Galatians, Paul’s angry letter. It begins!
Luke 7:11-17; Galatians 1:11-24; Psalm 30; 1 Kings 17:17-24
I absolutely love the letter to the Galatians. And not just because I’m a Lutheran pastor, and a good deal of Luther’s teaching comes out of Galatians. And not even just because my name sounds vaguely like Galatia. No, I like it because Paul is straight up angry. And if you haven’t notice Paul’s anger in this letter, you either need to read it again or find a better translation.
The letter of Galatians starts out: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel – which is really no gospel at all.” That’s the first thing Paul says after, “Hi I’m Paul, I’m an apostle, and God says Hi, too”. It just gets better from there, too. “Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned”. And then he repeats himself just to be sure the readers heard him. All that is in the first 10 verses. He’s going to spend the rest of the letter either talking about what exactly the gospel is, or berating the Galatians for not following it.
But why would Paul be so forceful in writing this letter but not in the rest? Well when it comes down to it, there is reasonably good evidence for the letter to Galatians being Paul’s first. At least, the first one that we still have copies of floating around. Knowing his background as a Pharisee, that we read today as our first lesson, it’s a little understandable that he’ll be, for lack of a better word, zealous. His passion for the God’s law had shifted to a passion for God’s grace. I really don’t think he was any less passionate a Christian as a Pharisee, in fact I think he was a much more passionate Christian.
But then God “called [him] by … grace”, and everything changed. He’s very clear on what changed. It wasn’t anything that came from another person. He wasn’t even doing anything so that people would like him or make them happy. No, he sees himself now as God’s servant.
In a sense, after his conversion he died and was given new life. Paul mentions this in other places, or at least something very similar. He died to sin and lives in Christ. I guess you could almost say he had a kind of resurrection experience. Not at all the same kind of resurrection as Christ, and not even the same kind as the people in our Old Testament lesson or Gospel, but something more like a spiritual resurrection.
I mean isn’t that really what becoming a Christian is all about? We go along living our lives focused on ourselves. We act in ways that don’t really pay all that much attention to God. But then, we find ourselves at a point where, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we change our focus. We stop living for ourselves and start living for God. We stop trying to please people, but instead try and please God.
God calls us to share the gospel – the simple message that nothing we do can earn our own salvation, but that it is the gift of God in Jesus Christ. Curiously enough, the first thing Paul did when he experienced God’s grace was to tell people about it in Damascus. Sad to say, that wasn’t the first thing I did when I finally understood grace, but I kind of wish it was. But that seems to be the pattern in Scripture: God does something amazing that no one really expected, and people spread the news. Seems like a good thing to me.