Tuesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time [468] Galatians 5:1-6 Psalm 119:41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48 Luke 11:37-41

Weekly Guide for Daily Prayer

The Galatians were Celts, the same ethnic people we know today as Irish or highland Scot. They were bleached blondes, fierce fighters, and exuded a typically childlike enthusiasm. When Paul got side-tracked to their town in what is today Asia Minor, he evangelized them and they embraced the Gospel eagerly. Sometime later Jewish Christian missionaries from Antioch arrived and insisted that Paul’s Galatian converts needed to be circumcised. The issue was a simple one. Christianity was a sect of Judaism; you couldn’t be Christian if you weren’t a Jew – and that meant circumcision. Apparently the Galatians accepted this teaching as well. Whether they embraced the practice because they thought they had to or because, in their enthusiasm, it was something “extra” they could do for God is unclear. (After all, adult circumcision in those days was no walk in the park.) When Paul heard of this he – in every sense a Jew in his own right – would have none of it. His words, earlier in this letter, were as harsh as any in the New Testament.

Paul’s position is pretty well summed up in the last verse of today’s reading. “In Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.” Few of us worry much about circumcision today, but the point behind this statement is as challenging today as it was then. What we do to or with our bodies keeps the focus solidly on us, whereas it needs to be on God – our gratitude for what God has done for us “in Christ Jesus”. That gratitude manifests itself, as Paul says, as “faith working through love”.

“Faith” here means faithfulness or loyalty to Jesus, and “love”, as so often in Paul, means self-giving, mutual support. This is not just abstract theologizing. By their baptism the Galatians were formed into a new kinship group – exactly what Jesus had meant by His question “Who are my mother and brothers and sisters?” (Matt. 13:48). A new family committed to one another above self – thereby preaching to the world around them what – in God’s view – true humanity was all about. The focus of each individual was not him or herself but his or her brothers and sisters, and the focus of the group as a whole was not on itself, but on drawing all around it into the same loving kinship.

How far we have drifted from that vision!

I find that I am concerned about my own salvation. In occasional lucid moments, I realize how silly that is. God has saved me in Jesus’ self-giving. I needn’t worry about that. I am saved. But I need constantly to strive to translate that into action, as “faith working through love”. It’s helpful to understand that for the Galatians – indeed for all of the Pauline communities – “love” was not warm fuzzy feelings or affection. Paul’s converts came from all social classes. Many were not “our kind of people”. But now they are. They’re Baptism people, Christ people. That kind of love is hard and gritty. That kind of love, when ritualized in Eucharist, is what makes it a subversive act, for it challenges all the world’s values. But it also broadcasts what God’s kingdom is like, preaching a powerful sermon by its very doing.