Ioannis Karavidopoulos, Professor Emeritus of the School of Theology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
October 20, 2018
The subject of the justification
of man through faith in Jesus Christ and of freedom dominates in the Epistle to
the Galatians of the Apostle Paul, from which is taken the apostolic reading of
Sunday, which in translation is the following:
“Brethren, we know that a person
is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we
also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ
and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be
justified. But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found
to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! For if I rebuild
what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. For through the law, I died to the law, so
that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I
who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I
live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Gal.
2:16–20)
In the apostolic reading, the
Christian concept of the justification and salvation of man is essentially
contrasted with the Jewish one: Man is not saved by his own works, that is, by
keeping the Mosaic Law, as the Jews believed, because Christ, by His sacrifice
on the Cross, freed man from the dominion of the Law.
By extension, also in
Christianity man is not saved by his works, but salvation is offered by God and
man accepts it through faith in Jesus Christ. The works of man, works of love,
are not a prerequisite for salvation but its fruit and its practical manifestation,
a self-evident fruit and expression of it. They are works of free acceptance of
salvation.
This is especially emphasized by
the Apostle Paul, who could be described as the Apostle of freedom, since
freedom constitutes a central concept not only of his theology but also of his
life. According to the biblical data, freedom is a characteristic of man from
the first moment of his creation, since he was formed by God with the gift to
decide freely either to keep the commandment of God or to reject it, with the
corresponding, of course, consequences.
The freedom of man constitutes a
fundamental message of the Apostle Paul both to the Hellenistic world into
which he brought the preaching of the Christian gospel and to our own time. In
contrast to the theoretical and anthropocentric freedom of the Stoic
philosophers of his time, Paul puts forward the freedom in Christ, the freedom
which flows from a historical event: the crucifixion and the resurrection of
Jesus Christ. A freedom which indeed exists in man from creation, yet is
offered in its fullness within the Church as a gift of God.
Man’s failure and inability to
find solutions to his problems on the basis of his own inner powers made
necessary the historical intervention of God in the world in the person of
Jesus Christ. Freedom, therefore, constitutes an offering of God in Christ to
the world.
But one might perhaps ask: Is not
the freedom which man attains through his own spiritual powers more important
than the freedom which is offered to him from outside? It would indeed be so,
if the nature of man were in harmony with the will of God and had not been
disturbed because of its apostasy from God. History, however, bears witness
that the works of man are connected with hatred, destruction, and corruption,
leading him to the disintegration of society, to the destruction of the natural
environment, the house of God, and ultimately to death. Leading him also — to
come to our own days — to economic crisis and moral degradation.
The freedom which the Apostle
Paul teaches is the liberation from the bonds of the Jewish Law, from the
tyranny of sin, and finally from death — and indeed from the fear of death
which paralyzes man and makes him for all his life a slave to this fear (cf.
Heb. 2:15). He writes to the Romans: “But now that you have been set free from
sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification
and its end, eternal life.” (6:22).
The culmination of freedom is
man’s acceptance (according to a play on words by Paul) to become a bondservant
of Christ — that which he himself also did, who usually characterizes himself
in his epistles as “a bondservant of Jesus Christ” (Rom. 1:1; Gal. 1:10, etc.)
and confesses that “I am free, without dependence on anyone. And yet I made
myself a servant to all, in order to win as many as possible” (1 Cor. 9:19),
because “the one who was called by the Lord while being a slave has been freed
by the Lord. Likewise, he who was free when he was called by the Lord becomes a
slave of Christ” (1 Cor. 7:22).
In other words, freedom is the
redemption which Christ offers and which man accepts not by keeping the Law but
by faith in Christ. This freedom he experiences within the Church, and this
freedom is reflected in his relations with the other person. Freedom is equal
to the liberation of man from the bonds of his individuality, which sin has
forged, and his opening to a personal relationship with the other person. “God
has called you to live in freedom. Only do not let freedom become an occasion
for sinful life, but through love serve one another” (Gal. 5:13).
This freedom is secured both by
the effort of man and, above all, by the Spirit of the Lord, for “where the
Spirit of the Lord is, there is also freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17). Within this
freedom which the Spirit of the Lord secures, no distinctions among people are
conceivable; for this reason, the Apostle of freedom emphasizes: “You are all
children of God… There is no longer Jew or pagan, there is no longer slave or
free, there is no longer male or female. You are all one, thanks to Jesus
Christ” (Gal. 3:28).
Paul feels free even when he is
in prison, from which he wrote some of his epistles. This freedom, however —
and here lies his difference from the Stoics of his time — is not his own
achievement but a gift of God through Christ: “Christ has set us free” (Gal.
5:1). What Paul especially emphasizes is not only freedom from something, that
is, from a condition of law, corruption, and death, but at the same time
freedom for something else, that is, for the righteousness of God, for service
in the work of love, for the hope of the new life. (This basic view is
emphasized in the book of the unforgettable colleague V. Stogiannou, Freedom.
The Teaching on Freedom of the Apostle Paul and of the Spiritual Currents of
His Time, Thessaloniki 1970).
Freedom from the formalistic and
servile observance of the Mosaic Law, to return to our passage, means for Paul,
and by extension for the Christian, a life in which the ego of the Christian
ceases to dominate, since now Christ reigns within him. Very important is the
Apostle’s phrase in today’s reading: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is
no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (2:19–20), a phrase which
expresses Paul’s Christ-centered experience as well as the goal of the
conscious Christian.
Greek source:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.