5 June – The gift

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Pentecost 3
5/6/2016

Galatians 1:6-24
Psalm 146
Luke 7:11-17


“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel!”

Paul has an issue he wants to sort out with the church in Galatia!

And yet, before dealing with this, he feels that he has to defend himself:

“For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

No less than 6 times in the first chapter of the book Paul insists that his apostolic vocation is not something of human origin but is a sending by God through a direct revelation of Jesus Christ. He has to defend himself in part because his proclamation of the gospel itself is challenged, and in part because his status as an apostle was questioned.

In response, Paul reasserts both the content of what he believes and his authority in the matter. But the important point for today is that these are not two separate things, but are inextricably linked. What Paul knows cannot be separated from how he knows it, for both the knowing and the knowledge itself are matters of interruption. In contrast, the “human” method of knowing – the pleasing people of which Paul is accused – is a matter not of interruption but of continuity.

What is at stake here is how we know the things of God.

On the question of how we come to knowledge in general, the theologian-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once drew an instructive distinction between a teacher and a midwife (in Philosophical Fragments). In the learning model of the midwife, we come to knowledge of something by its already being within us, and being skilfully drawn out. As a demonstration of this Kierkegaard recounts a story in which the philosopher Socrates “draws out” from an uneducated slave boy Pythagoras’ theorem about the lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle. Without telling the boy anything, but only by asking him questions, the boy is able to deduce something akin to our familiar a2 + b2 = c2. In this way, Socrates thinks he establishes that everything we can know is already inside us, and simply needs someone or something to help it out – like the midwife helps out the baby.

Kierkegaard contrasts this midwifery acquisition of knowledge with the teacher. The teacher brings something new to the student which the student could not otherwise have known or discovered. The knowledge is not induced from the student; rather the student is, in a sense, interrupted by what the teacher brings.

Kierkegaard’s distinction is helpful because illuminates the distinction Paul draws between “from humans” and “from God.”  For Paul, what he preaches is not what we might already know, but what only God could bring through what Paul calls “a revelation of Jesus Christ”. This was for Paul himself a profound interruption of his world. It turned him from persecutor of the church to evangelist, from devout Jew to being willing to eat and work with Gentiles as a sign of the gospel.

Belief in Jesus, as a kind of knowing, springs from just such an interruption, just such a revelation.

But it is not enough to say just this. Christian faith is not related to normal knowledge merely as interruption is related to continuity. Were this the case, anything which interrupted our world could be construed as an act of God: a heart attack, the terrorist’s bomb, falling in love, a market crash, an unfaithful partner. These things are rarely true discontinuities; they are much more often just the signs of deeper continuities of which we were unaware.

The relationship between what is continuous, and so natural to us, and what interrupts because it is truly outside the possibilities of our world, is put better for faith in terms of the relationship between law and grace. More specifically, Paul’s struggle with his opponents at Galatia (or in Jerusalem) has to with the order of law and grace. Paul rejects the way these are ordered by his opponents. The specific crisis is the question of the relationship between circumcision and Jewish and Christian identity. For Paul’s opponents, circumcision is a sign to God. Paul sees it as a sign to Israel. The difference here is that, for his opponents, circumcision tells God that this people belongs to him. For Paul, it tells the people that they belong to God. Those who want to impose circumcision on Gentile Christians consider that it amplifies God’s favour whilst, for Paul, circumcision is the sign of God’s favour which comes before the sign.

Because of this different reading of circumcision, Paul is portrayed as weak, as pleasing human beings by allowing the Gentiles to avoid the inconvenience(!) of circumcision. By putting God’s grace before anything we do Paul seems to be let everyone off the hook.

Yet Paul knows his own experience: a zealous persecutor of Christ claimed by God to become Christ’s proclaimer. When he defends himself, then, he defends the gospel, because he himself is a kind of interruption, a sacrament of grace, an apostle born out of place, out of order, so far as his critics are concerned. God made Paul to become, to represent, to embody what he was to speak of.

