Psalm 6
OT Reading: Hosea 10.1-8, 12
NT Reading: Galatians 4.8-20
At a time when it is difficult to find anything to celebrate in the news, it is perhaps appropriate to be faced with Bible readings which don’t offer much comfort either. Hosea was prophesying in the northern kingdom of Israel in the decades leading up to their utter defeat at the hands of the Assyrians, who besieged Samaria in 722 BC. There had been prosperity – Israel is a luxuriant vine, we read – but the people of Israel had abandoned their faith in the true God – the more his fruit increased, the more altars he built, and pillars – standing stones we would call them – to false gods. Beth-el was the house of God, but the prophet accuses them of frequenting Beth-aven, the house of the devil, whose high places would be destroyed by the rampaging Assyrians, leaving the defeated people of Israel to plow and harrow for themselves.
Nevertheless, even as Hosea is prophesying disaster, he goes on to plead with the people to
Sow for yourselves righteousness;
reap steadfast love;
break up your fallow ground;
for it is time to seek the Lord,
that he may come and rain
righteousness upon you.
There is always good news, even in the worst of times, for those who will seek the Lord. As we were reminded in the psalm, which was also sung as our Introit, the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping, the Lord has heard my supplication, the Lord accepts my prayer.
Judging by the scolding tone of Paul’s letter, the situation in the Galatian church community is not much better. In preaching the gospel to them, he has set them free from the tyranny of the pagan idols whose priests had made all sort of demands on them. As followers of Jesus, Paul had taught them that they were free from such demands, free to respond to the liberating love of God, like a flower opening in the sunshine; and what have they done with their new freedom? They have allowed themselves to be dragooned into observing a whole raft of Jewish laws, imposed upon them by the Jewish leaders of the community, who continued to follow their own religious practices. As a practising Jew himself, Paul has no problem with Jewish Christians continuing to observe Jewish law, if that is what they feel called to do, but he is firmly opposed to the burdens of such observance being imposed on his Gentile converts to Christianity, particularly if the pressure to conform includes circumcision. He reminds his Jewish friends about Abraham himself, the father of their faith, one of whose two children,
born to Hagar his slave, is cast out of the family, whilst the other – Isaac – born to Sara the free woman, becomes the progenitor of the House of Israel. One road leads to slavery, the other to the freedom of the people of God. What will they choose?
Paul goes on to insist that for Christians the Jewish ritual of circumcision is not essential. The only thing that really counts is faith working through love, symbolised by what he calls the offence of the cross. In the first chapter of this year’s Lent book, God With Us, Rowan Williams reminds us how startlingly offensive the Cross was – in Paul’s time – as a religious symbol. On the filthy outskirts of every city, the crosses of the crucified were an ugly reminder of every malefactor’s wrongdoing and his excruciating penalty. If you wanted to give expression to your devotion, and perhaps more particularly if you wanted others to be aware of your religious devotion, the punctilious observance of religious ritual and ceremonies was a much more comfortable way of making your statement than pointing to the cross, which for most people was symbolic of the worst excesses of criminal behaviour and depravity. A cross was the last thing you would expect to embrace. Paul is not iconoclastic. He is himself faithful to the religious practices of Judaism in which he was brought up. But he warns his Galatian converts – and us – not to lose the plot, not to confuse the outward forms of religious observance with the inner truth of devotion to Jesus, whose own devotion was symbolized by the Cross on which he was put to death.
We are called, Paul says, not to shoulder a burden of punctilious observance of religious rules and regulations, but rather to rejoice in the freedom to practice the one thing which really matters, the freedom to fulfil the central purpose of the law by becoming, through love, slaves to one another. The whole law, he says, is summed up in a single commandment: You shall love your neighbour as yourself (Galatians 5.14).
That of course would have been familiar territory to Paul’s Jewish converts in Galatia, and they might well have sighed as perhaps we do, faced with the prospect of giving practical expression to that law. But Paul goes on to suggest a new way forward. We are to live not by the flesh but by the Spirit. That is to say, when we have choices about what to do with our time or our money, we should give less priority to what we are to eat and drink, what we might buy to hang on the wall, where we might go on holiday this year, and more to what the Spirit might nudge us to do to spread love and joy, peace and kindness among our friends and neighbours. That is something we can all ponder and act upon, both as individuals and as a church community, so I’m going to stop there, and allow a few moments for us all to think prayerfully about how we might better give expression to our love for one another and for our neighbours in the coming week.