This is an extremely well-known passage … and of course what’s best knownabout it is the soaring affirmation of equality in Christ: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” This single verse does two things: it goes against the notion—I might even say gives lie to it—practiced by so many of our fellow Christians, that there are somehow classes of Christians less equal, less able to fulfill leadership roles in the church . . . in this line, Paul covers all the categories in ancient culture by which folks are classified. Greek versus Jew signifies foreigners, outsiders versus insiders … slave or free was another huge dividing line, all peoples were classified as either owned or not owned . . . and of course male and female, and note that Paul uses the Genesis formulation of “and” instead of “or” to emphasize that as it says in Genesis one male and female, both, are created in the imago dei, the image of God.
Of course today, most of the church hasn’t gotten this yet, most obviously in the case of women . . . fully 80% of the world’s Christians are Roman Catholic, who do not ordain women, and the great majority of others are evangelicals, and most of themdon’t do it either. But—and there’s no way to sugarcoat it—these churches are, as Paul would put it, stuck in categories of the world, conforming to the model of the flesh, rather than that of Spirit, rather than that of Christ. There is no longer male and female, those categories have disappeared, for all are one in Christ, and in his body the church.
The second thing this one verse does is to debunk the notion—popular among certain folks—that Paul of Tarsus, writer of over a quarter of the New Testament, was a raging sexist. Sorry, but I’ll be equally blunt here: it doesn’t wash. In the letters that we are sure he actually wrote—seven out of the thirteen attributed to him—he is anything but sexist, with only one passage in 1 Corinthians that can be construed that way, and most Pauline scholars think that a later author inserted that part.
That’s not to say that Paul was a full-fledged, 21st-Century feminist: he was a man of his time, after all. But his writings and practices—see Priscilla, whom he considered an equal in the faith—were radical for the time. But they’ve been used historically—like so much of the Bible—to keep women out of leadership roles both within the church and outside of it. And none of that is Paul’s fault.
For our purposes, it should be noted that this one verse tends to overshadow the rest of the passage, which is remarkable in its depth. Within the letter itself, it is part of an argument about the nature of the law—the Torah, to be exact—and how it relates to faith in Christ Jesus. As we saw a couple of weeks ago, the Galatians were being proselytized by a group of Christians that evidently—we don’t know for sure, all we have are the clues in the letter—who taught that Christians must first obey the Torah —i.e., be practicing Jews—before they are admitted into the Christian faith. In other words, they must practice the dietary laws, for instance, and be circumcised.
This didn’t sit well with Paul, and so he wrote this letter to protest the teachings of these “false teachers,” as he called them, and to convince the Galatians of the righteousness of his position. And this passage sits smack in the middle: he has first argued that it was by faith, not works, that Abraham became father of the promise, that he was “blessed,” as Genesis says, “to be a blessing.” And through Christ—a offspring of Abraham—we are alsoheirs according to that promise.
But—and this is where our passage begins—if the law is no longer necessary, why was it instituted in the first place? Why did God hand those ten commandments down to Moses—some time after Abraham, Paul might add—if Christ would nullify them? It was added because of our transgressions, to keep us in line until “faith came,” until Jesus Christ came upon the scene. For Paul—and for John Calvin, for instance, who made this one of his “uses of the law”—it was there as a guide for us, as a yard-stick by which to measure our behavior.
But more than that: “we were imprisoned and guarded under the law . . . the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came.” This is more than just our using it as a yardstick, more than a passive measuring tape. It’s as if the Torah were both the regulation and enforcer, both the civic code and the judicial system—police, prosecutor, judge and jury—all rolled into one. Paul uses the Greek word paedagogos, which we translate here as “disciplinarian,” to get at what he considers the law to be. In upper-crust Greco-Roman society—that is, among people who could afford one—a paedagogoswas the hired guardian of a minor: a teacher, disciplinarian and protector, all rolled into one. But when minors came of age, they were no longer under their thumb, under their guardianship. So the term “now that faith has come”—synonymous with now the Christ has come—can be viewed a s coming into adulthood, coming of age. “The lawwas our disciplinarian, our paedagogos,until Christ came.” As he says over in First Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”
We were children before Christ, minors subject to the law . . . but it’s important to note that Paul is not talking about an individual conversion experience, here, as in we were children before we became a Christian . . . Paul does not say “before we accepted Christ” or “after Christ came into our hearts,” he says “after Christ came,” as in “into the world.” He is talking about Christ’s physical coming, his crucifixion, and that mysterious, miraculous thing we call the resurrection. We were imprisoned and guarded under the law, we were minor children under the paedagogos,the disciplinarian, before the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And now … we aren’t.
