NOTES for Gal 5:2

Speaking of circumcision as a path back into slavery, Paul clearly has in mind the spiritual dynamic connected with the action of the Torah in a person. He tells the supporters of obligatory circumcision directly: if you are circumcised, then you must fulfill the Torah in its entirety. And the issue here is not only fulfilling all the religious prescriptions of Judaism, but going through the whole spiritual path marked out in the Torah, from a purely external, moral, and religious understanding of it to the spiritual work implied by the concept of the inner Torah. Otherwise, when understood only religiously, the Torah loses all spiritual meaning, and circumcision becomes a kind of religious game that in itself leads a person nowhere, only distracting him from the genuine spiritual path.

The apostle is not speaking against the Torah; he simply does not want following the Torah to turn into a kind of religious entertainment, by which many also reassured themselves that now they were doing everything necessary for God and for Christ. Many who were circumcised may have felt themselves to be "proper" Christians, while in Christianity they began to see not a spiritual path and not the life of the Kingdom, but a "proper" religion.

In such a case, religious life generally and imperceptibly replaced spiritual life, and it is precisely against this substitution that Paul warns the Galatian Christians. He says to them: do you seriously want to become Jews, to walk the whole spiritual path walked by the best representatives of the Synagogue? In that case, follow the Torah in all its fullness. Move from the external Torah to the inner Torah; try yourselves to become the living Torah, and learn from your own experience what that is like and what comes of such attempts. The apostle knew what he was talking about: in another of his letters, the Letter to the Romans, he himself described his attempts to realize the ideal of the living Torah in life.

Complete failure, a spiritual crisis, and finally the encounter with the Risen One on the Damascus road: all this is Paul's own path, a path which, however, none of the circumcised Galatian Christians intended to walk. The path of the Torah did not interest them; they simply wanted a little religion for variety in life and peace of mind. It is no wonder that such a position could arouse nothing in the apostle but indignation: he took the Torah, Christ, the Kingdom, and his own spiritual path with complete seriousness. And seeing certain "teachers" profane everything that was absolutely important to him, he could not remain calm.

What is freedom, and does it exist in the world? In today’s passage from the Letter to the Galatians, the apostle Paul emphasizes: “...stand firm in the freedom Christ has given us... for in Christ ίσχύει (what has force, what counts)... faith working through love” (in the Greek text, “δι’” means through love). Freedom, then, is the subordination of life to the principal and only truth—faith working through love—rather than to transient variations in a way of life that depend on circumstances. To be free therefore means to believe and to act with love. For the apostle, any discussion of human rights is out of place here, because freedom and unfreedom exist before the face of the Almighty. He therefore says nothing about the presence or absence of freedom to profess one’s faith: it is not granted by this world in the form of freedom of conscience, but is realized personally by each person who follows Jesus.

Do you know what happens to someone who falls into a bog? They slowly sink into the liquid mud, and the more vigorously they try to get out, the faster the mire sucks them in. This closely resembles the existence of a sinful person: a slow death, a complete inability to cope with the situation, and an utter lack of freedom. For the apostle Paul, it is obvious that humanity is enslaved to sin and needs the liberation that only God can give and that Christ brings into this world. He has already brought it and has already given it to those who believe in Him! A new life has begun, no longer in the bog; movement is no longer impeded and no longer brings us closer to destruction. And then Paul sees with grief how people begin once more to bind themselves hand and foot, lest they make one movement too many, “in case something goes wrong” and they later have to answer for it. Once again, people pile commandment upon commandment; once again, they place the traditions of the elders above the Word of God. O foolish Galatians! Do you remember the film called “That Sweet Word: Freedom”? Sweet? Perhaps... Difficult—yes, but anything else is unworthy of a human being created in the image and likeness of God.

Speaking about circumcision, Paul compares it with slavery, urging his readers to remain free people (v. 1). He tells the Galatian Christians directly that if they are circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to them (v. 2). At first glance, such a statement contradicts the apostle's own words, spoken, however, at another time and on another occasion, that circumcision prevents neither salvation nor abiding in the Kingdom. The key to understanding such a stern statement by Paul is the apostle's demand that the one being circumcised fulfill the whole Torah completely (v. 3). Paul, as can be seen, is not against circumcision. He is not against religion as such, as long as it does not hinder entrance into the Kingdom, and he is certainly not against the Torah. But he is firmly against the game of religion into which, as can be seen, the Christians of Galatia had been drawn. He reminds the Galatians that in Christ the question of circumcision loses all meaning, that it has no relation at all to the Kingdom (v. 6). One cannot be justified by the Torah, and the Galatian Christians ought to know this (vv. 4-5).

But that is not the only point. The point is that they do not treat circumcision at all as the Torah prescribes. For a believing Jew who observes the Torah, the question of circumcision sometimes became a matter of life and death, as it did, for example, during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, when circumcision was performed secretly and was punishable by death. In such a situation circumcision became the consequence of a deep spiritual choice, and not everyone resolved to take it. But in the present case the situation was different: circumcision was being used precisely in order to avoid problems, problems that Paul himself clearly did not try to avoid in this way (v. 11). For the apostle, as can be seen, circumcision is too serious a thing to be used as a cover. And he calls the Christians of Galatia to treat it just as seriously. He reminds them that by agreeing to circumcision they are choosing another path, not the one to which Paul had testified to them and on which they had walked before (vv. 7-8). This is no trifle; betrayal begins with something small (v. 9). And if someone among those who preach circumcision in the Galatian church does not understand the full seriousness of the situation, so much the worse for him (v. 10).

Circumcision, like religion in general, is neither good nor bad in itself. Everything depends on what it is for a person: a choice of path or a game that is played partly in order to avoid unpleasantness. In the first case, it is possible that the chosen path will still lead a person to the threshold of the Kingdom, as happened with Paul himself. After all, before the meeting on the Damascus road, he himself did not dare to think that circumcision could be spiritually useless. The second path leads nowhere, because it goes nowhere. It most of all resembles a circle around a playground, around which one can run endlessly. And the apostle certainly does not want running in circles to become the main occupation of his Galatian brothers.