Gal
3: 23 Before the coming of this
faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that
was to come would be revealed. 24
So the law was put in charge of us until Christ came that we might be justified
by faith. 25 Now that this faith
has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law. 26 So in Christ Jesus you are all
children of God through faith, 27
for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with
Christ. 28 There is neither Jew
nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all
one in Christ Jesus. 29 If you
belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the
promise.
Supposedly, you “can’t have
your cake and eat it too.” We’ve all heard that expression before. According to
wiki it’s an English bit of folk wisdom dating back to the time of Cromwell. I
bring up the phrase because it seems to me in various (heavy) places of St.
Paul’s writings, he is walking an extremely fine line, wanting…. in essence… to
have his cake and eat it too.
Specifically, St. Paul
wants to uphold the worth, validity, and sanctity of the Torah. It is, after
all, God’s holy word, the 1st 5 books of the Bible. If Torah itself
were worthless, it would need to be ripped from the Bible. Paul would never
think such a thing. Not only that, but Paul would never think in what would
later become a distinctively Lutheran caricature of “law vs gospel” = “Old
Testament = Law = bad….New Testament = Gospel = good.” I’ve actually
encountered well-meaning people who mistakenly suppose that if the sermon is
from the Old Testament, the pastor hasn’t preached “any gospel” to them. This
is horrifically untrue. Even if ALL we had were the 1st 5 books of
the Bible, we may not know anything of Christ specifically, but we would most
assuredly know of God’s grace and the gospel call to trust in his mercy for the
forgiveness of sins.
Yet, while Paul wants to
uphold the worth, validity, and sanctity of the Torah, he also very much wants
to uphold what the Torah cannot do. In
short, the Torah cannot do anything that Jesus did. According to the gospel of
John, the word became flesh and dwelt
among us. Building on that point, the
word must become flesh. The Law cannot humble itself to be born of a
virgin; the Law cannot embrace the sinful and unworthy; the Law cannot share a
meal with the undeserving; and most importantly of all, the Law cannot shed its
blood for the sins of the world. There are just some things the Law cannot do.
The difficulty with this
passage of Galatians continues to be the same thing we’ve encountered all
along, namely, what does that situation and
all of Paul’s well-developed rhetoric have to do with us today? No one is maintaining that Torah observance is necessary for
salvation. Nor is the caricature true… which is to say, no one is teaching that
salvation is based on our good works, or based on not doing bad things.
With that in mind, I think
one of the cool things that can be preached from this passage has to do with
the great POWER of baptism. Barclay & other scholars have pointed out that
in Paul’s day a very common Jewish prayer went as follows: (prayed by a man, of
course) it thanks God that “Thou has not made me a Gentile, a slave, or a
woman.” Clearly the prayer invests all of one’s standing before God in the fact
that one is Jewish, free, and male. Paul’s point is that such sentiments are
meaningless. One’s standing before God isn’t based on this. One’s standing
before God is based solely on being clothed
with Christ (v27)…a mystical, yet real
reality that occurs at baptism. For those who wonder if a simple ritual
accompanied by a few words can really do
anything, this verse is a powerful truth!
Cheers,
TM
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