He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.
Galatians 3:14 (NIV)
The Promise Reaches the Outsiders
The clinic smells like wet dog from the front desk out to the parking lot, and the people who work there stopped noticing years ago. The newest of them is fifty-one, two years in, and she will be the newest until somebody else gets hired. She spent her whole first working life doing something else, and the younger staff haven’t let it go once. Time served runs that building the way it runs most buildings.
God made the promise this passage argues about to one man, and a law that arrived 430 years later didn’t set it aside. Paul takes his example from ordinary life. Once a human agreement has been properly drawn up, nobody can cancel it or add a clause to it, and God had drawn up the agreement with Abraham long before the law showed up.
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. Paul gives the reason for it: so that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus. Outsiders. People born outside that promise with no family claim on any of it.
There’s a turn in the argument that is easy to walk past. Paul says the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed, and he reads that as one person rather than a crowd of descendants, and the one person is Christ. The Gentiles are not attached to the side of the family. They arrive through him.
The promise of the Spirit stands at the far end of it, received by faith. God gives his own Spirit to people who came in from outside the household, on the same terms he used with Abraham, who was handed a promise he had not earned.
The people this letter went to were being told there was more to do before they were fully in. The woman at the clinic is being told something like it in a quieter way. Paul is arguing about where a person stands with God, and about what a promise does once God has made it.
The law came 430 years after the promise and couldn’t touch it, and the blessing given to Abraham went out past his own household, to people he had never heard of.
She works the Saturday she’s given. When the retriever gets loose in the corridor she’s the one who catches him, because she’s the one standing there, and her years in that building have nothing to do with it.
A Prayer to Remember
I check people over before I welcome them. I do it fast, without saying anything, and I’ve done it at church. Break the habit at the place where it starts. When somebody walks in who has no business at my table as far as I can tell, let me set a place for them before I’ve decided anything about them.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
