I remember too the day we welcomed the first of several dozen refugees from Burma into the congregation where I served in Minnesota. Our primary means of communication initially was through an interpreter. And so much of what they were experiencing was utterly strange to them (not least the weather!). Yet there was no question that when they were with us they were at home among their spiritual family.
I suspect too that there are some in the congregation here this morning who, when they first came to Canada, found a number of our customs—things that seem perfectly normal to us—strange and mystifying.
In many ways, entering the world of the New Testament and meeting with the believers there is much the same. Some translation is required—and I am not speaking just from Greek to English. I’m also thinking of the many customs that were observed in the Jewish and Roman worlds of the first century that require sometimes considerable explanation if we are to gain a proper understanding of the message of the Bible.
For example, when Jesus told his parable about the woman and her lost coin, we may not be aware that her loss would amount to more than a hundred dollars in our world of today. Or when Jesus asked a Samaritan woman for a drink (which may seem like a perfectly normal thing for us to do on a hot day), he was breaking with nearly a thousand years of open hostility.
Well, welcome to the churches in Galatia in the middle of the first century—in the midst of a culture about as far removed as any in our world today. If we are to gain a proper understanding of the message the apostle Paul was seeking to get across to them, we will need to go behind his words to delve into the cultural background that underlies them. So let’s turn to Galatians 3:23-29 and see what we can learn from these verses and how we can apply it to our lives today.
The Pedagogue
When you read the opening verse of this morning’s passage, it appears that Paul has a very negative view of the Old Testament. “We were held captive under the law,” he says, “imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.” It sounds as though the people of Old Testament times had been languishing in some kind of dark dungeon for fifteen hundred years.
And there are lots of people today who share that point of view about the Old Testament. On more than one occasion I have heard someone say to me, “I don’t like reading the Old Testament. It’s all about sin and punishment. I much prefer to read Jesus’ words about love and peace in the New Testament.” I don’t like to remind them that Jesus spoke about hell and judgement in some of the most vivid and frightening terms in the Bible. Just think of the parable of the rich man who ended up in anguish in hell and pleaded for Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool his tongue (Luke 16:19-31) or Jesus’ warnings to be careful not to be thrown into hell “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44).
But I want to say that it was never Paul’s intention to be critical of the Old Testament. In fact, in the course of his thirteen letters Paul references the Torah forty-five times. He quotes from the prophets fifty-three times. And he draws from the psalms twenty-three times. Indeed, his reverence for the Old Testament scriptures comes out in the next verse of this morning’s passage. There he speaks of them as “our guardian until Christ came”.
Now the word our Bibles translates as “guardian” is has a very specific meaning. Elsewhere it is translated “guide” (1 Corinthians 4:15) and it refers to a servant whose duty was to conduct a boy to and from school, to teach him manners, and when necessary to inflict punishment. However, the guardian was not the child’s teacher. His role was simply to bring his charge to the teacher.
These guardians (the technical term was “pedagogues”) were often known for their harshness and strict discipline. Yet the fact is that many developed life-long relationships with their charges. Whatever the case, however, their duties came to an end when the boy reached the age of maturity.[1]
Paul recognized this fact. And he recruited it as a perfect image for the role of the Old Testament. Like the guardian who did not teach his charge, so the Old Testament cannot bring us to salvation. But through its stories and instruction about righteousness and sin, it brings us to the point where we can recognize our need for salvation and, more specifically, our need for a Saviour.
I rather like the way Eugene Petersen put verses 23 to 25 in The Message:
Until the time when we were mature enough to respond freely in faith to the living God, we were carefully surrounded and protected by the Mosaic law. The law was like those Greek tutors … who escort children to school and protect them from danger or distraction, making sure the children will really get to the place they set out for. But now you have arrived at your destination…
The Toga
That was Paul’s first picture: the pedagogue responsible for bringing a child to his tutor. Paul’s second picture was another that was familiar to everyone living in the Roman Empire of the first century. And it was this:
In ancient Roman culture when a boy reached an age of somewhere around sixteen, he was considered to have entered maturity. Until that time he would always have been dressed in a child’s toga. Then, in a solemn family ceremony, he would discard the toga of his childhood and it would be replaced with the pure white toga of adulthood. From that day on, wherever he went, whatever he did, everyone would recognize him as a man.
