Righteous and Faithful

Do you know what my least favorite thing is about reading Paul’s letters? I am left feeling totally and completely inadequate. The short opening part that we get from his letter to the Galatians isn’t as bad as some of the others, but he still talks about how much more brilliant he was than all his peers. And even though he switches gears quickly to talk about his life in Christ he still talks about being set apart before birth and being able to see Jesus face to face.

The passage that both brings me comfort and frustrates me is from Romans 7:15-20 and it keeps through the end of the chapter. The passage is about how he does the very thing he doesn’t want to do and the things he should do he doesn’t do. The reason that passage both comforts and frustrates me is that it shows how we all do things we shouldn’t do, and it’s comforting to know that Paul struggled with that as well. At the same time, I look at all the things Paul said and did and the way that he we see he lived through the book of Acts and his letters and I wonder if the things he was worried about were at all the things that I struggle with. Paul seems much more together with his faith than I feel at times.

Isn’t that how our faith journey is like though? There are times when we feel very strong in our faith and the journey we are on, and there are other times when we feel that things aren’t going well and that like Paul says from Roman’s that we are constantly doing the thing that we aren’t supposed to be doing? Those same feelings can happen in a single day it seems. One moment you feel like you are in right relationship with God and then something happens and you respond and then you feel that the response to the situation wasn’t at all the way that you should have been. And it’s usually in those moments where we are disappointed in ourselves that we then see or think about someone else who would have handled it better…like Paul. Paul definitely seemed like one of those righteous and faithful people.

However, what we, myself included, need to remind ourselves is that Paul’s point of talking about his past excellence isn’t as a way to brag or promote himself, but to contrast what life was like to what life is like now that he knows Jesus Christ. In the process of that he also points out the errors that Peter, who he calls Cephas in this part of his letter, Barnabas, and other Jewish followers of Jesus. He mostly does this to make his point even more completely because he wants to contrast the way things were to the way things are now that they live a life in Christ Jesus. The point he makes and what we’re going to really focus on is in verses 15-21. And if you look at those verses you will see two words repeated over and over again. Those words I’ve already alluded to: righteous and faithfulness.

What Paul beautifully does is that he uses these two very important words to help the Galatians and all of us center ourselves on what is most important instead of the issues that they are struggling with. The central issue that arises is table fellowship between Jews and Gentiles and the back and forth Peter and others showed when other Jewish followers arrived. This might be connected to the conversation we had last week about circumcision in Acts 15 and the Jerusalem council, but it does show that there were lots of things to figure out to be able to blend the Jewish followers of Jesus and the Gentile followers of Jesus. What Paul does with these words of righteous and faithfulness is he uses these familiar words that the Jewish followers would know all to well, but he uses them in a new way. By using them this way he is able to speak to them that helps them to find a path forward for this community of mixed believers.

And it’s not just helpful for the Galatians, but for us as well because there are plenty of people of faith, or even people looking from the outside that view faith this way, that believe that we are the ones who need to be fully righteous, faithful, and perhaps I can even add the word perfect to the mix. Yet this is the very thing that Paul is advocating against. Paul actually point blank tells us three times that we cannot be made righteous by the works of the law. In fact, if we look back again at Acts 15:10 from last week we’ll see that Peter directly says that we shouldn’t put burdens on the Gentiles, that we, the Jewish community, could not bear. In other words, not even these faithful followers like Peter, Barnabas, James, nor Paul, could follow the Law perfectly. The works of the law do not make us righteous, they do not put us in a right relationship with God.

So if we cannot be made righteous by the works according to the law then what do we do? Paul follows every example of how righteous works under the law don’t work, by then stating that it is the faithfulness of Jesus Christ that does it. Now some translations say by having faith in Jesus Christ and while that isn’t a bad translation I think phrasing it as the faithfulness of Jesus Christ gets at the heart of what Paul is emphasizing. If we were to say it was our faith in Jesus Christ then we would be putting the emphasis once again on ourselves. It is our faith in him. And if we actually look at Gal 2:17 we see that Paul rejects the idea of trying to make ourselves righteous in Christ. In other words, Paul does not want us to simply substitute the law for Jesus. They are not the same thing. Christ came so that we could live in Christ and no longer live in the law. Because, as Paul emphasizes, Christ gave himself for all of us which is grace, a free gift from God, and if we try to live by the law, or replace Christ with the law as a 1 for 1 then Christ died for nothing.

All of that is possible because of the faithfulness of Jesus, not of our own faithfulness or righteousness or perfectness. It is Christ who was faithful, it was Christ who was perfect in the eyes of the law, it is Christ who gave himself for our sake, so that we might be made righteous through him. This isn’t our own doing, but it is the power of God. So when we see ourselves and our imperfections and we look around us and see people who seem to be more perfect than we are, we are not focus on grace like we should. We are all the same under the banner of grace. We are all loved, we are all forgiven, we are all redeemed. Live this life knowing that it is Christ who is faithful to both God and us. Live this life knowing that Christ makes us righteous before God, and live this life making sure that everyone we meet knows that for themselves. None are perfect, but that we are made perfect in the faith we have by the faithfulness and the righteousness of God’s Son, our savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.