NOTES for Gal 1:1-10

Certain unnamed people troubled the Galatians by telling them that the freedom in Christ proclaimed by the apostle Paul was an illusion and that they had to follow the thorny road of Old Testament legislation toward God. What mattered, they said, was not whether you loved God and other people, but whether, for God's sake, you washed the dishes correctly and observed the other rituals. Therefore, at the very beginning of the letter, the apostle says that Christ gave Himself for our sins. Among other things, this means that what the apostle proclaims is not religion. By definition, religion is our human path toward reunion with an infinitely distant God. The point is not even that the law, like everything else in human religiosity, is no such path (the apostle writes about this at length to the Romans). Against his opponents he sets the fact that God Himself has already crossed the path that separated us; He Himself has overcome that distance.

We cannot help sharing the apostle's astonishment at how easily our human nature bows beneath the yoke of an impersonal law, distancing itself from the God who has drawn too close. Such is the psychological difference between faith and religiosity. This is important to keep in mind, because each of us needs to examine ourselves: do you live by faith or by religion?