Paul with the apostles
1 After fourteen years I again went up to Jerusalem with Bar nabas, and Titus came with us.
2 Following a revelation, I went to lay before them the Gospel that I am preaching to the pagans. I had a private meeting with the leaders – lest I should be working or have worked in a wrong way.
3 But they did not im pose circumcision, not even on Titus who is Greek and who was with me.
4 But there were some intruders and false brothers who had gained access to watch over the way we live the freedom Christ has given us. They would have us enslaved by the Law,
5 but we refused to yield even for a moment; so that the truth of the Gospel remain intact for you.
6 The others, the more respect able leaders – it does not matter what they were before: God pays no attention to the status of a person – gave me no new instructions.
7 They recognized that I have been entrusted to give the Good News to the pagan nations, just as Peter has been entrusted to give it to the Jews.
8 In the same way that God made Peter the apostle of the Jews, he made me the apostle of the pagans.
9 James, Cephas and John ac knowledged the graces God gave me. Those men who were regarded as the pillars of the Church stretched out their hand to me and Barnabas as a sign of fel lowship; we would go to the pagans and they to the Jews.
10 We should only keep in mind the poor among them. I have taken care to do this.
The conflict with Peter
11 When later Cephas came to Antioch, I con fronted him since he deserved to be blamed.
12 Before some of James’ people arrived, he used to eat with non-Jewish people. But when they arrived, he withdrew and did not mingle anymore with them, for fear of the Jewish group.
13 The rest of the Jews followed him in this pretense, and even Barnabas was part of this insincerity.
14 When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the Gospel, I said to Cephas publicly: If you who are Jewish agreed to live like the non-Jews, setting aside the Jewish customs, why do you now compel the non-Jews to live like Jews?
15 We are Jews by birth; we are not pagan sinners.
16 Yet we know that a person is justified not by practicing the law but by faith in Christ Jesus. So we have believed in Christ Jesus that we may receive true righteousness from faith in Christ Jesus, and not from the practices of the Law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.
17 Now, if in our own effort to be justified in Christ we ourselves have been found to be sinners, then Christ would be at the service of sin. Not so!
18 But look: if we do away with something and then restore it, we admit we did wrong.
19 As for me, the very Law brought me to die to the Law, that I may live for God. I am crucified with Christ.
20 Do I live? It is no longer me, Christ lives in me. My life in this body is life through faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
21 In this way I don’t ignore the gift of God, for, if justification comes through the practice of the Law, Christ would have died for nothing.
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Comments Letter to the Galatians, Chapter 2
• 2.1 This meeting in Jerusalem is related in Acts 15and its commentary is found there.
When they became Christians, the Jews by race and reli gion continued to observe the Law of Moses in which the great commandments (to know God, not to murder…), the rituals of worship, and national customs are combined. When people of different races began to be converted to Christ, Paul demanded that they should not be forced to follow the Mosaic Law. Naturally, they had to respect their neighbor and were not to steal, but this emerges from the Gospel without having to impose the Mosaic Law.
So that the truth of the Gospel remain intact in you (v. 5). Because the Gospel frees us from all that limits our horizon. God is pure liberty and pure gift. May he be seen (it is not wrong) as the fabulous creator of an immense universe, or (what has more truth) as unique Love and Lover, Father of all who are able to return his love, he cannot tie us to a certain way of dressing nor enclose himself in our cooking and our times of prayer. Time has come for reciprocal kindness (Jn 1:17).
We are concerned, and rightly so, for keeping true faith. Here Paul shows that keeping the truth of the Gospel is not only a matter of formulas; our very way of life, free vis-à-vis of all that is not God, proclaims what the Gospel is.
It does not matter what they were before (v. 6). Peter, James and John had no titles, or money or culture. They may even have been despised by more learned believers. Paul does not pay attention to that; he looks upon them only as the leaders of the Church.
• 11. In the church, Paul feels it is his duty to rep rimand the supreme leader, the first pope. Jesus promised Peter that his faith would not fail but he did not say that he would never make a mistake.
Jews did not eat with pagan non-Jews since, for them, it would have been something “impure,” a blemish. When some Jews were converted and entered the Church, if they had maintained this attitude to ward their Christian brothers and sisters from another race, they would have kept an inadmissible division within a community renewed by Christ.
Peter (or Cephas: see Jn 1:42) knows that now all people are equal and he accepts for him self, not to take the Law into account. Yet he is afraid of what his friends and compatriots will think. He does not realize that, in order to please them, he is endangering the evan gelization of those who are not Jewish. These people, in being seen as impure, are no longer at home in the Church. They are pressured to adopt the Jewish customs and with this, they will become alien to their own people. If they do not comply, they will be second-class citizens in the Church.
This problem is always with us, since often those who give the tone in the Christian community belong to a certain social level: others have no reason to do everything as they do. Each one in the Church comes from a particular milieu with its culture and language: we have the right to be shocked by what is foreign to our own culture but we must bear many things we do not like. The Church has to be open to diverse peoples.
• 15. We are Jews… Paul develops here what his reply to Peter contained: when you welcomed Christian faith, you gave up any hope of being rewarded for fulfilling the commandments; you put instead all your trust in Jesus as a Savior. This chal lenge has made Christian faith very strong. If now, for fear of scan dalizing the Jews you decline from eating with non-Jews, all will understand that you have gone too far and that in fact the Law is still valid.
If we do away with something and then restore it (v. 18). This is exactly what the Galatians are doing in their turn. Paul taught them to be free of the prejudices of their pagan religion just as of the practices of the Old Testament. Now without these practices they feel naked: was faith in Christ sufficient when all around them each one had religion and practices? It was not pleasant to be circumcised, but at least, it gave you an identity.
We have here a summary of what Paul will develop four years later in chapters 2–8in his letter to the Romans. We must not let the defense of Christian freedom, something that was so new and had not finished cracking cultural and social molds, hide from us what Paul would most like to transmit: “Christ lives in me.” Paul is not a theoretician; what makes him write today and tomorrow urges him to cross seas and traverse mountains is a passionate love of Jesus-God. It would need audacity to comment on this dwelling of Christ in those he loves and who love him. It has taken nothing less than this love without reserve, to bring about the greatest achievement of Christian faith and yet the least noticed: pardon and humility among others: with Christ I am crucified.