. This is why Scripture exists. Look all the way back to the beginning, to the back-to-back stories of God's creation and human disobedience. If human beings had always behaved perfectly, we would have no Scripture. The stories we have in Scripture are stories of what it means to be human and what it means to disobey God. Scripture is not a collection of perfect lives lived out in perfect unity with the will of God; it is human lives, flawed lives in which big mistakes are made. But in the midst of these stories of messed up and divided people doing messed up things to themselves and to one another, we also have the story of God. Scripture is the ongoing story of God’s grace interceding with our messed-up-ness.

God interacts with us through grace because we are human and we disobey and we mess up. Galatians deals with human beings who are divided over the question of who’s in and who’s out. They are divided in their opinions within the church and within the culture in which they live. Paul engages them, yet again, on behalf of the story God’s grace. Scripture is not a collection of perfect lives being lived out in perfect unity with the will of God; that is, until Jesus comes along. Remember what we have received through Christ, Paul pleads, a spirit of grace. In the 5th chapter he comments that those who “want to be justified by the law are cutting themselves off from Christ” and hence fallen away from grace. This inheritance does not come from the law.

Staking our identity on an interpretation of the law is going to lead to division. I’ve been reminded of this in the past week when I inevitably ended up listening to portions of the confirmation hearings for Neal Gorsuch. Now, I must admit that most of what these folks were talking about went straight over my head, but I was able to at least take away this one thing: “Geez, we’re frikkin’ divided!” And what is the cause of this division? I think that’s the part that mostly goes over my head…but it sounded to me like a bunch of nitpicking over how, precisely, to interpret the exact letter of the law. I didn’t hear much grace.

Granted, torah and US Constitution are vastly different “laws”, but I think Paul’s warning still applies: don’t grasp the law, any law, so firmly that there is no room in your grip for grace. Paul even goes so far as to claim that Scripture itself “imprisons all things under the power of sin.” This is on account of the transgressions which made the law necessary. But if our focus is only on the ways that we can mess up, we become like the second brother from the story I told two weeks ago, the brother who stood on the hillside and kept track of everything his other brother did wrong. His infatuation with “keeping the law” divided him against his brother.

Paul calls this infatuation an “imprisonment” under the law. But Christ sets us free from this. Christ Jesus did not abandon the law, but reminded us that it could all be fulfilled in this: “love your neighbor as yourself.” To be united in Christ, then, is to uphold the law in such a way that we are drawn together in grace, not given excuses and justifications for division. We’re no longer imprisoned by the “law,” but we can still be guided by it in facing all sorts of moral and ethical dilemmas, always keeping in mind the command to love. “Love does not always tell one exactly how to respond or what to say in the many ambiguous situations people face daily. Neither does the law; but in numerous cases passages like the ten commandments when read in the light of Christ give positive definition to the loving will of God. They help prevent love from becoming soft sentimentality or merely an abstract principle. The church still needs the law to throw light on the human situation and love to keep that law from being rigidly interpreted [and dividing us].”[4]

Christ, and the cross, draws our focus from the ways that we can and have failed and toward how God’s grace has interceded for us. This is especially relevant for our nation, in the midst of debates over building walls and writing laws to keep people out. To us, Paul might write, ‘at no point is your safety and security more at stake than at that point when you no longer live by grace and fail to recognize that we are all children of God through Christ.’ We aren’t separated by laws, by nations, by faiths, by languages, by sexuality, by the mistakes we’ve made. “In Jesus Christ you are all children of God through faith…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.” All of you.

“So, let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all!…May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters. Amen”[5]

[1] Cousar, Charles. "Galatians." from Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. 1982, John Knox Press. Louisville, KY. Page 3.

[2] Ibid. 78.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid. 83.

[5] Galatians 6:9-10,18