I love this verse. It teaches that if we belong to Christ, everything is radically different. Everything has been transformed. Our identity is shaped by our belonging to Christ and anything else like race, nationality, economic status, gender, etc is nullified, its put to death through the cross. It's a verse that shapes and informs my understanding of what it means to be the church. Where we are tempted to describe who's in and who's out, who's important and who's unimportant, these words to the Galatians, say there are no boundaries in the church, apart from belonging to Christ. As Douglas Campbell says,
'... this is an undeniably radical approach. Everything that we might normally nominate as important to our identities, or even to our well-being, has been displaced in this account of the impact of Christ to the periphery: matters of ethnicity, language, land, geography, and race; of class, education, status, income, and occupation; of gender and family, male or female, and parent or child. All of these distinctions are no longer of central relevance to what we are. What matters is the new reality, sonship, which is obtained in Christ.'
I find myself returning again and again to this verse. It's written on my brain (and hopefully on my heart) as a reminder that belonging to Christ calls us out of and beyond those distinctions which (although in themselves are not negative) can so often divide and separate us from one another (and so also from God).
No comments:
Post a Comment