NOTES for Gal 1:1-10; Gal 1:20-2:5
The apostle Paul writes the letter to the churches of Galatia that we begin reading today because of a rather unpleasant situation. Certain unnamed people have troubled the Galatians by telling them that the freedom in Christ proclaimed by the apostle Paul is an illusion and that they must approach God along the thorny path of Old Testament legislation. What matters, they said, is not whether you love God and other people, but whether you wash dishes properly for God’s sake and observe the other rituals. That is why, 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 towards reunion with an infinitely distant God. The point is not even that the law, like everything else in human religiosity, is not such a path (the apostle writes about this in detail to the Romans). Against his opponents he sets the fact that God himself has already travelled the path separating us, has himself overcome that distance.
We cannot help sharing the apostle’s astonishment at how readily our human nature bows beneath the yoke of an impersonal law, distancing itself from a God who has come too close. Such is the psychological difference between faith and religiosity. It is important to bear this in mind, because each of us needs to examine ourselves: are you living in faith or in religion?