Galatians 4:1-7
A woman I worked with years ago, a Roman Catholic, was trying once at the end of a workday, to clarify what Lutherans believe about Mary, the mother of Jesus. “You don’t think she was a virgin, right?” she asked. I was surprised, but assured her, "No, we say that Jesus was 'conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary' when we worship on Sunday mornings, just like you do."
I guess that I shouldn't have been too surprised though, because, oddly enough, there’s always been a lot of misunderstanding and disagreements among Christians over Mary.
Today, August 15, is a special day on church calendars all over the world. For our Roman Catholic friends, this is the Feast of the Assumption, commemorating the day that they say that Mary was bodily assumed into heaven at her death. Lutherans find no reason to believe that's what happened.
Be that as it may, we Lutherans believe that Mary has a lot to teach us about what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.
We also are amazed by the way in which God used this young teenager from an obscure village to bring the Messiah into the world. Mary herself was amazed by that and amazed too, that, based on her own experience, God so obviously cares about the eternal destinies of all the world’s "ordinary" people. (One thing we know for sure, though, is that while we all may be "ordinary" people, God's love for each of us is extraordinary!)
In today’s Gospel lesson, composed of the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise which comes during her visit with Elizabeth, Mary sees God reversing the fortunes of both those who trust in God’s grace and of those who trust in the "gods" favored by most in the world. God, she says, “has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.”
Mary understood that in Jesus, God was turning the world on its head, ensuring that eternity will belong not to those who claw and take and scheme and reason their way to power or prominence or influence or other worldly advantages, but to those who trust totally in Christ.
Our Gospel lesson came up this past Advent Season. So, I want to turn our attention away from it and, in a move of which I think Mary would approv, away from Mary, toward the Lord she served.
Pull our your bulletins, please. In the very middle, you’ll find the text of our second lesson, expanded by three verses from what’s officially appointed for today. It’s Galatians 4:1-7.
Galatians, you’ll remember from our sermon series based on that book earlier this year, is a letter written by preacher and evangelist Paul to a church in an area that we know today as Turkey. The letter was written back around 50AD. The church in the city of Galatia was composed of Gentiles, that is non-Jews. Paul was anxious to refute false teachers who told the Galatian believers in Jesus that in order to be truly saved from sin and death, they not only needed to believe in Jesus, but also had to adopt Jewish religious law, like circumcision for men and certain food and feast days for all.
In Galatians, chapter 3, which immediately precedes our lesson, Paul has asserted that we justified in God’s eyes not by what we do, but by our faith in Christ; that all who are baptized in Christ are clothed in His forgiveness and the righteousness—or rightness with God—that Jesus came to give those who trust in Him; and that in Christ, all who repent and believe in Him, have the same status before God.
Then, at the start of chapter four where our lesson begins, Paul comes up with a great way to illustrate what religious law, even the Ten Commandments, can and, most importantly, cannot do toward securing a right relationship with God for we sinful human beings. Read those first two sentences from Galatians—verses 1 and 2--with me out loud now.
“My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father.”What Paul is saying is that before God acted decisively by sending Jesus to the cross to take our punishment for sin, paying the debt we owe, our world was kept under control by the laws of God. The law acted as guardian and trustee over people too immature and too imprisoned by sin to live life the way God designed it to be lived.
Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says that this passage shows how the story of the human race before the arrival of Jesus was one of “people who stand to inherit a fortune (of sorts) but who are quite unaware of the fact.”
In the meantime, like a parent hemming in toddlers who are bound to get themselves into trouble otherwise, God gave His law as a way of keeping things under control until the time was right.
This was true even of non-Jews who had never heard of Moses or the Ten Commandments because, as the Bible reminds us elsewhere, God has written His law on our hearts. No matter how much we may try to deny it, violate it, or excuse our breaching of it, the whole human race knows that there is a law of right and wrong.
One evidence of this may be that while human laws may be unjust or designed to serve the interests of certain groups, even the most corrupt of dictators will claim that his law conforms to a notion of right and wrong that all his citizens would agree on without having ever discussed it. That's because our notions of what's right and what's wrong come from God; it’s the law of right and wrong we all seem to know that hems our world in, at times just barely, from total chaos.
