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Dr. George A. Purnell
June 6, 2010
“Moving Beyond the Need for Approval”
Galatians 1:6-24
When you are a leader you can sometimes feel that your authority is under attack, and it’s easy to respond defensively. And being defensive can undermine the very authority the leader is defending.
Many of us respond best to leaders who are able to not take criticism personally, and who can have a little fun with themselves.
Two presidents in my lifetime were especially effective at this.
People who are able to laugh at themselves seem comfortable in their own skin. This is attractive in leaders, but many of us are not quite so gracious when we feel under attack.
The Apostle Saint Paul is arguably the greatest leader in Christian history. Paul had a dramatic revelation of Jesus Christ and became the tireless and fearless evangelist who spread the good news of Jesus to the Gentile world. He planted churches throughout Asia Minor and Greece, and along the way he suffered and was finally martyred in the mid 60’s A.D. His letters to the churches he founded are in the New Testament. Indeed, the letters attributed to him constitute 13 of the 27 “books” in the New Testament.
But Paul was defensive about his authority as an apostle at times…
Today we are reading from the opening chapter of Paul’s letter “to the churches of Galatia.” Scholars agree that Galatians was one of Paul’s earliest letters, perhaps the second church to which he wrote following the Thessalonians. So, Paul was early in his missionary travels when he wrote this letter.
It is clear that Paul is unhappy with what is happening in Galatia. His other letters in the New Testament all open with the salutation “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” or similar words. These other letters also included prayers of thanksgiving for the faithfulness and work of the recipients.
The letter to the Galatians omits these niceties. It begins sharply: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.”
We learn here that the Galatians have apparently been persuaded by a new set of preachers who were proselytizing while Paul was away. These preachers were more conservative than Paul in following Jewish law, and they argued that believers must be circumcised. These preachers claimed that Paul’s message was only half the truth; that he preached Jesus, but ignored Torah to win converts quickly.
Paul is upset with what he finds has happened while he was away. Indeed, he writes to say that “if anyone proclaims a gospel to you, a gospel contrary to what you received (from me), let than one be accursed!” That is pretty strong talk. After all, the perverted gospel being proclaimed was that the Galatians needed to be circumcised. It isn’t like they were being led to worship false gods. Paul’s anger seems out of proportion. Why was he so defensive? Why was it his gospel or none?
The answer is that for Paul nothing could obscure the centrality of Christ crucified. Salvation is God’s initiative in Christ, not something we affect. (“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” Ephesians 2:8, 9)
Paul felt that there were people who believed he could not be a true apostle because he had never met the earthly Jesus. He had not been among Jesus’ original disciples, as were Peter, James and John, the leaders of the Jerusalem church. Paul defended his authority and his message as divinely authorized and independent of the leaders of the Jerusalem church.
“For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”
Paul also felt that many were suspicious of him because he had been a persecutor of Christians before his conversion, and they had a hard time reconciling his past and accepting him as a true apostle.
“You have heard, no doubt,” Paul writes, “of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.” He describes how quickly he advanced among people his own age in Judaism because “I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.”
He goes on to write:
“But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus.”
After three years, he writes, he went up to Jerusalem to visit Peter. He stayed for fifteen days, but saw no other apostle other than James, the Lord’s brother. (So, he infers, I was not around the Jerusalem apostle long enough to be influenced by him.)
Paul clearly felt he must distance himself from the leaders of the Jerusalem church (Peter, James and John ) to establish his independent authority as an apostle. Today’s scripture concludes chapter one. The very next verse, which begins chapter two, reads: “Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabus, taking Titus along with me.” (Galatians 2:1) Paul describes how he and his partners in ministry were treated as second class citizens, but “we did not submit to them even for a moment. And…those leaders contributed nothing to me.” (2:5, 6)
This chapter goes on to describe how when Peter came to Antioch to visit Paul, he ate with Gentiles until James came, whereupon “he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction.” (2:12) Paul writes how disappointed he was that even his partner Barnabus “was led astray by their hypocrisy.” (2:13)
It makes me feel a little better about how I react sometimes to know that Saint Paul, who took the good news of Jesus to the world beyond Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria…and whose writings in the New Testament have so shaped Christian thought over the centuries and so…was at times defensive.
It would have been understandable for him to feel he was seen as a second rate apostle. Paul took his message to the regions beyond Israel – to Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) and Greece. Even his ‘territory’ might have seemed less important. The A team stayed in Jerusalem, the religious center of Judaism, while Paul was sent to the pagan nations.
There are always plenty of reasons for any one of us to feel inferior.
The reasons we can feel that we don’t measure up are as countless as they are groundless, because the truth is we do not need to defend ourselves. We are children of a loving God, who approves of us and accepts us as we are. We only need remember that:
Paul defended himself and his faith against claims that he was not really an apostle and that his faith was not the full truth. He did not receive his authority from a human source, but rather he received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ, he claimed, so he needed no human approval. He even writes in the next chapter that he has no identity outside Christ: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” (2:19, 20)
So grounded was he in Christ that Paul did not feel the need for Jerusalem’s approval. Our authority to speak comes from the Spirit, which Christ promised would come upon us after he was gone. So, we need to take our authority and tell of the good news made known to us in Christ. Amen.
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