Galatians 2.11-21
2021 marks the five hundred year
anniversary
of
the infamous Diet of Worms,
which wasn’t some medieval fitness fad,
but
rather the Church Assembly (or ‘Diet’)
that
was held in the German city of Worms,
at which Martin Luther, the founding
father of the protestant reformation,
defended
his critique of the Roman Catholic church
and
was declared a heretic.
Martin uther was the son of a copper
miner,
who
went to university before joining the Roman Catholic church
as
an Augustinian Friar
He quickly set himself apart as a man with
great academic gifts,
and
was soon teaching at the University of Wittenberg.
When
he was 27, he made a visit to Rome
on behalf of some Augustinian
monasteries,
and
whilst he was there he became appalled
at the corruption he encountered in
the hierarchy of the church.
The
thing that most distressed the young Luther
was a practice known as the ‘selling
of indulgences’
where
priests would, in exchange for large amounts of money,
perform the ritual for the
forgiveness of sins
either on behalf of someone still
living
or indeed on behalf of someone who
had died.
What
this amounted to was, in effect, a licence to print money.
The great fear of the medieval mind,
and it was a fear that
the church did little to alleviate,
was the fear of spending either
eternity in hell
or a considerable period
of time in purgatory.
And
so priests who offered release from purgatory,
or forgiveness for sins,
in
exchange for money,
were clearly onto a good thing.
But
the thing which so upset Luther
wasn’t so much the blatant
profiteering
from religious fear and
superstition,
as it
was the propagation
of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer would
later come to call ‘cheap grace’.
Bonhoeffer
speaks of Martin Luther’s growing conviction:
‘When the Reformation came, the providence of
God raised Martin Luther to restore the gospel of pure, costly grace... [God] showed
him through the Scriptures that the following of Christ is not the achievement
or merit of a select few, but the divine command to all Christians without
distinction.’
The Cost of Discipleship, Ch.1
On 31st
October 1517 Luther published his now famous ’95 Theses’,
in which he attacked the sale of
indulgences
along with what he regarded as many
other abuses
of the church’s power.
As
was the University custom,
he pinned the theses to the door of
the castle church in Wittenberg,
and
in many ways,
the European reformation began here.
One
of Luther’s great concerns
was that the doctrine and practice
of the church
should be based on scripture, rather
than tradition.
And
it was his study of Paul’s letters,
particularly Romans and Galatians,
that
led him to the conclusion
that the Roman Catholic church of
his era
had gone so far away from a biblical
perspective
that full scale reformation was
needed.
When
Luther read Romans and Galatians,
he thought that in Paul he had met a
kindred spirit,
battling against the forces of
tradition and legalism
in favour of liberty and freedom.
The
Paul which Luther met in the Bible was a man engaged in a battle
with a group of Jewish Christians
who were trying to
impose Jewish legal requirements
on the Gentile Christian converts of
the first century.
Paul
seemed, to Luther, to be arguing against legalism,
he seemed to be fighting against the
attempts
by certain religious
leaders
to introduce the requirements of
legal tradition
into the relationship
between the ordinary person and God
And
for Luther, this seemed in many ways
to parallel the situation in which
he found himself.
For
Luther, Paul’s battle against Jewish legalism
was a parallel to his own battle
against the corruption of Catholicism.
And
in this battle, Luther encountered Paul’s doctrine
of Justification by faith
as
the final clinching biblical argument
that people are not justified by the
church, or by priests,
or by indulgences, or by
any other ritual or practice,
but by faith alone.
As
Luther said in his commentary on this morning’s passage from Galatians:
‘Here the question arises by what means are we
justified?
We answer with Paul,
"By faith only in Christ are we
pronounced righteous, and not by works."
Not that we reject good works. Far from it.
But we will not allow ourselves to be removed
from the anchorage of our salvation.’
So
far so good.
But,
and it’s a big but,
there is an issue here relating to
the translation
from the original Greek
of Paul’s letter,
and it’s one of those translation
issues that really matters!
I’ve
had a number of conversations recently with people
regarding the difficulty of
translating things into a different language.
There
are a of people who are part of our congregation this morning
who speak English as their second,
or even third or fourth, language!
And
I’m sure they will know the difficulty that can sometimes be faced
when trying to take a phrase from
one language
and accurately translate it into
another.