Now we can’t be altogether sure about all the details involved in baptism in New Testament times—whether it was by immersion or sprinkling, whether it was in standing water or running water as some insisted, whether or not candidates removed their outer garments, and a host of other details.
However, we do know that very early on in the tradition of the church—and very much like the tradition of the toga—the newly baptized, on coming up out of the water, would be clothed in a white robe. That white robe was a visible reminder that Jesus had taken away the stain of their sins. More powerfully still, it was a dramatic anticipation of the day when they would join with that great crowd that we meet with in the book of Revelation—“the multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7:9-10)
Whatever the case, just as the young man of Roman times put on his adult toga, so you and I through faith have put on Christ. Elsewhere Paul writes about our calling to attain to maturity, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” (Ephesians 4:13-15)
So it is that part of our calling in Christ is a challenge to spiritual maturity. When I was a very young Christian, a popular book that was doing the rounds had the title In Understanding Be Men. The title was based on the old King James Version of 1 Corinthians 14:20, which in our more contemporary translation of the Bible runs like this: “Brothers and sisters, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.”
What are the marks of a mature faith? I think the best list was given to us by Paul himself. He calls them the fruit of the Spirit, and we will come to them in a few weeks in our study of Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. And if I could add a tenth, it would be humility: never to make the mistake of thinking we have arrived, that there is no more room for personal growth in our lives, but to keep on maturing in our faith—seeking to love Jesus and others more and more day by day.
The Church
So far Paul has focused on faith from an individual perspective. It is as though we have been looking at the individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle spread out across the table. Now in the last two verses Paul fits all those pieces together. And what emerges?
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.
It is a glorious picture. Suddenly all the things that once seemed to make a difference and had the potential of dividing us pale into insignificance: nationality, status, gender… And no doubt Paul (and you and I) could continue the list: age, political persuasion, education, tattoos, musical preferences and a whole host of other things that differentiate us and could easily cause us to drift apart or even drive wedges between us. But our unity in Christ is far more valuable, infinitely more precious than any of those things.
I wonder how many of you are familiar with the law of entropy in physics. The law of entropy states that when left alone in its natural state, everything tends to greater and greater disorder. I had a friend who used to talk about the law of spiritual entropy. That is, when left to itself, everything in the church tends to greater and greater disorder—and sometimes even to outright hostility!
The challenge for you and for me is, that if we are to avoid that spiritual entropy, if we are to be the community that Paul is describing for us in these verses in Galatians, it takes commitment and it takes hard work. We can’t be satisfied just to be pew warmers.
Unfortunately, the way our church building is structured (and most church buildings for that matter) it looks as though the great majority of us are an audience, with a few performers on the stage. Well, in my Anglican tradition, the area of the church where you are sitting right now is called the nave. It sounds a lot like navy, doesn’t it? That’s because the two words are related. “Nave” means “ship”. And in olden days, long before engines or even sails were invented, ships were powered by oars. And that’s where you come in! You are the oarsmen. You are the ones who are meant to be powering the ship.
Now I know that there are already an awful lot of people putting in an awful lot of sweat to keep this ship moving ahead. (In fact sometimes I worry that some of them are going to burn themselves out!) But let’s each ask ourselves, “How can I use the gifts that God has given me to help make this church the Christ-honouring community that God is calling us to be—where people looking in from the outside say, ‘See how they love one another!’ and yearn to come in?” This was the kind of church that Paul was yearning for in Galatia. And this is the kind of church that the world is yearning for today.
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