Now That Jesus Has Come – Galatians 3

A text – Galatians 3:23-29

²³ Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. ²⁴ Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be reckoned as righteous by faith. ²⁵ But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, ²⁶ for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. ²⁷ As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸ There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹ And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

A reflection:

Paul is using the word “faith” as interchangeable with the name of Jesus. For example, verse 23: “Now before Jesus came…” or verse 25: “But now that Jesus has come…” That got me to wondering whether the Jews, living for centuries under the law, ever had to have “faith” in anything. Were they used to believing in something or someone? Or was the law just a fact that they lived under, without “faith” or “belief” coming into it at all. If the latter was the case, how different it must have felt to the disciples and the other first believers to hear words like this: “We had the law as our disciplinarian until Jesus came, and now that we know Jesus, we are automatic heirs of God’s kingdom, no matter who we are.”

If the Jews of Jesus’s day lived under the law as a fact of life and as a disciplinarian of their morals and behavior, and then Jesus arrived, fulfilling that law and changing God’s Last Will and Testament to make all who believed Jesus to be Lord into heirs of God’s kingdom, well then the leaders of Judaism would sort of be basically unemployed. Or they could let go of what they studied and did and taught, since those things were now superfluous. They were not needed to teach and then enforce the law, they were not needed to make distinctions between what is good and bad, or among people (Jews, Greeks, men, women, slave, free). What they had devoted their lives to was something Paul is saying the faithful “are no longer subject to. ..Now that Jesus has come…”

Is it any wonder that the leaders of the practice of Judaism found themselves opposing Jesus? No wonder Nicodemus had such a lot of trouble comprehending Jesus in his nighttime visit. If the Son of God loved him, and if the Son of God told him that all people, regardless of race or gender or status, were already beloved children of God, wouldn’t that be difficult to believe? It challenged everything. It made his own activity irrelevant to his salvation, too. His being saved was an act of God, not his own doing. We humans like to do things for ourselves, but instead we are the receivers of God’s grace, not our own. “Now that Jesus has come…” Now it doesn’t matter which body we have, which language we have, and which facts we know. We are inheritors of God’s kingdom…now that Jesus has come…

A prayer:

Lord God, thank you for loving us. Thank you for making us heirs of your kingdom. Help us always to remember that you have saved us and given us the promise of eternal life with you, no matter what. Help us not to rely on our own work but on your work on our behalf. Amen.