Well,
this morning’s reading from Galatians
contains two words in the Greek
where
it is not entirely clear how they should be translated.
The
words are ‘pistis Christou’
and they can either be translated as
‘faith in Christ’
or ‘the faithfulness of
Christ’.
For
those of you who are linguists,
the difference is whether it should
be treated
as a subjective genitive
or an objective genitive
but we don’t need to know the
technical jargon
to appreciate that this
is a significant difference.
And
there is no linguistic way of judging between them:
both are acceptable renderings of
the original Greek.
Which
means it is unclear whether Paul, in Galatians 2.16, means to say:
that a person is made righteous by faith in Christ,
or that a person is made righteous
by the faith (or faithfulness) of Christ.
Clearly
Luther went with ‘faith in Christ’ reading,
because it so clearly resonated with
the attack he was wanting to make
on the corrupted practices of the
church of his own time.
Luther’s
point was clear:
You are not justified by the works
of the church,
you are justified by faith in Christ
alone.
And
in opting for this he made an exegetical decision
which was born of his cultural
context,
and
which, inadvertently, set the trajectory for protestant theology
for the next five centuries.
There
are some very good things to come out of Luther’s reading
of justification by faith in Christ.
For
starters, it brings an emphasis on personal response,
where you become a follower of Jesus
through free choice.
This
emphasis on the faithful response of the individual
opened the door for a whole raft of
breakaway Christian movements,
including our own
Baptist congregations,
and
in many ways spelled the beginning of the end
for the unholy alliance of church
and state
that had come to be known as
Christendom.
The
emphasis on justification by faith in Christ
also gave rise in time to the
evangelical movement,
with all the great
missionary endeavours that followed,
as the gospel of Christ was
conceived of as ‘good news’
which needed to be told
as far and wide as possible.
Again,
so far so good.
But
Luther’s theology also opened the door to some dark places as well,
and I’m especially thinking here
of the way in which his
conflation of Jewish legalism
with
Catholic corruption
paved the way for wave
after wave of European anti-Semitism,
with a
reformed Europe needing to be purged
of
the so-called ‘legalistic Jews’ who had killed Christ.
Indeed,
one of Luther’s more distressing works,
was an essay entitled ‘The Jews and
Their Lies’
which he published in 1543.
Luther’s
doctrine of justification by faith in Christ
also led to many Christian groups
over-emphasizing the
‘personal response’
that is required for a person to be
considered a proper Christian.
And
this over-emphasis on ‘personal choice’
can lead away from the entirely
proper freedom to choose one’s religion,
as enshrined in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
to an ‘in or out’ mentality,
where various
shibboleth’s are used
to define in ever more
nuanced fashion
the question
of whether someone is actually justified.
Justification
by faith in Christ has become,
in many strands of post-Lutheran
Christianity,
a
requirement to choose faith,
and to then demonstrate that choice
in some proscribed manner
as a
requirement for full acceptance within the body of the church.
Whether
it is the requirement
to say a prayer of commitment in a
certain way,
the ‘sinners prayer’ as
it is sometimes called;
or a
requirement to manifest a particular expression
of the gifts of the Holy Spirit,
such as speaking in
tongues;
or a
requirement to undergo a certain rite or ritual,
such as believer-baptism;
the
effect has been to place a fence or boundary
around the people of God
whereby
those who are ‘in’, know that they are ‘in’,
and those who are ‘out’ know that
they are ‘out’.
All
of which is rather ironic,
given this morning’s passage from
Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
Those
who are enthusiastic about Justification by faith in Christ alone
will quickly focus in on chapter 2
verse 16.
But I
want us to take a step back for a moment
and remember that Paul wasn’t
writing a thesis on justification.
Rather,
he was writing a personal letter to some friends,
and his theology on justification by
faith
is not some abstract
statement of the doctrine of salvation,
but rather is the answer he gives
to a real and intensely
pastoral practical problem,
grounded
in a very real and pragmatic situation.
It
seems that Peter, yes the ‘St Peter’ of the twelve disciples fame,
had been struggling with the issue
of
how to relate to the gentiles who had started following Jesus.
Particularly,
he had been struggling
with the issue of whether it was
appropriate for him,
as a Jewish follower of
Jesus,
to sit and eat with non-Jewish
followers.
