Answering Faith: A Guide to Galatians With N.t. WrightSampl

At the same time as Paul makes a customary closing, all too easily read as a pithy, spiritualized encouragement, he is also making a forceful summary of his entire argument. He stresses, in a short fashion, the three main points of his whole letter.

1) Israel’s God has done what was always promised and launched New Creation. The cross is the cosmic turning point of history, mapping exactly onto the expectations of Israel.

2) Messiah Jesus fulfills the divine purposes in his death and resurrection, accomplishing the New Exodus and New Creation. This is dramatic and vital. We are not in some sort of limbo between the old and new. We are in the overlap of the ages, where the new has broken in and is reshaping everything around itself, through the activity of the spirit in the people of God.

3) God gives God’s own spirit to the Messiah people as transformative energy, an advanced gift from the promised inheritance. The ending of the old world and the beginning of the new is expressed generally in the work of the Messiah and expressed personally in Paul’s double crucifixion (to the world, and the world to him). In this way, Paul sees himself as representative of members of the Messiah community.

A final remark. Verse 16 is often translated as something like, ‘Peace and mercy upon those who follow this rule, and on God’s Israel’. That ‘and’ is most likely intensive continuing a comment on the group already mentioned, rather than additive, marking out a second group. It is a further claim that the readers are, in fact, part of God’s chosen people, the in-Messiah people, who belong to God through faith and baptism, enlivened by the spirit. If that is true, nothing should tear this family apart.

A church community formed by Galatians will have Jesus at its centre, practicing a unity whereby all people proclaiming membership in the Messiah by faith and baptism belong at the communal table, regardless of background. Our task is to teach and model a church, rooted in the promises of the Old Testament, but radically focused on the cross, such that the transition brought about by Jesus is a dramatic but expected enlargement of God’s family.

Reflection:

What are the boxes you’ve felt pressured to check in order to belong to the family of Jesus? What boxes have you pressured others to check?

What does it mean to live in the overlap of the ages? Are there any ways in which you are still living as if in the Old Age that needs to be made new?