Hello, my church. May God bless you. My name is Isabel Quirós and it is for me a pleasure to be with you today. I come from very far and I never thought I would come to the United States some day. I always said I would not get on an airplane if they paid me. But I did not think also that my son would be successful so far away from me. I always thought he would do well but not soooo much. My boy, why did not you stay in Puerto Rico taking care of a church there? Ok, you do not have to say anything now; we will talk in your house. For sure he is going to say that I am embarrassing him in public again, but the truth is that I am very proud of my boy. After he studied to be a pastor, he became a doctor and he knows a lot about the Bible, so I ask him all the questions that I have. You see, I read the Bible a lot. Sometimes I ask questions that my former pastors look at me with their mouths wide open and try to tell me stories that don´ convince me so I ask my son.
Well, they didn´ invite me to talk about my son. They invited me to talk about Paul and of his allegory of Sarah and Hagar. ¡Quite a man this Paul! He is famous as a male thinker and arrogant I would say. But when I realized that he defended the gentiles when others thought that they should be “circuncised” and then I realized that Paul was protecting them because they were trying to impose upon them a culture that it wasn´t theirs so as to become part of the people of God, I said to myself: “I have to study this letter to the Galatians more thoroughly.”
And listen, you know what I learned? That over and over again, with a different story Paul insists that the right gospel does not require the gentiles to be “circuncised” to be part of the People of God. Paul is telling the Galatians that whoever tries to force the gentiles to be “circuncised” is as if they were being slaved again and therefore minimizing Christ´s sacrifice on the cross. Look, I think that those Galatians misunderstood the whole thing. Either that or Paul was upset, because he says the same thing three different ways. First he tells them that that was what was agreed at the Jerusalem Council many years back. Then he tells them of slavehood and freedom. He tells them of being children of Abraham, of law and grace, of the slaves and of the adopted children, and last, tired of saying the same thing in 20 different ways, it seems to me, he tells them the story of Sarah and Hagar. I will tell you something: I din´t like it at all what he does with the story because he does not mention Sarah at all. Then he changed the identity of the sons to be because of the mother, to be because of the father and then at the end of the story Hagar is in a poorer situation than in the original story because besides being a slave and a foreigner Paul leaves her “kicked out” and having children that will be slaves. But, when I learned that the purpose was to give a new interpretation to an old text, on light of Christ´s sacrifice and with a liberating message for the gentiles, then I calmed down.
The situation was that there were people preaching to the Galatians that they had to be “circuncised” to be part of the community of believers and apparently “those who were confusing them” (which Paul never really identifies) were using the story of Sarah and Hagar. They said that the children of the covenant were the children of Sarah, the “circuncised”, but other of other races, the foreigner or gentiles, like Hagar and the Galatians, who were not “circuncised” were not children of the covenant and they were not heirs. So, you know, if the Galatians wanted to be heirs they would have to change mothers and according to the “troublemakers” they would be heirs if they get “circuncised”. And then Paul appears and tell them, “No way, Mr. That’s not so. If you interpret allegorically the story of the free and the slave you will find out that really the children of the covenant are the children of the promise, the children born by the grace of God, not by human will like the son of Hagar.” Do you notice that Paul changed the story? Now it turns out that it is God the father who determines if they are children or not and the “criteria” is divine intervention, it is not race nor culture. For sure Paul scored. I imagine that those who heard this new interpretation of the story were dumbfounded with their mouths even wider than the pastors when I ask them questions that they cannot answer. And Paul used this interpretation to encourage the Galatians to reject any teaching that was not according to the gospel of grace. They were to stand firm against any threat to the freedom that Christ obtained on the cross.
Well, but Paul had already said that of the new identity based on God and Christ´s crucifixion so I kept thinking “what would be what´s new” in this passage. I kept thinking if Paul meant something new in this passage and that´s the reason why he tried to reinterpret the story of Sarah and Hagar. Naturally, he had to show that he was well versed in the scriptures and could interpret them as well as those “troublemakers”, but I thought there must be something else. Then I realized that what is new about this passage is the quotation of Isaiah of the sterile woman but who has many children and the references to the present Jerusalem and the celestial one. At first sight one associates a sterile woman with Sarah, who gave birth by divine intervention when she was older than I am now. But it turns out that such words of Isaiah refer precisely to the city of Jerusalem. That is what my son told me, who is the one that really knows about theology. Then my son showed me in a chart that Paul was using a way of philosophizing that was like placing opposite ideas in two columns. Hot-cold, good-evil, etc. Well, Paul place in this chart of Galatians 4: law-freedom; children of the free-children of the slave; present Jerusalem-future Jerusalem; earthly Jerusalem-celestial Jerusalem; Hagar- ____________(blank). Look, when I saw the chart that my son wrote and I “look” at the space blank it came to mind verse 4:19 that Paul says that he is having childbirth pains. I thought: “Naturally! Paul does not mention the name of Sarah because he is Sarah, and does not mention the names of the “troublemakers” because they are Hagar.” Paul was comparing his preaching with theirs, and the gospel that they preached with the gospel he preached. Can you see that the two covenants he mentions are not the New Testament and the Old Testament, neither Judaism and Christianity? They are two different interpretations of the sacrifice of Christ and of how one can enter the Christian community.
But what Paul says in this passage that is new about Jerusalem, when you place it in the chart, the present and earthly Jerusalem is placed on the same side as the law and slavehood. Do you see where I am going with this, right? Paul is placing the blame about the “confussion” in Galatia on the church in Jerusalem. Look, it had already been agreed in Jerusalem that the preaching to the gentiles was about a gospel free of the law and the circumcision and now this people show up and start preaching a whole different thing and Jerusalem lets them do so. No wonder Paul was disappointed! Paul was holding the leaders accountable for their responsibility to enforce the agreement reached at the Jerusalem Council and their responsibility to accept all the gentiles who believed in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ and their responsibility to protect them so that no one would force them to be “circuncised”. Paul is calling the leaders to shape up.
Dear church, this is a never ending tale. Nowadays we do not talk about been “circuncised” or not but just the same there are groups who want to impose rules and who judge other believers because they do not observe the same religious practices. Nowadays in my church we do not talk about Christian Jews and gentile Christians but I notice that they talk about Hispanics, Latinos, Asian and other minorities and there are some who criticize that each group worship God with different music and instruments. Well, I don’t like what I hear that Calvin talked about “a capella” nor do I like that about using only the organ. But nothing of that is what is important. In this passage what is important is that Christ obtained for us the freedom to be called children, male and female, regardless of our race or our culture. In this passage what is important is that such freedom requires us to claim from our authorities and our leaders when they are not accepting their responsibilities. Dear church, what are the divisions in our church today? What are our leaders doing “regardin” this? Are they working for the unity of the church or are they allowing, or even causing, more divisions “en el” body of Christ? Get up, dear church! Live you freedom in Christ. Let us pray.
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