You
may remember the story from the book of Acts,
where Peter received his vision of a
table-cloth
spread with all kinds of food, both
ritually clean and ritually unclean.
A
heavenly voice told him to eat,
and Peter protested that he had
never eaten ritually unclean food.
The
voice then told him that what God had made clean,
he must not regard as unclean.
The
context of this vision was that Peter was about to be called
to the house of the Roman centurion
Cornelius
to lead him and his
family to faith in Jesus
without requiring them
to convert to Judaism,
something that Peter, as an observant Jew,
might have struggled to
do.
And
the message is clear:
in the renewed people of God that
has come into being in Christ,
ethnicity and cultural
practice are no bar
to membership of God’s
people.
However,
if we fast-forward some twenty years on from Cornelius’ house
to the city of Antioch,
it
seems that Peter was still grappling
with the issue of the full inclusion
of gentiles
who have converted to Christianity.
He
had been quite happily integrating his Jewish identity
with the Gentile Christians there,
until some Jewish visitors from
James arrived.
James
was the leader of the church in Jerusalem
and also one of the brothers of
Jesus.
It
seems as if the Jerusalem church, based in the Jewish capital,
had not yet properly addressed the
issue of fully integrating gentile converts,
and
so when the visitors from Jerusalem arrived,
Peter and the other Jewish
Christians in Antioch
had started to separate
themselves from eating and socialising
with the ritually
unclean gentile Christians.
Paul
tells the Galatians in his letter
that when he discovered this he was
having none of it!
And so
he had called Peter’s hypocrisy for what it was:
‘Look here’, Paul had said to Peter,
‘you’re a Jew, but you’ve been
living like a Gentile.
How can you force Gentiles to become
Jews?’
I
paraphrase, but that’s the gist of it.
And
here we catch a glimpse of what, for Paul,
was the defining issue of his
ministry and his theology.
If
God has included in his kingdom the ritually unclean gentiles,
then the ritually clean Jewish
Christians
have no cause to exclude them in any
way,
including the refusal to
sit at table and eat with them.
Paul
is utterly opposed to any sense of drawing back,
any implication that the ‘best’ or
‘proper’ Christians
are those who combine
their following of Jesus
with their on-going
observance of the law.
Paul
does not accept that those who are followers of Christ,
but not followers of the
Jewish law,
are in any sense second-rate
citizens of the kingdom of God.
And
so he says,
‘we know that a person is not
justified by the works of the Jewish law,
but through faith.’
The
context, therefore, for Paul’s great statement in Galatians on Justification by
faith,
is that of Jews eating with gentiles
in the churches of Christ.
Of
course, for Paul the Jew,
this is a radical departure from his
previous beliefs as a Pharisee,
just as it is a radical
departure for Peter
the Jewish fisherman
from Galilee.
But
for Paul it was not a break with the past,
rather it was the appropriate
development of his Jewish heritage.
For
Paul, the stories of his Jewish ancestors found in the Hebrew Scriptures,
what we call the Old Testament,
were
stories of God’s on-going faithfulness to God’s covenant people.
God
had established the covenant with Abraham,
promising that Abraham’s children,
the Jewish nation,
would be God’s people, and that the
Lord God would be their God.
The
Hebrew Scriptures then tell of God’s on-going faithfulness to that covenant,
even when the people of Israel
behaved in ways
that broke their part of the
covenant.
But
for Paul there was a purpose to God choosing Israel,
there was a purpose to God calling
them to be his people
and promising to be
their God.
And
that purpose was to ultimately bring not just Israel
but all nations into the kingdom of
God.
Not
just the Jews but the gentiles as well.
And
it is this covenant purpose that Paul understood
as having been fulfilled in Christ.
Through
the death and resurrection of Christ,
Paul saw God decisively intervening
in human history
to bring about the
fulfilment of his covenant with Abraham,
as the gates of the kingdom were
thrown open,
so that all could be
made righteous through faith,
and through faith alone.
However,
here our exploration of Paul’s thought
hits up against Luther’s exegetical
decision
to render Paul’s Greek phrase pistis Christou as ‘faith in Christ’.
Many
contemporary scholars are now convinced
that here in Galatians, as well as
in Romans and elsewhere,
the alternative translation is more
appropriate.