And why not? Because in Christ Jesus we are all children of God through faith. That very faith that has come with Christ—as if it were not here before—provides the conduit by which we are children of God. Notice that this faith was not here before Christ,and that linguistically, at least, Paul goes so far as to equate the two. So this faith, through which we are made children of God, it is not something we have innate within us, it is not some inborn ability we have, it is totally external to us … it is in fact a gift every bit as much as is salvation, a species of grace every bit as much as much as anything else we receive from God.
Paul continues with a startling statement: all of us who have been baptized into Christ Have put on Christ, have clothed ourselves with him. Here is the second great metaphor of our passage. And though it seems a bit . . . weird to us, the phrase “to clothe oneself” in someone or, in an alternate translation, “to put on” someone, was used a fair amount by ancient Greek writers. The historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for example, writes of folks having “put on or clothed themselves with Tarquin" and the Assyrian rhetorician Lucian speaks of himself "having put on Pythagoras." Other Greek writers speak of putting on Plato, Socrates, and etc., and they mean to take on the characteristics of that person, to emulate them, to use them as a model. And so for Paul, to clothe ourselves in Christ means to model ourselves after him, to use him as a standard of behavior, to be like Christ.
This metaphor is such a powerful one that first and second-century Christians soon adopted its symbolism in their own baptismal rites . . . the baptismal candidate would meditate and keep vigil all night, and then walk into one of the shallow baptismal fonts of the day . . . they would be clothed in normal street garb and after the priest had poured the water over their heads, they would be briefly hidden from view, only to emerge in dazzling white . . . thus they were clothed in Christ, no longer in the raiment’s of the world, the raiment’s of the flesh, as Paul might have put it, but in the clothing of the Spirit. They had “put on Christ” right before their witness’ eyes.
Paul uses similar language in other places, but perhaps no more strikingly than over in Philippians, in the passage we often say as an affirmation of faith. There, he describes Christ as “emptying himself, taking the form of a slave, and being born in human likeness.” Of course, he is speaking of the incarnation, here, or his understanding of it . . . and in that incarnation, Christ emptied himself, he put on humanity so fully, clothed himself with humankind so completely, that there was nothing left of his divinity, nothing left of his god-ness. Christ clothed himself in us so completely that he becameone of us, fully and without holding back.
And as for us, clothing ourselves is an apt metaphor . . . for if we clothe ourselves, we do not become, but we do indeed imitate . . . we do take on some of the qualities of Christ . . . for Paul, putting on Christ is to become like him, to in a sense, thinklike him, at least in a limited way. As much as it became a cliché, as much as I got sick and tired of hearing it constantly and trivially, the phrase “what would Jesus do” was an attempt to grapple with part of this. Many Christians go through life not really giving this much thought or, worse, assuming that whatever their country or culture does, or whatever seems right to them, is what Christ would do. In this way, they become clothed in the world, wrapped in the flag of whatever state they give allegiance to, like those sports fans that celebrate by wrapping themselves up in their team colors.
But as Christians, we are to wrap ourselves in Christ, not the world, we are to model ourselves after Christ and his life and actions on earth. And Paul couples this with our baptisms, and it’s very apt, for it is at our baptisms that we are given the wherewithal to do so. For it is at baptism that the Spirit of God, that Christ himself promised us, is bestowed upon us, the spirit of truth and comfort and, lest we forget, power. At our baptisms, that spirit descends upon us like it did upon Christ, at hisbaptism on the River Jordan, and we are given the power and strength to go against culture, to go against the world, and clothe ourselves in our Redeemer. Amen.
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