Daily Verse Galatians 2:20 | Verse of the day Image by Youversion | bible.com
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A well-known story is told of Margaret Thatcher during the time she was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She was visiting an old people’s home, going from room to room and meeting senior citizens who had lived there a long time. One old lady showed no sign of realizing that she was shaking hands with a world-famous politician. ‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Mrs Thatcher. ‘No, dear,’ replied the old lady, ‘but I should ask the nurse if I were you. She usually knows.’
It is a strange idea to most of us, but for some a very necessary one: that you might begin again from scratch to learn who you are. That is precisely what people who have suffered severe memory loss need to do. It is what people who have suffered other kinds of loss also need to do: the refugee without home, country or family is but one example. And it’s precisely this sort of exercise, losing one identity and reconstructing another, that Paul is explaining in this dense and complex passage.
This is where he really gets to grips with the underlying issues between himself and the ‘troublemakers’. It isn’t a matter of a few twists and turns in the interpretation of the gospel, or for that matter of the Jewish law. It isn’t simply about one style of missionary policy as against another. It is a matter of who you are in the Messiah. It’s as basic as that. Paul’s head-on clash with Peter in Antioch was about Christian identity. His passionate appeal to the Galatians is about their Christian identity.
Often Paul’s dense paragraphs, like this one, yield their secrets if you approach them from near the end, where he sums everything up in a single great climactic statement. In this case it is verses 19b–20: ‘I have been crucified with the Messiah!—I am alive, however, but it isn’t me; it’s the Messiah, living in me! And what about the life I continue to live in this mortal flesh? Well, that is lived by the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’ This is the heart of Paul’s argument. One must lose everything, including the memory of who one was before; and one must accept, and learn to live by, a new identity, with a new foundation.
The question Paul and Peter have run into, which was focused on whether Jewish and Gentile Christians were allowed to eat at the same table, is the question: who is God’s true Israel? Who are the true people of God? Is it all who belong to the Messiah? Or is it only Jewish Christians (including proselytes, i.e., Gentiles who have converted to Judaism), with Gentile Christians remaining second-class citizens?
Paul focuses his answer on the most basic point of all. God’s true Israel consists of one person: the Messiah. He is the faithful one. He is the true Israelite. This is the foundation of identity within God’s people.
The question then becomes: who belongs to the Messiah? How is that identity expressed?
Paul answers this with one of his most famous beliefs, which remains difficult for modern Western minds to come to terms with. Those who belong to the Messiah are in the Messiah, so that what is true of him is true of them. The roots of this idea are in the Jewish beliefs about the king. The king represents his people (think of David fighting Goliath, representing Israel against the Philistines); what is true of him is true of them. The present paragraph doesn’t spell this out; it assumes it. Paul will return to it in more detail later on. His point here is quite simple: all who are ‘in the Messiah’ are the true people of God. And that means Gentiles as well as Jews.
He speaks of himself, as a Jew who had become a Christian, to make the point. We Jews, he says, even though we were born into the covenant family, do not now find our real identity as God’s people through the things which mark us out as a distinctive people—that is, through the Jewish law. If we believe that Jesus is the Messiah (and without that there is no Christianity), we believe that the crucified Jesus is the Messiah. And if we are ‘in’ the crucified Jesus, that means that our previous identities are irrelevant. They are to be forgotten. We are no longer defined by possession of the law, or by its detailed requirements that set Jew over against Gentile. ‘I died to the law, that I might live to God.’ We must now learn who we are in a whole new way.
Who then are we? We are the Messiah’s people, with his life now at work in us. And, since the central thing about him is his loving faithfulness, the central thing about us, the only thing in fact that defines us, is our own loving faithfulness, the glad response of faith to the God who has sent his son to die for us. This is the very heart of Christian identity.
The words Paul uses as his shorthand for Christian identity, for belonging to God’s family, are usually translated ‘righteous’ and ‘righteousness’. This English word has different meanings to different people. For Paul, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is related to God’s promise to Abraham, now fulfilled in the Messiah, that God would create a single worldwide family, whose identity-marker would be faith. And it speaks of the family identity, the status of covenant membership, which God gives to all his family, to all who believe the gospel. Out beyond that, it speaks gloriously of God’s saving justice embracing and healing the whole unjust world, and rescuing in the present those men, women and children who trust his love revealed in Jesus. This is the people who are ‘declared righteous’, or ‘justified’.
The point of it all, here in Galatians, is quite simple. Paul was demonstrating to Peter that even Jewish Christians have lost their old identity, defined by the law, and have come into a new identity, defined only by the Messiah.
This doesn’t mean, as he says in verses 17–18, that by losing Jewish identity we are ‘sinners’, as the Jews had regarded the Gentiles. On the contrary, if like Peter you reconstruct the wall between Jews and Gentiles, all you achieve is to prove that you yourself are a lawbreaker. If the law is what really matters, then look out: you’ve broken it!