Let
me read you Tom Wright’s translation of Galatians 2.16:
16But we know that a person is not declared ‘righteous’ by works of
the Jewish Law,
but through the
faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.
It
seems most likely that what Paul meant, when he used the phrase,
‘a person is justified not by the
works of the law
but by pistis Christou’,
was that a person is justified not
by their faith in Christ,
but by the faithfulness of Christ.
In
other words, it is on the basis
of the faithfulness of Christ to the
covenant of God,
demonstrated through his
death and resurrection,
that people are declared righteous.
The
human response of faith
is not what makes a person
righteous:
God
does that for them, through the faithfulness of Christ.
The
faith-full response of the believer
is the appropriate response to what
God has already done.
The
relationship between the covenant faithfulness of Christ
and the Christian response of faith,
is therefore
analogous to the relationship within Judaism
of the covenant faithfulness of God
and the Jewish response of
faithfulness to the Jewish law.
And
Paul is clear:
for Jews, keeping the law was the
appropriate and faithful response
to the covenant
faithfulness of God,
but the works of the law in
themselves
did not make a person
righteous.
It’s
the same with the Christian response
to the faithfulness of Christ:
keeping
the faith is the appropriate response
to Christ’s covenant faithfulness,
but
we are not made righteous by our faith.
We
are declared righteous
because of the faithfulness of
Christ.
Therefore
any attempt to introduce any kind of division
within the kingdom of God ,
based
on different responses of faith on the part of Christians,
is as bad as Peter withdrawing from
the Gentile Christians in Antioch
and refusing to sit and eat with
them.
And
here, perhaps, we start to hear the challenge for us today:
Who, I wonder, might we not want to
sit at table and eat with?
Who might we not want to
share food with?
Where might we start to draw the
boundaries
in our minds, hearts,
and lives
which begin the process
of setting ourselves apart from others?
What ‘works of the law’ are there in
us which,
whilst entirely
appropriate responses in themselves
to the
faithfulness of Christ,
run the risk of becoming
defining issues
by which we
reckon ourselves righteous
and others
unrighteous?
In
what ways do we need to hear Paul saying to us:
‘we know that a person is not
declared righteous
by the works of the law,
but through the faithfulness of the
Jewish messiah.’
Our
faithful ethical and moral response to Christ
is certainly the appropriate
response of faith,
but it does not in itself declare us
righteous.
We
are not justified through our faith in Christ,
but through the faithfulness of
Christ to us!
Just
in case Paul’s Galatian readers hadn’t got the point yet,
he goes on over the next few verses
to spell it out even more clearly.
The
reason, he says, why Jews should believe in Jesus as their messiah
is precisely because their faithful
adherence to the Jewish law
had not enabled them to be declared
righteous.
In
fact, any attempt to keep the law for its own sake
had only served to highlight the
sinfulness
that lurks deep within
the human heart.
Paul was
painfully aware that no one, by their own efforts,
can become perfect.
Goodness
knows as a Pharisee he’d given it his best shot!
No-one,
by their own efforts,
can banish every wicked thought,
every selfish action,
however
successful they may be at projecting piety in their outward being.
Our
souls know better, and we cannot heal ourselves.
The
path to true righteousness lies outside of us, not within.
It is found in surrendering to the
one who is faithful to us,
and to God’s covenant
purposes for all people.
We are declared righteous,
not because of what we
do or who we are,
but because of what
Christ did and who he is.
And
what he did was this:
in fulfilment of God’s covenant with
Abraham,
Christ died under the
law
so
that we might die to the law with him,
and in so doing we might find
release
from the compulsion to seek
our own path to righteousness.
And in fulfilment of God’s covenant
with Abraham,
Christ was raised to new
life
to bring
into being a new humanity
where people
are themselves made truly alive
because
Christ lives in them.
The
response of faith to the faithfulness of Christ
is what leads us to baptism,
It is
the response of faith that calls us to enter the tomb with Christ
so that we might be raised with him
to new life.
And I’ll
mention again that I’m planning a baptismal service for later in the year,
if you feel the call of God to
follow Jesus through the waters of baptism.
But
baptism does not save us;
it is simply the appropriate
faithful response, to the faithfulness of Christ.
We
are declared righteous through the faithfulness of Jesus the messiah.
This
is the gospel of Christ, and it is good news for us all.
Amen.
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