Paul certainly is angry. The letter to the church in Galatia is an angry letter. Its fiery words of introduction declare Paul’s authority as an apostle commissioned directly by God. The machine gun pace is then kept up without a break until the beginning of chapter 6, where Paul finally begins to slow. By the time of the letter’s exasperated conclusion Paul is spent. But he is still ticked: “from now on let no one trouble me; for I carry the marks of Jesus on my body,” Paul is fuming. He’s not a little upset. He is furious. Why?
We caught a glimpse of Paul’s anger two weeks ago when we read these words: “if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!” Now, “Go to hell,” might not mean much anymore, it’s said with such flippancy, but to Paul, that kind of imperative meant a great deal. And that’s what he says about the false teachers who have followed him into his church plant in the region of Galatia. They are preaching another gospel. A false gospel. A gospel that is, in effect, undoing not only Paul’s own preaching but threatening to nullify the cross of Christ for the Galatian Christians. If anyone comes proclaiming a Gospel other than the one you received, says Paul, that person can go to hell. And he means it.
He is, indeed, far more graphic just a few paragraphs when, in perhaps a less-than-sanctified loss of temper, he says to his flock, “I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!” Oh my. Some of you are thinking, “Is that really in the Bible?” It is! Paul says lots of things we wouldn’t normally attribute to a saint. And with these words, we’ve gone from grim to gruesome. What on earth is going on?
It seems that enemies of Paul have followed him to this fledgling church and begun to “correct” the Gospel he proclaimed. Yes, they seem to have said, to the Gentile converts. Yes, Paul was quite right to tell you that you do need to trust in Christ! That’s the first step. AND now, you need to become observant Jews, too. That means you need to be circumcised and you need to start keeping kosher. You need to trust in Christ AND observe the law.
It is that little word, “and,” that has Paul fuming. It is not that observing the law is wrong in itself—as though to trust in Christ one had to spurn one’s Jewish heritage. Paul certainly doesn’t do that. Rather, Paul uses the invectives of damnation and castration when he hears that his enemies have tacked on Jewish ceremonial observances to trust in Christ as a second set of “essentials.” How can you be set free from sin and death? You are set free from sin and death by trusting Christ AND becoming Jewish. Paul, full of apostolic anger, tackles this “AND” in the letter to the Galatians. And he is particularly clear here in our Epistle for the morning.
Let’s look again at v. 16. “We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners.” This is the neuralgic point. The point of pain in the new community. How do Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus become one Church? In this new community that Paul has founded by preaching the Gospel of Jesus, there are two kinds of people—Jews and Gentiles. How do Gentiles come into covenant with God of Israel? And Paul’s answer is, simply, the same way Jews do. Not by keeping the law, but through the faithfulness of Christ.
Ah, now that’s an important phrase: through the faithfulness of Christ. It is usually translated “through faith in Christ” and this, most scholars of Paul believe, is a mistake. For the phrase, “faith in Christ,” suggests still that we are saved by something that we do. We are rescued, restored, reconciled to God as we exercise our faith, our trust. However ture that may be, that’s not Paul’s point in this letter, his bone of contention with his opponents. The argument with Paul’s enemies is not whether the Gentiles in Galatia were saved by their faith or by their works. Rather, the key question on which Paul and his enemies part is, are the Gentiles saved by something that Christ has done or by some combination of what Christ has done and their own keeping of the law?
And Paul’s answer to this question is unequivocal. Christ’s own covenant faithfulness, his obedience, has done this for me; it is through his faithfulness that I am justified, that I am placed in a right relationship with God. He has done this for Jews; he has done this for Gentiles. Christ only is God’s one faithful covenant partner. Christ only has kept the law. And he has done it for us. “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God.” Christ in his saving life, death, and resurrection has done it all. There is no more that needs doing.
Which is to say, there is no Christ AND! Gentiles are not to be welcomed only if and as they become Jews. Gentiles don’t need to become observant Jews. Indeed to require them to do so would be to say Christ’s faithfulness even to death on the cross was for nothing.