This is exactly what Paul is talking about when he writes in the next verse—read along with me silently:
“So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world.”Now, for some people, that’s the end of the Christian story. They think that being Christian is about trying to live according to some rules, or trying to be nice people, or working to never make anybody upset or mad, or to fighting injustice. All of those things should be part of daily living for Christians. We should try to obey the law of God and, to glorify God and make the lives of our neighbors bearable, abide by the rules of society. We shouldn’t go out of our ways to cause strife or arguments and we should by all means fight injustice.
But none of those things, however faithfully or impeccably executed, will transform you and me from minors or slaves in need of constant goading or hemming in by the law of God into the free inheritors of all that God wants to give to us. As Martin Luther writes in his commentary on this passage, “…mere outward decency does not constitute Christianity.” He goes on to explain, “The heathen observe the same restraints to avoid punishment or to secure the advantages of a good reputation. [But in] the last analysis such restraint is simple hypocrisy.”
It’s in the next two sentences, verses 4 and 5, that Paul gets into what can move us from slavery to becoming children of God, from minors hemmed in by God's law to heirs set free by God, inheritors of forgiveness and everlasting life with God. Read those next two sentences with me aloud, please.
“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.”That phrase, “the fullness of time,” is important. The New Testament, including Philippians, was written in Greek, as you know. In Greek, there are two main words for time. The first is chronos, which refers to chronological time. The other word is kairos, which means God’s time. Paul is saying that at the right time, at the precise moment chosen by God, after everything had happened that needed to happen, God acted to free us, to give us our inheritance.
And how did God do that? He sent the Son, Jesus. Jesus came from God and was God. But, He was also born of a woman, voluntarily born subject to the same law to which you and I are subject. Only Jesus perfectly kept the law so that when the law accused Him and put Him on a cross, it had the wrong guy. When Jesus was executed for our sins, Jesus redeemed—that is bought out of slavery all of us who live under the law. The result is that we are God’s children no matter what!
Paul does some celebrating in the last two verses of our lesson. Read along with me—with all the enthusiasm the words deserve, please:
“And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.”Ever been desperate enough to cry out to the God you know in Jesus, but not been sure what to say? Then know this: In those moments...in those moments when you knew that there was no one and nothing else you could turn to...that God’s Holy Spirit was telling you something. The mere impulse to pray demonstrates that you belong to Christ! Your desperation proves it because it's only in desperation that any of us are truly open enough and humble enough to admit our need of the God Who loved you so much that He went to a cross, open enough and humble enough to receive the inheritance of life and forgiveness we can't earn, but that God gives to all who trust in Christ. May we always be that desperate!
Your conscience need never accuse you for sins you committed and for which you already repented!
You need never think that because you aren’t perfect, God doesn’t care about you!
The Savior you somehow just know can reach out to in your times of desperation, Whose Spirit prompts you to do just that, will stand by you and love you now and always!
The Savior Who came into the world to share our lives and deaths so that all with faith in Him can also share in His victory, His life, and His eternity with God, wants you to know that you are no longer hemmed in, no longer a slave to sin, no longer a minor pining for the day when you will be acceptable to God.
If you are baptized and trust in Christ alone, you are absolutely acceptable to God! And no one can take you from your Father's hands! In Christ, we are free to be God’s people, free to look forward with confidence to the certainty of eternity with God.
In his commentary on Galatians, Martin Luther quotes Saint Augustine, a great Catholic theologian revered as much by Lutherans as Catholics: “every [person] is certain of [their] faith, if [they have] faith.” Luther goes on to write, “We ought to feel sure that we stand in the grace of God, not in view of our own worthiness, but through [what Christ has done for us]. As certain as we are that Christ pleases God, so sure ought [the believer in Christ] be that we also please God, because Christ is in us.”
This was the faith that sustained Mary: faith in Christ and the good will of God for those who trust in Him. May that be our faith too!
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