But the law isn’t now the thing that matters. ‘If righteousness (covenant membership, justification) came by the Jewish law, then the Messiah wouldn’t have needed to die.’ To have separate tables within the church is to spurn the generous love of the Messiah. One of the marks of Jesus’ public career was open table-fellowship. God intends it to be a mark of Jesus’ people from that day to this.
Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 24–27.
It is a strange idea to most of us, but for some a very necessary one: that you might begin again from scratch to learn who you are. That is precisely what people who have suffered severe memory loss need to do. It is what people who have suffered other kinds of loss also need to do: the refugee without home, country or family is but one example. And it’s precisely this sort of exercise, losing one identity and reconstructing another, that Paul is explaining in this dense and complex passage.
This is where he really gets to grips with the underlying issues between himself and the ‘troublemakers’. It isn’t a matter of a few twists and turns in the interpretation of the gospel, or for that matter of the Jewish law. It isn’t simply about one style of missionary policy as against another. It is a matter of who you are in the Messiah. It’s as basic as that. Paul’s head-on clash with Peter in Antioch was about Christian identity. His passionate appeal to the Galatians is about their Christian identity.
Often Paul’s dense paragraphs, like this one, yield their secrets if you approach them from near the end, where he sums everything up in a single great climactic statement. In this case it is verses 19b–20: ‘I have been crucified with the Messiah!—I am alive, however, but it isn’t me; it’s the Messiah, living in me! And what about the life I continue to live in this mortal flesh? Well, that is lived by the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’ This is the heart of Paul’s argument. One must lose everything, including the memory of who one was before; and one must accept, and learn to live by, a new identity, with a new foundation.
The question Paul and Peter have run into, which was focused on whether Jewish and Gentile Christians were allowed to eat at the same table, is the question: who is God’s true Israel? Who are the true people of God? Is it all who belong to the Messiah? Or is it only Jewish Christians (including proselytes, i.e., Gentiles who have converted to Judaism), with Gentile Christians remaining second-class citizens?
Paul focuses his answer on the most basic point of all. God’s true Israel consists of one person: the Messiah. He is the faithful one. He is the true Israelite. This is the foundation of identity within God’s people.
The question then becomes: who belongs to the Messiah? How is that identity expressed?
Paul answers this with one of his most famous beliefs, which remains difficult for modern Western minds to come to terms with. Those who belong to the Messiah are in the Messiah, so that what is true of him is true of them. The roots of this idea are in the Jewish beliefs about the king. The king represents his people (think of David fighting Goliath, representing Israel against the Philistines); what is true of him is true of them. The present paragraph doesn’t spell this out; it assumes it. Paul will return to it in more detail later on. His point here is quite simple: all who are ‘in the Messiah’ are the true people of God. And that means Gentiles as well as Jews.
He speaks of himself, as a Jew who had become a Christian, to make the point. We Jews, he says, even though we were born into the covenant family, do not now find our real identity as God’s people through the things which mark us out as a distinctive people—that is, through the Jewish law. If we believe that Jesus is the Messiah (and without that there is no Christianity), we believe that the crucified Jesus is the Messiah. And if we are ‘in’ the crucified Jesus, that means that our previous identities are irrelevant. They are to be forgotten. We are no longer defined by possession of the law, or by its detailed requirements that set Jew over against Gentile. ‘I died to the law, that I might live to God.’ We must now learn who we are in a whole new way.
Who then are we? We are the Messiah’s people, with his life now at work in us. And, since the central thing about him is his loving faithfulness, the central thing about us, the only thing in fact that defines us, is our own loving faithfulness, the glad response of faith to the God who has sent his son to die for us. This is the very heart of Christian identity.
The words Paul uses as his shorthand for Christian identity, for belonging to God’s family, are usually translated ‘righteous’ and ‘righteousness’. This English word has different meanings to different people. For Paul, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is related to God’s promise to Abraham, now fulfilled in the Messiah, that God would create a single worldwide family, whose identity-marker would be faith. And it speaks of the family identity, the status of covenant membership, which God gives to all his family, to all who believe the gospel. Out beyond that, it speaks gloriously of God’s saving justice embracing and healing the whole unjust world, and rescuing in the present those men, women and children who trust his love revealed in Jesus. This is the people who are ‘declared righteous’, or ‘justified’.
The point of it all, here in Galatians, is quite simple. Paul was demonstrating to Peter that even Jewish Christians have lost their old identity, defined by the law, and have come into a new identity, defined only by the Messiah.
This doesn’t mean, as he says in verses 17–18, that by losing Jewish identity we are ‘sinners’, as the Jews had regarded the Gentiles. On the contrary, if like Peter you reconstruct the wall between Jews and Gentiles, all you achieve is to prove that you yourself are a lawbreaker. If the law is what really matters, then look out: you’ve broken it!
But the law isn’t now the thing that matters. ‘If righteousness (covenant membership, justification) came by the Jewish law, then the Messiah wouldn’t have needed to die.’ To have separate tables within the church is to spurn the generous love of the Messiah. One of the marks of Jesus’ public career was open table-fellowship. God intends it to be a mark of Jesus’ people from that day to this.
Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 24–27.