Freed
From Fear—Freed For Service
June
27, 2010
If I were to make a top 10 list of
the greatest works of Western literature, Les
Miserables, by Victor Hugo, would be somewhere on that list. It’s an amazing story of sin and redemption,
of love and hope and pain and loss, and ultimately of law and grace. The main character in the story, Jean
Valjean, spends 19 years of hard labor in prison for stealing a loaf of bread
so he could eat. Prison hardens him,
gives him an edge, makes him distrustful of everyone around him. His attitude becomes one of “hurt the other
person before they have a chance to hurt you.”
At the end of his 19 years, he is paroled, but is forced to carry a
yellow ticket everywhere with him and show it to anyone he comes into contact
with, so they know he’s a parolee. For
Jean Valjean, being freed only becomes a new kind of imprisonment, and makes
him even more cynical and bitter. Four
days after being let out, he arrives, cold, hungry, and broke, at the house of
a bishop. Nobody will house him or feed
him or give him work. He’s
desperate. And angry. Here’s the scene from the 1998 movie…you may
recognize Liam Neeson as Jean Valjean:
“Don’t forget. Don’t ever
forget. You’ve promised to become a new
man. Jean Valjean my brother, you no
longer belong to evil. With this silver,
I have bought your soul. I have ransomed
you from fear and hatred. And now I give
you back to God.”
God’s grace transforms our fear
into lives of loving service.
What the bishop did for Jean
Valjean was an act of costly grace. The
bishop sacrificed his pride, his silver, and his sense of justice. But in taking that act, he did something that
Jean Valjean never could have done for himself.
Not only did the bishop ransom him from fear and hatred, he ransomed him
for a purpose. He said “And now I give
you back to God.” An act of complete and
utter selflessness broke Jean Valjean’s bondage to living for himself…it gave
him the freedom, and the mission, to live his life for the sake of others
.
.
My friends, what we witnessed in
that scene was the power of cross-shaped grace in transforming our lives. It is that same power that Paul concerns
himself with in our passage from Galatians.
We’ve heard over the past few weeks about the identity struggle that the
early church had. The church saw itself
as a sect of Judaism, so they had that heritage and those laws to look to, to
help shape their identity as a people.
However, they were also attracting a large number of non-Jews to the
faith, especially as it began to spread into areas that were not primarily
Jewish. The question became, how do we
handle these folks who didn’t grow up with these laws, customs, and
heritage?
There was nothing wrong with Jewish Christians continuing to observe the Jewish purity rites…clean and unclean foods and the like. In the first section of our Galatians passage, Paul is pointing out what he sees as blatant hypocrisy on the part of Peter. He had begun to eat with Gentile Christians—non-Jews—and by extension had been lax on the Jewish food laws. But then, when some Jewish Christians came to Antioch where he was, he stopped eating with the Gentiles. The implication was that in not following Jewish law, these Gentile Christians were second-class citizens.
There was nothing wrong with Jewish Christians continuing to observe the Jewish purity rites…clean and unclean foods and the like. In the first section of our Galatians passage, Paul is pointing out what he sees as blatant hypocrisy on the part of Peter. He had begun to eat with Gentile Christians—non-Jews—and by extension had been lax on the Jewish food laws. But then, when some Jewish Christians came to Antioch where he was, he stopped eating with the Gentiles. The implication was that in not following Jewish law, these Gentile Christians were second-class citizens.
And that’s what got Paul’s blood
boiling. In verse 14, he recounts a
showdown he had with Peter, telling him, “If you, though a Jew, live like a
Gentile and not a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?”
Touché.
Then he gets into the meat of his
argument, telling Peter, “We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile
sinners.” One of my seminary professors
says, “there are two kinds of people—those who divide everything into two groups,
and those who don’t.” Paul is one who
does that…in his eyes, one is either a Jew or a Gentile. He’s saying that even those who have been
Jews from birth, those who have been given the gift of the law, are unable to
be saved by that law. So why then is
Peter using the law to divide the community?
Observance of the law does nothing for a person’s eternal life, whether
that person is Jew or Gentile.
Why? Because
God’s grace transforms our fear into
lives of loving service.
You and I, we hear this passage and
immediately our thoughts turn to our individual salvation. Martin Luther interpreted it in that sort of
context, and we, as 21st Century Americans, we whose very identity
is defined partially by our rugged individualism—of course we’re going to think
in those terms as well. There’s nothing
wrong with that, and we’ll get there eventually. But that wasn’t Paul’s primary concern.
His main concern was with
community. His concern was that the
Jewish Christians were using the law to exclude
other Christians, instead of standing unified under the cross as the
sinners that we are. He reminds Peter,
and us today, that our identity as humankind isn’t that we fulfill the law, but
rather the opposite, that there is nothing any of us can do to live up to the
law’s demands. God’s law wasn’t given to
divide. God’s law was given to draw us
all to the power of the cross. Paul is
pointing out that every time we draw lines that seek to divide or exclude, we
are always going to find God on the other side of the line. “If justification comes through the law,”
Paul writes, “then Christ died for nothing.”
The silent question the bishop was
asking Jean Valjean, the silent question Paul is asking the Galatians, and the
silent question our Scripture passage asks of us today are all the same
question: are you going to live lives of fear, or are you going to live lives
of grace?
While it’s an important question to
ask ourselves individually, it’s an even more important question to ask
ourselves corporately, as those who are called to be Christ’s body on earth. The world looks at the church and it sees a
body that builds walls. It sees a body
that divides. It sees a body that lives
out of fear more than out of grace.
Sometimes these conclusions are unfair, but quite often we as the
church—the whole, universal, worldwide church—have given the world good reason
to come to those conclusions.
However, God’s grace transforms our fear
into lives of loving service.
Now this doesn’t mean that we’ve
been given free license to do whatever we want, to live however we want to
live. The bishop didn’t tell Jean
Valjean “with this act of grace you’re free to do whatever you want to
do.” Paul even says “But if, in our
effort to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have been found to be sinners,
is Christ then a servant of sin?
Certainly not!” What it does mean is that we’re living by a
different set of motivations. We don’t
serve others to build up points to try to get to heaven or win God’s
favor. In fact, the cross is what has
freed us from all of those old insecurities, all of those doubts, all of those
fears that we just don’t measure up, that God can’t possibly find us
acceptable, that there’s no way that we can earn a spot in heaven. You know what? There
is no way, no way at all, that we can earn ourselves a spot in heaven. Nothing to worry about. We can’t do it. But the cross, the empty tomb, God’s promise
to us through Christ, that is what’s
done the job for us. The word that Paul uses over and over in this
passage, the one translated “justified,” is the greek word dikaios. It is a courtroom
word, and has the sense not of actually being innocent, but of being declared
and treated as though we were innocent.
Through the cross, God sees our guilt but still acquits us. It’s not a whitewashing of sin, it’s God
grabbing us by the collar like the bishop did to Jean Valjean, looking us right
in the eye, and telling us, “Don’t
forget. Don’t ever forget. You’ve promised to become a new person. My brother…my sister…you no longer belong to
evil. With this cross, I have bought
your soul. I have ransomed you from fear
and hatred.”
God’s grace transforms our fear
into lives of loving service.
So we are free. Free to break down the walls that fear has built. Free to live in community with those we agree
with, as well as those with whom we disagree.
Free to live not for ourselves but given the mission to live in loving
service to others. Free to recognize
that God’s law doesn’t divide one person from another, but rather unifies all
of us as one gigantic category of people—redeemed sinners at the foot of the
cross.
Amen.
Matt Schur
Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church
Lincoln, NE
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