As we said in our last post on Galatians, the situation Paul is addressing in this letter is that some unnamed “teachers” have come among the Galatians lobbying for them to first embrace circumcision and other strict Jewish observances in order to be “true” followers of Christ. This is a perspective which Paul had embraced in his earlier years, but when he had encountered the message of Jesus—a message of radical inclusion—he grew to embrace a new perspective which sought to include rather than exclude.
If we reflect on the thousands of years of human history, we can see a long trajectory of bloodshed over the issue of peoples and nations trying to assert their strongly-held religious perspectives and beliefs onto others. This is what Paul had done: “You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it” (Gal. 1:13). The word translated “Judaism” (Gk., Ioudaismos, extremely rare in this period), signals that Paul was formerly engaged in a particularly devout and passionate form of loyalty to Jewish tradition.[1]
Paul was a great religious rule-keeper—and he knew it. He’d spent years seeking to live according to the Jewish customs and traditions, but it hadn’t made him right with God. When it comes to being a good Jew and observing Jewish laws and practices, Paul is saying: I’ve already been there and done that! You can’t make yourself acceptable to God by the most zealous and detailed following of any moral, ethical, or cultural rules. Paul’s story is a powerful witness to the beating heart of Christianity—the good news of God’s grace. We might also call it the good news of creative transformation.
Grace is the free, unmerited favor of God, working powerfully on the mind and heart to creatively transform us. There is no clearer example than Paul that salvation is by grace alone, not through moral and religious performance. Though Paul’s sins were very deep, he was invited in.
No one is so good that they don’t need God’s creative transformation, nor so bad that they can’t receive it. Paul needed transformation. Paul was deeply flawed, yet he could be transformed by the gospel—and he was!
As Paul looks back, he can recognize that God’s transformation was working in his life long before his actual change of mind and heart. When Paul says God “set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace” (v 15), he means that God had been shaping and preparing him all his life for the things God was going to call him to do.
How astonishing! Paul was fashioning God out of his own imagination and doing it all wrong, but God was using Paul's experiences and even Paul's failures to fashion Paul into God’s instrument for building Christ-communities.
As Tom Ehrich writes:
We know the God whom we fashion of our own limitations. But the God of infinite love and mercy remains a stranger—until we, too, need that God. In that moment—when we feel small and defeated, worthless and unloved—we discover a God who is our best friend, our steadfast companion, our lover. And more and more.
Human language runs out. Even our parallels and metaphors fail to grasp the one who alone can restore our lives … and make us more than we ever imagined being.
If we know that God is always tantalizing each of us toward the most creative ways of “living, moving, and having our being” in the world, we can trust that God’s attraction is authentic for others in ways that differ from our own. The good news gives us a pair of eyeglasses through which we can review our own lives and the lives of those who differ from us and see God preparing and shaping us all to become networks of God's grace and transformation in the world.
This is where Paul lands. He isn’t like those Christians who, many years ago, wore buttons or displayed bumper stickers that announced, “I found it!”---as if they could reduce the mystery of divine creativity to the “it” they found! But even more troublesome, the slogan ignored the God who comes looking for lost humankind in Jesus Christ. The line from the popular hymn “Amazing Grace” is instructive: “I once was lost, but now am found.” Grace finds us.
Paul isn’t saying, “Look at me, aren’t I great?” but, “Look at how great the gospel is: it is the power of God to transform life!”[2] Paul affirmed the Galatians as being people who were found by the love of God as non-Jews; they needn’t be forced into becoming something that they are not in order to be considered to be “for real” in their faith journey.
The truth is that the real God loves us simply because God loves us. The real God effortlessly transforms us from what we were into all we can be simply because it pleases God. All we need to do is let God fashion us into people who know that…
To love means loving the unlovable [like us].
To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable [like us].
Faith means believing the unbelievable.
Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
This is creative transformation. This is God’s “amazing grace.”
