Remember back when we were kids, maybe the first or second or third grade, and they taught us how to write a letter? We were taught how to begin it, then follow up with asking after the recipient’s health, and the help of her or his family. “Dear Grandma, how are you? I am fine . . . how is Grandpa? I hope his goiter isn’t acting up . . .” and there was an accepted form for a personal letter, and back in Paul’s Greco-Roman day there was a standard format for a Greco-Romanletter, and all of Paul’s letters follow it, to some extent, at least. Greco-Roman letters generally begin with a Salutation—the dear Grandma part—and indeed, here in Galatians it’s found in verses 1 through 5, which we read last week. In it, he specifies who the letter is from—Paul an apostle and all members of God’s family with him—and to whom it is written—the churches in Galatia—and then he greets them: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to set us free from t he present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.” Notice that he basically sums up the gospel just in this opening greeting—Paul never couldpass up a preachable moment.
Now: in a normal Greco-Roman letter, the next part would normally be the “thanksgiving,” where the letter writer expresses her or his appreciation for its recipients in the form of thanks to God. Listen to the thanksgiving from 1 Corinthians: “I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind—just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you—so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Notice that here again, he can’t resist a sermon.
All this is to say that the parishioners in Galatia, sitting in church, listening to this letter from their beloved founder—the letters were always read aloud—as they sat there, they were expecting to hear a thanksgiving section, extolling their virtues—by the grace of God, of course—but instead they get: “I am astonishedthat you are so quickly deserting the one who called you”—that’s Paul—“in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel” It’s as if a grandchild followed up the greeting to her grandmother with a whining complaint: “Dear Grandma, I am flabbergastedthat you didn’t give me a bicycle for my birthday . . .” Grandma might faint dead away . . .
Of course, that is the effect that Paul is after, he wants to emphasize how upset he is, to impress upon them the gravity of the situation, as he sees it anyway, and the situation is this: there is a group of Jewish Christians, perhaps from Jerusalem itself, which scholars call the Missionaries, visiting the churches in Galatia, the churches that he founded. And they are preaching a version of the Gospel that Paul believes is false: namely, that you had to be a Jew and be circumcised and all that to be a Christian. And to Paul, this was nonsense, and worse, heresy, against the very foundation of Christianity, and as we spend some time in Galatians over the next month or so, we will come back to this question, which for Paul was a question of freedom in Christ, but for now it’s to set the stage for our passage, which seems prickly to say the least if not downright defensive.
And if it does, it’s probably because Paul feelsthat way, he feels under attack, and that at stake is nothing less than the Gospel and his standing as Apostle. He tells them that the gospel that was proclaimed by him—gospel and the verb to proclaim come from the same root, so the Greek is something like “the proclamation that was proclaimed”—the proclamation that was proclaimed to him wasn’t of human origin, he didn’t get it hanging around the water cooler in Jerusalem with the boys, he didn’t read it in the paper or see it on Anderson Cooper, but it was a revelation from Jesus Christ. And the Greek word rendered here as “revelation” is apocaluptos, and maybe a more literal translation would serve better, as in “I received it through an apocalypse of Jesus Christ,” because it certainly created an upheaval in his life, an upending of his whole belief system, for he was a devout Jew, a Pharisee, by his own description “advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age.”
He was devout, and as an expression of that devotion, he was actively trying to destroy this upstart religion called “the way.” And so though he might not have reallybeen knocked off his donkey like Luke claimed, his conversion had a lot of the apocalyptic about it: going from persecutor in chief to church planter extraordinaire and though he never renounced Judaism that we know of, he argued vehemently that Christianity stood alone, and was available to Gentiles like you and like me.
But God called him from before he was born—the Greek is literally “from the womb”—and revealed—and once again, it’s apocalypted—and apocalypted God’s son to him, to preach among the Gentiles, he didn’t get anybody’s permission, he didn’t confer with anyone up in Jerusalem—although he did later visit Peter (whom he calls Cephas) and James, Jesus’ brother—and what he is trying to emphasize here is that his apocalypse is directly from God, he didn’t pass go, he didn’t collect $200, he didn’t set out to become a believer, God came to him,God converted him,God chose himbefore he was born, and Paul didn’t have a thingto say about it.
About a decade ago, Campus Crusade for Christ initiated a marketing campaign built around the simple slogan “I found it.” They had flyers printed up with “I found it,” bright orange t-shirts emblazoned with “I found it,” and scribbled “I found it” all over campus chalkboards. Of course, it being Campus Crusade for Christ, the “it” they found was Jesus Christ, and aside from the problematic use of the neutral pronoun—Christ is an it?—and the reduction of the entire Gospel to just one word, the more insidious thing is that it assumes that it is in our power to “find,” that it is somehow in our control whether or not we do. As the episode with Paul shows us, we don’t find God, God finds us. The hymn doesn’t say “I once was lost but now I found it,” it says I once was lost but now am found. The lyric is in the passive tense—am found—just as is Paul’s story. Paul no more reveals the gospel to himself any more than we findit ourselves.
What’s even moreproblematic, though, is when we think we can determine whether or not somebody elsefinds Christ does. In Gold Beach, Oregon, the site of my first church, the ministerial association was peopled largely with pastors of a more traditional bent, and I remember one meeting where they were beating their breasts over the condition of the town, which they considered largely “lost,” and “unsaved.” If they’d just work harder, redouble their evangelical efforts, they could change things, win the whole town over for Christ. And the only other mainline pastor in town, the Lutheran Pastor Tim, said “Wait a minute . . . isn’t it God that saves people?” and they had to admit that he had a point . . .
It isn’t anything we do that saves somebody any more than anything we do to save ourselves. Just as God set Paul apart before he was born and called him by God’s grace, so God does to us. As biblical scholar Heidi Hustad Armstrong puts it, “all conversion stories begin with God’s decisive action. God always takes the initiative.”
The notion that people somehow won’t “be saved” if we don’t work thathard enough is a form of idolatry, with ourselves as the idol. We, the created, put ourselves in the place of our creator and that is never a good idea. It can lead to arrogance, it can lead to dominance, it can lead to war . . . if it is up to us to save people, doesn’t it put ourselves over even our God?
In our passage, Paul insists that he didn’t get his version of the gospel from anyone other than God: “I did not confer with any human being,” he says, “nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me.” He sounds impassioned, almost pleading:“In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!” And though we can’t be sure, it may have been that he was being accused by the Missionaries of spouting a version of the gospel he got second-hand from the realapostles in Jerusalem. Whatever the case, it’s easy to get the impression that it is alldefensiveness, all an attempt to set himself apart from others. But as Armstrong puts it, he’s not saying “Look at how great Iam” but “Look at how great Godis, how great the Gospelis.” It’s no wonder that he gets upset, so upset that that he just dives into his complaint, without observing the niceties of 1st-Century correspondence. For him, the thought that you have to do something to earn God’s grace—become a Jew, get circumcised—flies in the face of the God’s saving power, it negates the very heart of the whole thing.
Paul doesn’t tell us about his life to build himself up, he tells us about it to build the Gospel up. He tells us about his conversion from a church hater and baiter—with no help from anybody else, untouched by human hands—to emphasize the primacy and astonishingly radical nature of grace. Two-thousand years before John Newton, Paul would certainly have agreed with another line from Newton’s great song: Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. Amen.
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