Read the Bible with Me!

Welcome to the Pauline Family's "Year of the Bible"! We've been reading the Bible clear through this year. We are finishing the New Testament, so read along with me. But first, let us pray: 

Father,

When the fullness of time had come, you sent your Word in the One who said, “Whoever sees me, sees the Father.” No revelation can surpass this until Jesus comes again. By your gift, the Church continues to receive unfathomable riches from the inheritance handed on from the Apostles and guaranteed by the Holy Spirit.

Let the Spirit who inspired the writing of today's pages "guide me in the truth and teach me" to follow Jesus ever more closely, until he calls me to follow him to the Kingdom where he lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen.

Today's chapters are Galatians 1-3.

As his Second Letter to the Corinthians drew to a close, Paul had to reaffirm his apostolic authority and qualifications. When he wrote to the Galatians, a community he and Barnabas had founded early in their one and only missionary journey together (Acts 13-14), Paul had to begin in a similar tone. Not that the two communities themselves were similar, however! Whereas in riotous Corinth, the Church was almost always on the breaking point, ready to splinter up into factions and needing to be recalled to unity in Christ, it seems that in Galatia, the community was tempted to the wrong kind of unity! There, the Gentile believers were being attracted (or pressured?) to uniformity with the ethnically Jewish members in matters of Mosaic observance. The same sort of thing had been happening in the great city of Antioch, causing not only confusion, but ultimately division since Jewish-observant and Gentile believers could not, under the Law, share a common meal.

In order to address the questions beneath these community crises, Paul addresses a letter that is remarkable from its very opening. Typically, Paul greets the community he is writing to with grace and peace and a prayer of thanksgiving to God for the way the Holy Spirit has been at work among them. Galatians starts with a reminder of Paul's divine calling, a wish for grace and peace and...an explosion of exasperation at how easily the community has been duped. And by whom???

What follows is an autobiographical treasure, since it gives us an account of Paul's vocation (his "conversion," but in words that echo Jeremiah's call) and missionary experience in Paul's own words. He brings up the story of the church in Antioch, and we see the pressure that Peter and Barnabas experienced to conform to the old ways. But Paul, the trained rabbi, sees something that the two pastors do not see: The Law has been fulfilled. To return to it is, in effect, to treat Christ's death as pointless. Here we have the unforgettable summary of Pauline spirituality:

Through the Law, I died to the Law to live for God.

I have been crucified with Christ,

and I live, no longer I, but it is Christ who lives in me.
I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. 

To help the Galatians (and us) reflect on what this "faith" is that has taken the place of the Mosaic Law, Paul will (as he did in Romans) reflect not on Moses, but on the faith of Abraham, whom God promised to make "father of a host of nations." 

Start reading here.

For additional background

N.T. Wright's Paul: A Biography is the book I would recommend to someone who wanted to read one (only one) book that combined the life and letters of St Paul. Written by a noted Scripture, this is a flowing narrative that is scripturally enlightening and historically sound. Wright gives the reader a way of following Paul through the Acts of the Apostles and the writing of his letters, making Paul the person that much more approachable, and the letters themselves more readable as a result of having a social and historical context.