Galatians 6: (1-6), 7-16

It’s choose your own preaching adventure this week in Galatians 6:(1-6), 7-16. The lectionary gives us two distinct sections. You can try to chart a path that covers both, but I suggest making a homiletical decision to focus either on the community-building and exhortation of 1-10 or on verses 11-16 as a wrap up of what may have been a series on Galatians.

Perhaps you’re near the end of several weeks in Galatians and this point is moot, but whenever I preach Galatians, I spend a bit of time on the letter’s context. Our passage this week makes more sense if we’re aware of the alternative gospel message that has been presented to the Galatians after Paul initially led the Christ-followers there. I’ve found framing the context of Paul’s points within the letter helpful for preaching. (If you want to consider this further, I recommend Douglas A. Campbell’s works, Quest for Paul’s Gospel and Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography. His work made reading Paul’s letters come alive in a new way, and my preaching of them was improved as well.)

The first section (and I’m including the parenthetical verses from the lectionary) covers Gal. 6: 1-10. In this section, Paul addresses several topics that are deeply relevant to today’s church. The locus of attention in Galatians is aimed at how the community should live its life together, and, more particularly, how the people should respond to those who are in error. The Galatians seem to have taken the Teachers’ instruction on a mature application of the law and applied it by setting themselves apart from other believers (J. Louis Martyn, Galatians, Anchor Bible Series). Instead of maintaining community, they adopted a posture of superiority and exclusion. Paul raises issues of humility and directs the community in how to restore people instead of look down on them. As commentator Charles Cousar writes,

Paul is saying to a community which has experienced the life giving presence of the Spirit and is contemplating circumcision in order to be faithful to the law, ‘Look! Take seriously your life in the Spirit. If you let the Spirit direct your behavior, you will be led to restore brothers and sisters in Christ who have fallen away. Then, as you share their burdens, you really will be fulfilling the law — the law of Christ’ (Galatians, Interpretation Series).

As we preach this message in our contexts, we should look for the pressing situations that may need this sort of reminder. Perhaps you’re speaking to people who are about to leave on a mission trip and can remind them that helping others does damage to us when we allow it to make us feel superior. Furthermore, all of us interact with people on a regular basis who lead us to feel either good or bad about ourselves. In this passage, comparison is problematic if it is framed by the ways of the Flesh (as opposed to the Spirit) or if it leads to a sense of superiority or discord within the community. As J. Louis Martyn puts it in his commentary, Paul here calls for restoration that is devoid of any lasting stigma. Perhaps this text can frame a powerful message about ways your community can enact reconciliation instead of punishment when someone falls outside community expectations. Or, spend time unpacking what it might mean to have those in your midst lose the stigma that haunts them elsewhere. In order to cultivate this type of community, Paul urges the Galatians (and us) to listen to the Spirit that will provide the criteria to determine transgressions (Spiritual transgressions rather than the law transgressions of the teachers), and the general litmus test is whether things build or destroy community.

For us, we must not neglect the important role of restoring others who have transgressed the community-understood expectations, and in doing so we must also avoid feeling superior because we are the one calling others back through reconciliation and restoration practices. The closest example in my experience is with my children or students. I cannot neglect correcting my children if they treat others unkindly, but at the same time, our relationship is such that I certainly cannot feel superior by catching them at some misstep since that reflects on me as well. The same is true with my students. If my Intro to Theology students don’t know basic doctrinal terms when they are in Church History class, then that reflects badly on me. Paul understands the way Christians are to carry each other’s burdens in this way. We are both obligated to carry the burden and to work that other person towards restoration, but it is not an occasion to feel superior. Rather, it calls for humility because the community is so intricately linked together that when one fails or transgresses, the whole community is less whole and holy.

Galatians 6:11-16 is about Paul’s closing argument vis-à-vis the Teachers Paul has opposed throughout the letter. It puts forward the clear difference between Paul’s motivations and the Teachers’. It also reiterates the implications of abandoning the true free gospel of Christ for continued reliance in the law. But Paul doesn’t miss the chance to frame the Teachers as more concerned with saving their own necks. It is likely that Paul and any others who sought to bring gentiles into the fold would have groups of purists angry with them. If the Teachers can report making Jewish proselytes, then that is a far easier report than spreading the message to what would be seen as outsiders in more than just belief but ethnicity/race as well. Paul offers the rebuke that New Creation is everything—that is, living out your new identity and moral life in Christ and through the Spirit instead of holding onto the old frame of gender, ethnicity, and class (those often-invoked categories from 3:28—male and female, Greek or Jew, slave or free).

If you choose to focus primarily on vv. 11-16, then you have the opportunity here to point to ways that we as humans are drawn to the safety of “back up plans” like the Teachers who are really trying to preach Christ but hold on to the law so they aren’t rejected back in Jerusalem. We are often tempted with these sorts of compromises that aren’t chosen for the right reasons of maintaining community, but rather of saving face. Not all compromise is virtuous, and Paul can launch you into a sermon about the implications of doing and seeing things for the right reasons and in the right ways (those being through the lenses of Christ and the Holy Spirit).

The main link I can see in this second section (11-16) with what comes before it is a message about humility, pride, and relativism from the earlier material with Paul’s final claims about his own boasting being in Christ’s cross (not the other barometers of success, goodness, faithfulness, etc.). Preach well, friends.