Lent Readings v. 2.0
1 So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law.
Galatians 5:1
Note: This will be the shortest of the Lent Readings selections, but it carries with it a volume of wisdom. Paul’s statement is simple: if Jesus has come alive in you, then keep it that way.
This is a part of Paul’s letter to the church at Galatia. This is one of the churches that received Paul’s message quickly. A group of intensely devout Jews (and non Jews practicing Judaism) received Paul in their midst as a rabbi. When Paul spoke, he taught them the fulfillment of the law, a life lived in Jesus; a life of simple love for a great God and the people that He had created.
This message was different from the lifestyle to which the Galatians were accustomed. In order to follow God you were supposed to try and fit into a system of religious rules that dictated every part of your day and conduct. Being a religious or spiritual person meant that you were a person that was more concerned with living by a set of rules-some of them seemingly impossible to follow-than you were with people. Following this set of rules could easily become of such a great importance that one would care more to follow the rules than to try and please God. That is to say that as the rules would come more sharply into focus in one’s life, God could become increasingly blurry.
Paul was familiar with this lifestyle; he had spent the totality of his life living these rules with extreme devotion. Paul makes the argument that he was a “Pharisee of the Pharisees;” the Pharisees were the one’s that would interpret the law, so being a Pharisee of the Pharisees would mean interpreting the law for the Pharisees. Paul claims, with absolute assurance, that it would be very difficult to find anyone that was better at following the laws of Judaism than him and no one argued with him.
Paul’s absolute devotion to the law lead him into a most peculiar occupation: he spent his days hunting down the followers of Jesus and bringing them to his form of justice: a swift death.
Paul’s absolute devotion to the law clouded his vision with the density of a London fog. He could not see beyond his stark perfectionism and that drove him to hate; hate for anyone that tried to “mess up” his systematic lifestyle.
Fast forward.
We’re back in Galatia for the first time.
Paul preaches freedom and grace and peace to the Galatians.
And they take to it like a fish to water.
Freedom is deeply appealing when you have been bound in chains. In fact, it is even more appealing when you realize that the chains that you thought bound you to God become the chains that bind your soul to hell-fire.
The Galatians accepted Jesus and began living lives of love. Paul moved on to continue spreading the good news.
Then it happened.
Paul received word that the Galatians had received some new teachers in their midst, teachers of the law, teachers that once again, bound them up in the chains of the old religious system. They went from freedom in Jesus to bondage.
From lives of love for God and man,
to the self absorption of trying to live a perfect life.
Paul wrote this letter to the Galatians in this context. He was urging them, pleading with them, compelling them to not forget the great freedom that they received from Jesus.
Why is it so easy to fall back into doing the thing that you hate?
Chains become comforters. We desire to carry them around like Linus carrying his blanket and sucking his thumb (thank Jesus for “Peanuts”). Familiarity becomes more important than truth. Ignorance is bliss and we are the ignorant.
This is what Paul was talking about. Why would we desire to live in the darkness of Plato’s Cave (read “The Allegory of the Cave” by Plato http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.html) when the love of Jesus has loosed our chains and brought us blinking into the light? Why would we desire to bind anyone else in the same chains that we have been set free from?
If you have been set free, then stay that way. It’s the very reason that Jesus died.
Freedom in Christ to be who God made you, imperfections and all: this is what living the resurrection looks like.
