NOTES for Gal 6:1-10
Paul returns again and again to the theme of human nothingness. The Apostle often said of himself that he was nothing, while advising others, as in the Epistle to the Galatians, not to imagine themselves to be something great or exceptional when they were nothing. Such a self-assessment and such an appeal are entirely appropriate in the context of the understanding of poverty as a spiritual state that in Paul's time was commonplace in Jewish and early Christian spiritual tradition alike. Indeed, poverty as a spiritual state is defined by the fact that, by virtue of having been created, a person is in a certain sense not his own. What makes him human is the “breath of life” that God, at creation, “breathes” into his “nostrils.” It is this that makes the human being the image of God. Yet this breath does not belong to the person; it remains God's, and the person remains human only so long as he preserves it and insofar as he is conscious of it. Once he realizes fully that his own existence as the image of God does not depend on him at all, that it is wholly God's work and that he himself can only participate in it, he understands himself as nothing, as having no existence apart from God's action.
Human nature, then, not to mention everything that belongs to a person, begins to be understood merely as an outward shell, as a set of tools given by God, as something received from Him on loan for accomplishing the tasks that God sets before a person during his life. Understanding himself in this way, a person becomes a perfect instrument of God. He can now help his neighbor if the latter has sinned, for God Himself will act through him, and God knows what to do. If, however, a person does not accept his own nonexistence, he will not thereby acquire another quality of being or become something he was not before; but he may well convince himself and even others that he is something when in fact he is nothing.
Such an illusion may prove costly in spiritual life generally, and especially in Christian life, for here the issue is the Kingdom, which can be found or lost in a single instant: one need only empty one's heart for it or, conversely, fill the heart with something of this world. It is these things, fundamental to Christian life, that Paul recalls to the recipients of his epistle, who had evidently forgotten them quite thoroughly.