For it is only the free who are able to set free. This is the closest thing the people of God have to a fundamental law.

Only the free are able to set free. The question then becomes, Who is free?

Paul’s answer to the Galatians is, only God.

What does this mean?

Positively, it is impossible to say because, in our experience, absolute freedom is self-contradictory. And so we place limits on freedom. We write laws which seek to constrain as much as to liberate, which indicate how deep (and no further) freedom can go. But with God freedom goes all the way down. This is what is so hard for the circumcision party to fathom: did God not command the sign of circumcision? How can God be free here? We’ll hear how Paul accounts for this in the weeks to come, but at the heart of the matter is God’s capacity to create new things, truly new things, and God’s not being bound by what is already in place, to have to draw something out of that.

What God’s sovereign freedom means negatively is a little easier to say. It means that God does not owe us anything.

It surprised me when I first wrote that. It surprised me because I realised that I (and probably you too!) tend to imagine that God does owe us something. If we make the right sacrifices the right way or, in modern terms, get the strategic plan right, or the governance oversight, or the budget, or the building, or the location, or the worship music, or the outreach program, and if we are prayerful and faithful enough (or at least, sincere), then…

It is the “then” which limits God’s freedom, which nails God down (or nails him up, as the case may be). The “then” which follows the “if” is our expectation that we can midwife something out of God, some benefit which is already there, just waiting for us to ease it into the bright day. We just have to get the angles and the timing right: Push, God… Breathe

This is not the God of the gospel. There is nothing we need to ease out of God, for God willingly gives us what we need.

When Paul says, Christ alone, he declares just this: what God gives is enough. What we do in return is just the particular form in which that gift is acknowledged: whether circumcision or uncircumcision, whether we marry or choose to remain celibate for the kingdom, whether we fast or feast, whether we worship under a spire or in hard to find catacombs.

It all begins with the gift, to which any imagined or prescribed obligation must simply point. What we do is an answer to our sense for the gift.

When this truly is the case for us then, as it was for Paul, they will glorify God because of us.

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel!”

Paul has an issue he wants to sort out with the church in Galatia!

And yet, before dealing with this, he feels that he has to defend himself:

“For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

No less than 6 times in the first chapter of the book Paul insists that his apostolic vocation is not something of human origin but is a sending by God through a direct revelation of Jesus Christ. He has to defend himself in part because his proclamation of the gospel itself is challenged, and in part because his status as an apostle was questioned.

In response, Paul reasserts both the content of what he believes and his authority in the matter. But the important point for today is that these are not two separate things, but are inextricably linked. What Paul knows cannot be separated from how he knows it, for both the knowing and the knowledge itself are matters of interruption. In contrast, the “human” method of knowing – the pleasing people of which Paul is accused – is a matter not of interruption but of continuity.

What is at stake here is how we know the things of God.

On the question of how we come to knowledge in general, the theologian-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once drew an instructive distinction between a teacher and a midwife (in Philosophical Fragments). In the learning model of the midwife, we come to knowledge of something by its already being within us, and being skilfully drawn out. As a demonstration of this Kierkegaard recounts a story in which the philosopher Socrates “draws out” from an uneducated slave boy Pythagoras’ theorem about the lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle. Without telling the boy anything, but only by asking him questions, the boy is able to deduce something akin to our familiar a2 + b2 = c2. In this way, Socrates thinks he establishes that everything we can know is already inside us, and simply needs someone or something to help it out – like the midwife helps out the baby.

Kierkegaard contrasts this midwifery acquisition of knowledge with the teacher. The teacher brings something new to the student which the student could not otherwise have known or discovered. The knowledge is not induced from the student; rather the student is, in a sense, interrupted by what the teacher brings.

Kierkegaard’s distinction is helpful because illuminates the distinction Paul draws between “from humans” and “from God.”  For Paul, what he preaches is not what we might already know, but what only God could bring through what Paul calls “a revelation of Jesus Christ”. This was for Paul himself a profound interruption of his world. It turned him from persecutor of the church to evangelist, from devout Jew to being willing to eat and work with Gentiles as a sign of the gospel.

