Fr Peter Helman

Dear friends,

The apostle Paul puts us off balance with his theology of the crucified Jesus.
 
How do we appropriate his admission in the reading this morning from his letter to the churches of Galatia: “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14)? If we read only a verse or two further, we find Paul wading into darker waters still: “I carry the marks of Jesus branded on my body” (6:17b).
 
For the bystander, as much then as now, Paul’s is an altogether unthinkable self-identification: to offer body and soul to and be made one with the God who dies in agony. Jesus suffers the monstrosity of death and abandonment and from the cross cries, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” (Matt. 27:46). And Paul takes this dirge upon his lips as a gospel song of praise and thanksgiving.
 

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The letter to the Galatians, one of Paul’s earliest, is wondrous in its presentation of his developing theology.
 
He addresses communities of predominantly gentile Christians scattered throughout Asia Minor, who find themselves beset, so soon after Paul’s departure into other provinces to plant churches, by the bitter polemics of errant teachers.
 
Galatian communities, by and large, have no hardbound affinity to Judaic ceremonial and ritual purity codes, so they are hardpressed to parse the relationship of their faith to the sacred precepts of the Mosaic Law these teachers enjoin them to obey. (A brief 20 minutes to read the six chapters of the letter to the Galatians gives a sense of the scene at hand!) The conflict hinges on the significance of circumcision, a sign of the everlasting covenant God made with Abraham and thereafter commanded his descendants perpetually to observe (Gen. 17:10-14).
 
Paul proclaims an upending wideness in God’s mercy that sets free both Jews and gentiles from strict observance of the Law. "Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything," he writes (6:15). The Law of Moses, for Paul, functions like a tutor to lead one to Jesus, and so obedience to the Law pertains only in light of a greater Law, that of Love, which is manifest in the person and work of Jesus. The advent of Jesus reveals the eternal light of divine love found in human form, a law written on the heart; and his death and rising to newness of life undoes death and brings immortality to light.
 
To be sure, Jesus does not come to abolish the Law. He come to fulfill it (Matt. 5:17). The revelation of the Decalogue to Moses on Mount Sinai and each of its precepts concerns the solidity of righteousness—the means to be made to stand in right relationship with God. However, even the strictest obedience is able, at last, only to repeat the fragmentation of the heart’s affections and reiterate redemption’s plea for grace. We stand in loving fellowship with God because we are brought near by the blood of Jesus, whose free gift of lovingkindness makes us free from sin and death and reconciles us to God and the world.

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Paul says "a new creation is everything” (6:15), and this is what he believes God accomplishes through the advent of Jesus and the anguish of the cross: an unaccountable irruption in history that frees the world from itself by opening up the very door beyond itself into the infinite life of God. What dies will not die forever because the power of God raised Jesus from the dead--brought him back from the abyss that opened up before him and into which he threw himself--and will also raise us up by his power (1 Cor. 6:14).

Paul makes the cross his song because it is the very signpost of the gate of heaven. 

 
Yours in Christ,
Fr. Peter