For Paul, neither Jew nor Gentile could not make themselves right with God. Neither Jews, who could not obey the law they had, nor Gentiles who did not obey the law they lacked. Both sets of people, left to their own efforts, were lost. Neither Jew nor Gentile could by their behavior keep covenant. They were totally unable. Sin had so incapacitated them, it was as though they were dead. The good news was, Jew and Gentile together could only thank God who, as Paul will later write, “in the fullness of time, sent forth his Son, born of a woman, both under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.”
Now, the controversy between some Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus in the first century is well past us. But the problem of “Jesus AND” is with us every day. To live in covenant with God, you must trust in Christ. AND dress just the way I do. To live in covenant with God, you must trust in Christ AND vote the same way I vote. To live in covenant with God, you must trust in Christ AND support my causes. To live in covenant with God, you must trust in Christ AND agree with my theology. We act as though those statements and others like them are true, don’t we? Sometimes?
Do you hear the first person pronoun there? We. It will not do to so relegate the text to the first century that this becomes the historical problem some Jewish Christians of the first century. (Aren’t you glad we’re not like that anymore?) Nor will it do to point the finger the Christian Right (that is, Christians who shop at Walmart and boycott Starbucks) or the Christian Left (that is, Christians who boycott Walmart and shop at Starbucks). It will not do to point our finger that church over here or over there. Adding our own AND to Jesus is something we all are tempted to do. It is something to which we all, from time to time, yield.
Which brings us to our Gospel lesson for the day. The Gospel presents us with two people. A Pharisee and a sinner. A good religious person who invited Jesus over for dinner and a woman who knew she was in a mess and couldn’t get out of it. A good religious person who couldn’t offer even the simplest and obligatory forms of hospitality to Jesus. A sinner who couldn’t withhold her affection and gratitude. A good religious person who believed his conduct impressed God. A sinner who knew she never could. A good religious person who sniffed at Jesus’ conduct. A sinner who wept tears of joy at what Jesus had done. A good religious person who was forgiven little. A sinner who was forgiven much. Which one does Luke present to us as an example?
When we think, speak, or live as though “Jesus And” is true, we have cast ourselves as the Pharisee in this story. For we take what can only be received as a gift and presume to supplement it with our own impressive list of accomplishments. We cast ourselves as someone who can have God’s gift of reconciliation, rescue, restoration, on our own terms, based on our own behavior. We can look our neighbors and even God in the eye and say, “I did this.” And Jesus, I can only imagine, looks at us in the same way as he did that Pharisee—with profound disappointment, with a weary look that says, “you just don’t get it. You cannot welcome me.”
The example in the story, the one whom Luke and Jesus agree we readers are to emulate, is the woman. She has grasped the truth that the Pharisee is unable or unwilling to hear: that we are in such a mess that we cannot fix it even if we want to. We are far better off when in our helplessness, we cast ourselves without reservation, without hesitation, without any qualification at all, on Christ. We are far better off when we leave our conjunctions—all our “ands”—to one side and cling only to Christ, who is the life God intends for every human being. We are far better off when the only words we can manage are “thank you.”
Thank you—that is our only contribution, and it is, of course, no contribution at all. What does “thank you” do? Thank you recognizes the truth about ourselves—we are all sinners in need of rescue. Thank you recognizes the truth about Jesus—there is no “and,” no supplement to what he has done. He is God’s rescue. He is God’s reconciliation. He is God’s restoration. He is all of that alone and of himself. And now it is time for all of us to utter our collective thank you to Christ, in whom we have been hidden in baptism, who died and lives for us that we might die to our sin and live in covenant fellowship with God.
We say our collective thank you here, at this table. That is what Eucharist means—thanksgiving. For it is at this table where the life of Christ is given again. Freely. Here is the place where all of our ands, all of our if onlys, all of our but thens are set aside. Here is a place where no condition can be made. For here we meet Christ in the power of the Spirit. Here we receive the life that is absolutely and utterly beyond us. The life that raises us from the dead and hides us in the heavenly realms. Here is the place where we all are forgiven much, and where the only response is thank you.