Belief in Jesus, as a kind of knowing, springs from just such an interruption, just such a revelation.

But it is not enough to say just this. Christian faith is not related to normal knowledge merely as interruption is related to continuity. Were this the case, anything which interrupted our world could be construed as an act of God: a heart attack, the terrorist’s bomb, falling in love, a market crash, an unfaithful partner. These things are rarely true discontinuities; they are much more often just the signs of deeper continuities of which we were unaware.

The relationship between what is continuous, and so natural to us, and what interrupts because it is truly outside the possibilities of our world, is put better for faith in terms of the relationship between law and grace. More specifically, Paul’s struggle with his opponents at Galatia (or in Jerusalem) has to with the order of law and grace. Paul rejects the way these are ordered by his opponents. The specific crisis is the question of the relationship between circumcision and Jewish and Christian identity. For Paul’s opponents, circumcision is a sign to God. Paul sees it as a sign to Israel. The difference here is that, for his opponents, circumcision tells God that this people belongs to him. For Paul, it tells the people that they belong to God. Those who want to impose circumcision on Gentile Christians consider that it amplifies God’s favour whilst, for Paul, circumcision is the sign of God’s favour which comes before the sign.

Because of this different reading of circumcision, Paul is portrayed as weak, as pleasing human beings by allowing the Gentiles to avoid the inconvenience(!) of circumcision. By putting God’s grace before anything we do Paul seems to be let everyone off the hook.

Yet Paul knows his own experience: a zealous persecutor of Christ claimed by God to become Christ’s proclaimer. When he defends himself, then, he defends the gospel, because he himself is a kind of interruption, a sacrament of grace, an apostle born out of place, out of order, so far as his critics are concerned. God made Paul to become, to represent, to embody what he was to speak of.

For it is only the free who are able to set free. This is the closest thing the people of God have to a fundamental law.

Only the free are able to set free. The question then becomes, Who is free?

Paul’s answer to the Galatians is, only God.

What does this mean?

Positively, it is impossible to say because, in our experience, absolute freedom is self-contradictory. And so we place limits on freedom. We write laws which seek to constrain as much as to liberate, which indicate how deep (and no further) freedom can go. But with God freedom goes all the way down. This is what is so hard for the circumcision party to fathom: did God not command the sign of circumcision? How can God be free here? We’ll hear how Paul accounts for this in the weeks to come, but at the heart of the matter is God’s capacity to create new things, truly new things, and God’s not being bound by what is already in place, to have to draw something out of that.

What God’s sovereign freedom means negatively is a little easier to say. It means that God does not owe us anything.

It surprised me when I first wrote that. It surprised me because I realised that I (and probably you too!) tend to imagine that God does owe us something. If we make the right sacrifices the right way or, in modern terms, get the strategic plan right, or the governance oversight, or the budget, or the building, or the location, or the worship music, or the outreach program, and if we are prayerful and faithful enough (or at least, sincere), then…

It is the “then” which limits God’s freedom, which nails God down (or nails him up, as the case may be). The “then” which follows the “if” is our expectation that we can midwife something out of God, some benefit which is already there, just waiting for us to ease it into the bright day. We just have to get the angles and the timing right: Push, God… Breathe

This is not the God of the gospel. There is nothing we need to ease out of God, for God willingly gives us what we need.

When Paul says, Christ alone, he declares just this: what God gives is enough. What we do in return is just the particular form in which that gift is acknowledged: whether circumcision or uncircumcision, whether we marry or choose to remain celibate for the kingdom, whether we fast or feast, whether we worship under a spire or in hard to find catacombs.

It all begins with the gift, to which any imagined or prescribed obligation must simply point. What we do is an answer to our sense for the gift.

When this truly is the case for us then, as it was for Paul, they will glorify God because of us.