Hi All, I typed this out from Fleming Rutledge's book that I'm reading. It will have typo's!!!
This meditation is based on the third chapter of Galatians which was just read to you. It is rarely heard in the church, and rarely preached on - because of its complexity? Or because it is tough to take? At any rate, it is one of the central texts for understanding the crucifixion. Like so many of the passengers in Paul's letters, it is a conception of great originality and penetrates to the heart of what is happening on Good Friday. Let us hear the central portion again:
All who rely on works of the law are under a curse, for it is written, "cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and to do them."
Focus for a moment on just one sentence. All those who are seeking justification by works of the law are under a curse. What are works of the law? Basically, works of the law are works that are
commanded by God - godly works, moral works, righteous works, the best works that we can think of - good deeds, as we say. Now listen to Paul's words again: "all those who are seeking
justification by works of the law are under a curse." That is the most radical utterance ever uttered - I'm quite serious - and the Epistle to the Galatians is the most radical writing ever produced. Perhaps you can sense why. If St Paul is truly saying that you rely on God's own commandments is to be under a curse, what becomes of morality? What becomes of godliness? Indeed, what becomes of religion?
Now in the congregation at Galatia there were many who were preaching and teaching the justification was available only through works of the law. What is the meaning of this word justification? It may sound technical and for bidding, but it isn't really. We readily use it today and a question like, how are you going to justify what you just did? That is, how are you going to demonstrate that you are in the right? That's what sets steak, for the Galatian Christians and for us. Think about yourself for a minute. What do you rely on in order to prove to yourself and others that you are a worthy human being? What do you count on to clear yourself from judgement, whether the judgement of your own conscious or the judgement of those parental voices that still lie in the back of our psych even though our parents have been dead for decades, or the judgement of our peers and our families and our growing children, or, for that matter, the final judgement of God? What do you count on to clear yourself from judgement? How do you justify yourself?
Some rely on status and rank achieved in a career. Some rely on the successful raising of children. Some of us justify ourselves by the number of people we control, whether in the workplace or at home. We justify ourselves by our reputation, our good name. Or maybe we rely on our "lifestyle" - we think of ourselves as being in better shape, or more healthy, or slimmer, going to more fashionable places, eating in the best restaurants and talking about it afterwards. Most telling of all, we seek to justify ourselves by the kinds of people that we think we are. You justify yourself, I justify myself by convincing myself that I am a certain kind of person: more moral, more sensitive, more loving, smarter, more thoughtful of others, more patriotic, more community minded, more socially aware, whatever. Or, to take the reverse of that, more marketed, more put upon, more misunderstood, more long-suffering than anybody else. We can sum all of this up by saying that we justify ourselves, subtly or not so subtly, but evaluating ourselves above others.
But what about God? How do we justify ourselves before God? Well, by keeping his commandments, right? But what are they? Here are two of them: "thou shalt love the Lord thy God with although heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." How are we doing on these? Can we justify ourselves before the throne of God by saying, "Well, I keep some of the commandments some of the time"? I once had a woman from our local community helped me with choosing some fabrics. When we were talking about colours and patterns we did all right, but I had a hard time keeping her off the subject of religion. She wanted me to know that she had no use for the church. "What is religion?" she said. It's do unto others, that's what it is. I don't have to go to church for that." I wish I had the nerve to look her in the eye and ask her how she could say with such confidence, because the fact is that, far from "doing under others," she had a reputation in town for being unusually self-centred and bent on having her own way.
St Paul quotes from the book of the law, the Torah itself, to make his point. From Deuteronomy 27:26, "cursed be everyone who does not do everything that is written in the book of the law." That's certainly puts out ostentatious efforts at self-justification into perspective. How can we live, then, under the threat of this judgement by Almighty God? According to Paul, we can't. It really doesn't matter what we seek to justify ourselves by, because it's no use. Using an old expression, I once said to my husband in a jocular way that someone we knew was "living in sin" with a woman. My husband said, "We are all living in sin." That's the point. We are under a curse because we are in bondage to the power of sin and we can't do the right thing all the time even if we want to; as Paul says unforgettably in Romans 7: "the evil I do not want to do, that is what I do."
Now comes the critical verse in our text. "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse on our behalf." "What is a curse?" Asked a young woman in a Bible class I was teaching; "A curse as a swear word. I don't understand how Christ became a swear word." But that isn't what curse means in the biblical sense. Cursing and blessing, in the Bible, means the power of God to accomplish his ultimate purpose, and so, the power of God to bless and the power of God to condemn. If we were living under the rule of the law, we would all be condemned.
Christ became a curse for us. You know that St Paul, before he became a Christian, was zealous and even vehement in his persecution of Christians. Why? The reason Paul was so enraged against Christianity is that he, a highly trained rabbinical Jew, could not tolerate the idea that the Messiah of God, long promised a long expected, had died under the condemnation of God. And why did Paul the Pharisee think such a thing? Here is the key: in Deuteronomy there is a verse that says, "cursed be everyone who was hanged on a tree." A dead body publicly displayed was anathema to good religious people, a godforsaken object. And so the claim of the Christians was that the Messiah had died under the curse of God. That was intolerable for the zealous Paul. He went to the Damascus to root out Christianity where ever he could find it. And you know what happened; he was knocked off his horse, blinded for three days, and utterly transformed by his vision of the risen Lord Jesus Christ.
So Paul had to go back into the Bible and find out: why? Why did the Messiah of God die a God-forsaken, God cursed death? Why did the Messiah die by crucifixion, the most shameful of all
methods of execution? When St Paul read the passage in Deuteronomy with Jesus in mind, he must have seen fireworks. Now he understood: Jesus was taking upon himself the curse that would have been hours because of our inbred nature as rebels against God's righteous commandments.
Now what this means for you and me is that there is no condemnation in heaven or earth that can touch us anymore. "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us." We deserved the condemnation, but he stepped into our place. Therefore, as Paul writes in Romans, "There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."
A woman close to me lives tormented by her memories of her mother. Her mother wanted to spend her last years under her daughter's roof, but her daughter, my friend, did not feel up to it. She arranged for her mother to have good care, and she visited her very often, but she cannot shake off the sense that she failed her mother. She feels condemned. Once she was telling me about this and she said, using the present tense, "I wonder if my mother for gives me." Then she said, "I guess she does." I was struck by this, "I guess she does." It was so uncertain, so unconvinced. It was clear that my friend could not really believe it, that she continued to labour under the thought of that condemnation. How I pray for my friend that she will come to know the merciful action of Jesus on the cross, where he took our condemnation upon himself so that we should not have to be it. My friends mother's forgiveness is something that will not be known to us until the resurrection; but Jesus forgives us right now. We do not "guess" it, we know it. What is more, he not only forgives us, he justifies us. When a printer lines are a margin, he says he is "justifying" the margin. We cannot see it fully now, but in for giving us God is also justifying us, making us not bent, but straight. That is what is happening on the cross. We cannot do it for ourselves. He alone can do it for us; he alone has done it for us. In the words of the hymn, "Rock of ages"
Should my tears for ever flow,
should my zeal no longer know,
all for sin could not not atone:
thou must save, and thou alone.
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