N. T. Wright - Galatians

I magine youre in South Africa in the 1970s. Apartheid is at its height. You are embarked on a risky project: to build a community center where everybody will be equally welcome, no matter what their color or race. Youve designed it; youve laid the foundation in such a way that only the right sort of building can be built. Or so you think.

You are called away urgently to another part of the country. A little later you get a letter. A new group of builders are building on your foundation. They have changed the design, and are installing two meeting rooms, with two front doors, one for whites only and one for blacks only. Some of the local people are mightily relieved. They always thought there was going to be trouble, putting everyone together like that. Others, though, asked the builders why the original idea wouldnt do. Oh, said the builders airily, that chap who laid the foundation, he had some funny ideas. He didnt really have permission to make that design. Hed got a bit muddled. Were from the real authorities. This is how its got to be.

That was the sort of situation in which Paul found himself, almost two thousand years ago in what is now south central Turkey. He was building with people, not bricks and mortar, laying the foundation of the good news. The one creator God had unveiled his long-awaited plan for the world in his son Jesus who was executed by the Romans but raised by God. The good news doesnt end there either. Jesus death and resurrection mean that God is now building a new family, a single family, a family with no divisions, no separate races, no Jews at this table and Gentiles at another.

Afterward others came in saying Paul didnt really know what he was doing. He didnt have proper authority from the apostles in Jerusalem. Yes, we all believe that Jesus is the Messiah, they said; but we cant have Jewish believers and Gentile believers living as though they were part of the same family. If the Gentile believers want to be part of the real inner circle, they have to become Jews first.

Paul was so incensed that he wrote a sharp letter to the Galatiansone of the first, perhaps the very first, that Paul ever wrote to one of the young churches he planted on the eastern rim of the Mediterranean. (For more on this letter also see my Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians, published by SPCK and Westminster John Knox, on which this guide is based.) That means it is among the very earliest documents we possess from the beginning of the churchs existence.

Through this guide, prepared with the help of Dale and Sandy Larsen for which I am grateful, we will see a group of people already full of life, bubbling with energy, with questions, problems, excitement, danger and, above all, a sense of the presence and power of the living God who has changed the world through Jesus and is now at work in a new way by his Spirit. We all look for those same qualities to touch us as well as we delve more deeply into them.