In his letters Paul often compares Christian life to a race, and Christians to runners in a stadium competing with one another. Here too the apostle compares the recipients of his letter to runners who began their race well, but then something stopped them so that they no longer hear the voice of truth. From the immediate context it becomes clear that he is speaking of an infatuation with that very religiosity which has never been enough for a genuinely righteous life.

Circumcision becomes the symbol of this religiosity, and with it, apparently, some members of the Galatian church connected their spiritual life even more than with Christ. And here their spiritual path ends. It ends precisely as a path on which they were supposed to walk or run, and which was supposed to pass in direct communion and union with Christ. The Christian's path is the path of the Kingdom, not the path of religion. But that is not the only point.

Paul does not accidentally tell the recipients of his letter that they have stopped. They did not turn onto another path, did not turn back, but precisely stopped. And no wonder: religiosity can both help a person on the spiritual path and hinder him. Religious life as such has no direct relation to spiritual life, although it is connected with it. It is connected above all as form is connected with content. Or, more precisely, as a source of forms for the content with which spiritual life is filled in that part of it which is connected with communion with God.

Here religion can indeed prove useful. But not when it turns into an end in itself. Not when religious life replaces spiritual life, that dynamic of relationships binding a person to God and to other people, which no religion can replace. Here one can truly speak only of a stop on the spiritual path. And if the stop lasts long enough, perhaps even of a rejection of that path: after all, a person can be satisfied with religion alone if he makes the corresponding choice. But then one will have to speak only and precisely of religion, and not of Christianity.

Usually we think that freedom is something that can be given to a person. One can allow him to be free from one or another requirement of the law, from obligations to behave or think in a certain way. One can allow a person to be as he is. One can give a person liberty to act in his own way. Yet, judging by the words of the apostle Paul read today, this is a human notion that confuses freedom with permissiveness.

"You were called to freedom, brothers," says the apostle. Therefore, for him freedom is an ascetic task to which the Almighty calls us. And this freedom means above all the primacy of the spirit over the flesh. The apostle says that a person's slavery, the condition opposite to freedom, consists in his inability to resist the desires of the flesh. One way of resisting this slavery is the law, but even it does not give a person freedom; it only obliges us to resist the base principle that enslaves us.

But, the apostle continues, if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. A simple logical chain thus brings us to the thought that the essence of freedom is to be led by the Spirit. This is the only thing that always provides us with the possibility of responsible moral choice. And what is at stake here is not permission to make such a choice, but the existence of a real alternative. If you are not led by the Spirit of God, you are not able to choose the truth, and your paths, though paved with good intentions, nevertheless lead to destruction.

In Gospel times people looked at the Torah (the Law) in different ways. For most believing Jews the Torah was a kind of moral and legal code that was to be accepted and fulfilled unconditionally. At the same time it was taken for granted that this code was fulfillable. And at the level to which the religious majority limited itself, there really were no insoluble problems with fulfilling the Torah. Of course, this required effort, but sincerely religious people are usually not sparing of such effort. And after making the effort and fulfilling the Torah, as it appeared to them, to the end, such people naturally considered themselves righteous. Indeed, from their own point of view, from the point of view of a religious person, they had nothing with which to reproach themselves. What more could God require of them? He had set out His requirements in the Torah, and they had fulfilled it.

Yet in those days there was another view of the Torah and of spiritual life. It was a view that, in essence, already went beyond the framework of traditional Jewish religiosity, and beyond the framework of any religiosity at all. In this case the matter concerned the inner Torah. A Torah perceived not as a legal or moral code, but as the revelation of God's will. God's will in the most literal sense. In the sense of God's intentions addressed to a person. Intentions that must determine the whole spiritual life of a person, and indeed that person's whole life in general. They must become the spiritual core that alone can make a person righteous, if it determines his life completely.

When speaking about the Torah, Paul often contrasts the inner Torah with the outer one. And the point is not that he is a principled opponent of all religiosity. He simply knows too well from his own experience that religion has never yet made anyone righteous, and cannot do so.

A religious person can do many things for God. But in spiritual life the main thing is not to do, but to be. What is needed is not a set of good and pious deeds, but a qualitative change of life. And here religion proves powerless, because it changes a person from the outside, through the norms and rules it offers. Real changes always happen from within. Here what is needed is precisely the inner Torah, but this is exactly what a fallen human being is unable to bring to fullness. Original sin stands in the way.

And the apostle understands this perfectly too: he himself tried to live this way and suffered a complete failure, described quite frankly by him in the Letter to the Romans. All that remains is hope in that breath of God, the breath of the Kingdom, which alone can make a person righteous. Of course, this is an admission of one's own spiritual insufficiency. But it is better to acknowledge the obvious and obtain the fullness of the life of the Kingdom than to try to put a good face on a bad situation and lose everything.