Faith vs. Works
One Sunday morning, a teacher was attempting to teach her Sunday school class about the doctrine of salvation by faith. She asked the class, “If I went to Church every week and tried to live my life following the ten commandments, would I get into heaven?” “No!” answered little Johnny. “If I sold my house, my car, and all of my other possessions and gave all the money to the church, would I get into heaven?” Johnny replied, “No!” “Ok, well, if I spent my whole life being charitable, loving my family, and being kind to everyone I met, would I get into heaven then?” Johnny again replied, “No!” The teacher was somewhat surprised by little Johnny’s intellect and thought that he might already be grasping the subject, so she asked him, “how do I get into heaven, then?” Johnny replied, “You have to die first.”
Little Johnny the Theologian?
In a way, little Johnny’s answers points to what Paul is talking about in our reading today from his Letter to the Galatians. Johnny’s answers suggest the understanding that we are not saved by what we do or our ability to adhere to certain standards of religious behavior. This was the Apostle Paul’s message and the point that he wanted to emphasize in the letter. The Letter to the Galatians helped influence Martin Luther develop his doctrine of salvation by faith alone because it emphasized that there was nothing humans could do to obtain righteousness before God, but God bestows faith and salvation upon us as a gift. Luther believed that the Catholic Church’s emphasis on adhering to the sacraments did little to establish a relationship with Christ, which Luther (and most Christians, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant today) believe is crucial for our salvation.
Luther stated in his book, Disputation against Scholastic Theology, “We do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds but, having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds.”
Letter to the Galatians
Paul wrote this letter to the Galatians because his credibility as an apostle and his established ministries were under attack by a group of Jewish Christians who came to his churches after Paul left to form other churches and claimed that Paul was not true Apostle of Christ and that his message was incomplete. When word of their attacks reached Paul, he wrote this letter to counter their false teachings. At the beginning of his letter, Paul gave a little bit of his call story. He wrote that he “advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age” and was “far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.” As we know from the story in the Book of Acts, Paul was a Pharisee who persecuted Christians until he had a vision of Christ that temporarily blinded him, and he became a converted follower of Christ when his vision was restored.
In Galatians 2:15, Paul wrote, “when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being,” Paul, as is evident in his letters, had a great philosophical mind, and God used his skills to proclaim the gospels to educated and uneducated Greeks and Romans.
Judaizer
Paul understood that Jesus’s message was not bound by the laws of Judaism, and he did not force his disciples to take on Jewish customs.
Paul began his ministry in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), where he encountered the Galatians, descendants of a Celtic tribe that settled in Turkey several centuries earlier. His ministry in that region was very successful, and he established many other churches throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. Other Jewish-Christian missionaries, however, traveled through the region sometime after Paul had left, and they did not agree with Paul’s methods. They told believers in Turkey that the men must be circumcised and that the people must follow Jewish dietary laws and customs to be true followers of Christ.
Paul wrote this letter to counter the teachings of these missionaries, which Paul called, in a rough translation of the original Greek, Judaizers. They, Paul believed, were putting the burden of Jewish law on the gentiles, but Paul writes in Galatians 2:16 that Jewish believers, “know that a person is justified (made righteous) not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.
Freedom
This message was important not only for the Galatians but also to Martin Luther and all believers today. In the opening of our reading today, Paul proclaims, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” We know that we often fall short of the standards we set for ourselves, let alone those proposed in Old Testament.
We have all broken at least one commandment, and maybe a few of us have done so a few times. Paul wrote of his repeated failure to stop sinning on his own in his Letter to the Romans 7:21-24:
“So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?
He provides the solution in the next verse, Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Perfect Love
As Paul reminds us in Romans 3:23, we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But Paul encouraged Galatian readers, “Stand firm,” and “do not let yourselves be burdened by the yoke of that slavery to sin.” We could never attain righteousness for ourselves, so Jesus gave us the example of perfect love. Jesus went to the cross to show us that our weaknesses and failures do not separate us from the love of God.
Returning the Love
We return that love through open-hearted service, not through obeying rules. A person who loves identifies with people, gets down where they are, even below where they are, and ministers to them. Verses 13 and 14 state, “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Sarx
The Greek word for flesh, sarx, means more than our basic understanding of flesh as blood, skin, and tissue. This, as we know, is usually the case with the Greek terms in the Bible. Sarx means flesh as we understand it, but it also refers to sensuous or animal nature. Without any suggestion of depravity, animal nature involves our cravings that, without some moderating influence, may incite us to sin. Sarx represents our lizard brains in modern terminology. In verses 16 through 17, Paul provides a remedy to free ourselves from the bondage to sarx, “So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.”
God gives us the gift of the human body; it is intended to serve God and creation. We are not called to reject or hate our bodies, we are called to use them to share the love given to us as a gift by the Holy Spirit. The law reminds us that sometimes we are powerless over that nature, but God’s Spirit leads us away from the bondage to sarx. As we serve others, the Holy Spirit bestows the gifts of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control to help us serve more effectively.
The Little Flower
An illustration of grace superseding law can be found in a story told about a man many of his New Yorkers admirers called the Little Flower. Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor of New York City during the worst days of the depression and all of World War II. The mayor was short in stature, 5 foot 2 inches tall, but he had a huge heart, hence the nickname. Mayor LaGuardia did much to help New Yorkers survive the great depression, but he is best remembered by popular antidotes of his kindness. LaGuardia would show up at orphanages with buses and took the children to baseball games, and when the New York papers went on strike, he read the Sunday funnies to the kids over the radio.
On a very cold night in January 1935, Mayor LaGuardia went to the night court that served the poorest neighborhood in New York City, dismissed the judge for the evening, and took over the bench himself. That evening, along with the traffic violators and petty criminals, a tattered older woman was brought before him, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. She told LaGuardia that her daughter’s husband had deserted her, her daughter was sick, and two grandchildren were starving, so she took the bread out of desperation to feed them.
But the shopkeeper from whom the bread was stolen refused to drop the charges. “It’s a bad neighborhood, Your Honor,” the man told the mayor. “She’s got to be punished to teach other people around her a lesson.” LaGuardia sighed, turned to the woman, and said, “I’ve got to punish you. The law makes no exceptions—ten dollars or ten days in jail.”
But even as he pronounced the sentence, the mayor was already reaching into his pocket. He extracted a bill and tossed it into his hat, saying, “Here is the ten-dollar fine, which I now remit; and furthermore, I am going to fine everyone in this courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat.” So he handed his hat to the bailiff and they collected an additional $47.50 from some seventy petty criminals, traffic violators, New York City Police officers, and one red-faced store owner. Everyone in the room gave the mayor a standing ovation.
True Justice over Legalism
God’s grace directs us to true justice over legalism. Jesus Christ died to pay the penalty for our transgressions, so we have nothing to prove. We no longer are slaves to our failures and are free to live new lives. Therefore, standing before God, we can be assured that Jesus has given us the righteousness we did not earn.
Fruits of the Spirit
Paul promises that the Holy Spirit will produce the fruit of the Spirit, “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” The fruit of the Spirit keeps us from sin and helps us to walk like Jesus
The Kingdom of God
Jesus said that the kingdom of God is in our midst, and he gave us examples in parable form:
1) The kingdom of God is expressed in the father who looks for his prodigal son coming over the horizon to return home,
2) It is expressed in the love of the shepherd who leaves the other sheep safe in their pen and searches for the lost sheep.
Little Johnny was right, we do die before entering the kingdom of God, but we die to our failure, our shame, and our loneliness when the Holy Spirit calls us to God’s grace, leads us home, and leads us to help call others find home. Amen.