Galatians 5:13-26
You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law . The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.
The first thing I read about our passage this week was that many commentators see Galatians 5 as the beginning of the closing section of the letter. That detail is not terribly interesting on its own perhaps, but you may remember that the Romans passage we heard two weeks ago which called its readers to “accept one another” was the end of the main body of that letter, and last week we heard the call to “encourage one another” from the final chapter of 1 Thessalonians. Not all of Paul’s letters end with these “one another” instructions, but I do think it is interesting that he repeatedly found that his writing led him towards ideas of how to live well in community. Whatever news or theology or advice had come before, it would seem that it pointed towards or found application in living well with one another. I think that ought to remind us of just how important this stuff is. Large movements within Western Christianity have made faith very personal, have treated it as something almost entirely between the individual and God, but I believe that is a fatal error. Of course faith connects us to God, but it is meant to connect us to one another too. It is lived out in community and it is meant to teach us how to live together. If our theology doesn’t lead us to one another as well as to God, then something has gone wrong and we need to go back and fix it.
Paul’s instruction to “serve one another” comes in the context of an exploration of what it means to be made free in Christ. In the verses just before the passage we heard this morning, he appears to set freedom against the law, specifically the religious law that he himself had been a teacher and defender of. He is particularly focused on the issue of circumcision, a cause of much debate in the early church, saying that “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value [for] the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love”. He’s already pointing towards the way in which we are called to use our freedom, with that great phrase “faith expressing itself through love”, but to make sure we are left in no doubt as to his meaning, a fews verses later he writes “do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature, rather serve one another in love”. It’s as if he understands our tendency to use our freedom for our own benefit, and needs to be sure that his words will not be used as an excuse for selfishness or individualism. For Paul, freedom in Christ is not freedom from obligation, but is instead freedom to understand where that obligation truly lies. In one sense our commitment is to Christ, but in practical terms it is lived out in our commitment to one another.
There is perhaps some irony in the way Paul’s insistence on freedom from the law is supported by quoting from the law, as he writes that “the entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘love your neighbour as yourself’”. (And by the way I think it’s always worth reminding ourselves that this command is first found expressed in this way in Leviticus, and many of the laws in Exodus are clearly written with this principle in mind. Jesus emphasises it as one of the greatest commandments alongside “love the Lord your God”, but it did not originate with him and Christianity cannot lay a unique claim on it. It has always been the will of God that we love one another, and the people of God have always sought to understand what it means to live that out.) What I think this call back to the law tells us is that Paul isn’t trying to scrap everything that had gone before, but establish a different relationship to it. Living by the law is not about following the letter, which can lead to us doing the least that is permissible or the most we can get away with, but rather following the spirit, acting in all ways with care and consideration for others.
It is the Spirit that Paul comes on to next, saying “walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh”. If Paul seemed to set freedom against law and then introduce a bit more nuance, here he most definitely sets Spirit against flesh, but again I think we can look for a little more subtlety, or perhaps simply disagree. Passages like this have at times been taken to mean that anything that brings pleasure is sinful, while the spiritual life will always be a struggle, but that is hard to reconcile with Jesus’ declaration that he came to bring life in abundance, even as he called us to take up our crosses. Sometimes the right choice will be the hard choice, and sometimes there will be conflict between what we feel we want to do and what we know we ought to do, but I absolutely believe that there is meant to be joy in this life, and that we can live well as embodied creatures made of flesh and alive in the Spirit, taking pleasure in what is true and noble and right and pure and lovely. For more than a decade I have prayed that my heart will become like God’s heart and my desires like God’s desires, and while I know I’m not there yet, I keep praying it because I think that is how we bring our flesh into alignment with the Spirit and live without the conflict that Paul describes.
Perhaps one way of reading these verses is to understand flesh and Spirit not as body and soul in any literal sense, but rather as representing competing attitudes. New Testament professor Charles Cousar suggests that “flesh refers to a way of thinking or behaving that is confined to the human sphere, that operates without the guidance of the Spirit of God”, and we might then say that Spirit refers to a way of thinking or behaving that is open to the divine sphere, that operates with the guidance of the Spirit of God. Walking by the Spirit doesn’t deny the flesh or our human experience, but allows us to be shaped by something beyond ourselves, so flesh and Spirit are no longer opposed, but instead one transforms the other. Thinking back to the command to “serve one another”, we might also say that Paul is presenting a choice between selfishness and selflessness, where the flesh is concerned only for its own desires, but the Spirit acts in love for the good of others.
Paul elaborates on his understanding of the desires of the flesh and the Spirit with a couple of lists, beginning with the acts of flesh. These are clearly not meant to represent all those things we do with our bodies, but rather those things which are sinful, which do not align the flesh with the Spirit. New Testament scholar Richard Hays remarks that “the list is in some respects conventional. It begins with three terms identifying sexual offenses, continues with two words for idolatry and occult magical practices, and concludes with two terms for self-indulgent partying. The most interesting feature, however, occurs in the middle of the list: a lengthy catalogue of eight words that highlight dissension and offences against the unity of the community…Paul’s concentration on these community- destroying behaviours shows that his primary concern is for the unity and peace of the Galatian churches”. It is their behaviour towards one another that is of prime importance, and it is still our behaviour towards one another that is of prime importance. As I keep telling my son when he throws himself about without looking around, we have to be careful about what we do with our bodies and how it impacts on other people’s bodies, although I would add by clarification that we have to be careful with our words as well as our deeds.
The next list is the fruit of the Spirit. I don’t want to say too much here because these verses really deserve to be treated on their own, and I’d rather allow space for that elsewhere than try and cram too much in now. (Mark began leading us through the fruit during my maternity leave, and I do hope we might be able to call him back to finish at some point.) I will say though that I remember my mum preaching on this passage and pointing out that it is ‘fruit’ singular not ‘fruits’ plural. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control...they must all grow together. We may find that we need to focus on different qualities at different times, because we may find that we struggle more with different qualities at different times, but ultimately we can’t pick and choose which we live out. And returning to our headline verse of “serve one another”, I believe we should see the fruit of the Spirit in how we serve one another. We should serve joyfully and our service should bring joy, we should serve patiently and we our service should encourage others to be patient, we should serve faithfully and our service should inspire faithfulness...and so on.
We’ve worked our way through the Galatians passage, but there’s something else I want to bring in before I close, because we also hear the call to serve one another in 1 Peter 4:10, which reads “each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms”. We have each been gifted in different ways, and so we will each best serve in different ways, and it is for us as a community to support and enable one another to do that, by recognising each other’s gifts and making space for them to be exercised. I think this is both a responsibility and an encouragement. It is a responsibility because it says that we must use what we have been blessed with for the good of others, and we must help others to do the same, and it is an encouragement because it says that there is space for us all to flourish as we do what we do best, and we will all be enriched in the process. So may we understand how best we may serve one another, and may we do it with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Amen.
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