The Son Unveiled in Me
The Son Unveiled in Me
Galatians 1:10-17
by William Klock
As I was digging around in our crawlspace this week, I found my 1970s Tupperware lunchbox full of my old Star Wars action figures. Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan and Darth Vader have these neat little light sabres hidden in their arms that slide out when it’s time for them to duel. At one point I had Luke’s X-wing fighter and I was remembering putting him in the cockpit and flying around the house, looking for the Death Star’s thermal exhaust port. Luke might have been in the cockpit, but I was going to destroy the Death Star and save the galaxy. As the week went on I was thinking about our text from Galatians 1and particularly Paul’s background. I started wondering what sort of games and role-playing young Paul would have engaged in? Who were his heroes? Based on what he tells us about himself and from what we know of First Century Judaism and of the Pharisees, it isn’t too hard to imagine Paul playing with his brothers or his neighbourhood friends and taking on the part of, say, Phinehas, Aaron’s grandson. When the men of Israel were enticed into sexual sin and idolatry by the pagan women of Peor, Phinehas, in an act of holy zeal, ran the ringleader through with a spear, pinning him to the ground along with his Midianite paramour. Or maybe Elijah. Even though it seemed that everyone in Israel had turned to pagan idols, Elijah dared to confront the prophets of Baal. On them mountain top, Elijah taunted them and made fun of their god, then—again with holy zeal—called down fire from heaven. Or Mattathias, the zealous priest who sparked the Maccabean Revolt. Antiochus Epiphanes offered him the title “Friend of the King” if he would offer a sacrifice to the Greek gods. Matthias refuse, but another priest offered to make the sacrifice in his place. Matthias slaughtered that people-pleasing priest on the altar and called on everyone who was zealous for torah and the covenant to join him.
These were the heroes of the Pharisees and all the other faithful in Israel in the days of Paul. In light of that, it’s ironic that the people in Galatia have accused him of being a “people pleaser”, because that’s exactly what Paul—in his old days—would have called any Jews who weren’t as zealous as him in keeping torah. Of course, it’s the false teachers in Galatia who are being the real people pleasers, but Paul won’t say that until the end of the letter.
So let’s start where we left off last Sunday, with verse 10 of Galatians 1. Paul has written some pretty scathing words to the Galatians. He’s outlined the essentials of his gospel and he’s pronounced a curse on anyone who teaches anything else. And now he writes:
Well now, does that sound as though I’m trying to make up to people—or to God? Or that I’m trying to curry favour with people? If I were still pleasing people, I wouldn’t be a slave of the Messiah.
It’s a safe bet that when you hear someone warning about false gospels and pronouncing curses on those who teach such things, you’re not dealing with a people pleaser. Paul makes that clear. And then he turns the accusation back on them. “If I were still pleasing people,” he writes. As much as Paul the Pharisee had devoted his life to going after the people pleasers who compromised torah in order to curry the favour of the gentiles, well now, from the perspective of life in Jesus and the Spirit, that old life of his turns out—ironically—to have been a life of people pleasing. He was a slave to them even though it didn’t seem that way at the time, but now he’s a slave to the Messiah and his only interest is in faithfully proclaiming his message and pleasing the God who sent him.
But Paul needs to explain himself a good bit more, so he does something that he doesn’t do very often: he tells them—and us—about himself. Whenever Paul does tell one of these before and after stories, it’s always to end with Jesus. He does this in Philippians 3 to make the point that for the sake of Jesus and the gospel he’s given up his privileges. What he says here comes to a climax later in Chapter 2 as he passionately declares that “I am crucified with the Messiah” so that “I through the law died to the law” because “the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me.” In the end, none of this is about Paul. It’s about Jesus and the only reason Paul writes any of this is to defend against the charge that his gospel is of human origin and, therefore, in some way deficient. So he begins in verses 11 and 12:
You see, Brothers, let me make it clear to you: the gospel announced by me is not a mere human invention. I did not receive it from a human being, not was I taught it; it came through an unveiling of Jesus the Messiah.
Literally, “I would have you know, Brothers”. This is important. Paul first defended his apostleship. He was commissioned directly by Jesus himself and he speaks for Jesus and no one else. Now he defends his gospel. It’s not something he cooked up himself, nor is it something he got second-hand from others.
This is worth spending a little time parsing out. The gospel that you and I know and preach came to us from others. It was passed down from our parents and grandparents, from our Sunday school teachers and pastors, maybe from a preacher we watched on TV or a book we read. But somehow all of us here are believers in Jesus the Messiah because someone else proclaimed the good news about him to us and now we—I hope—proclaim it to others. Even if we first encountered the gospel through the pages of scripture, it came from some other person. Maybe from Matthew or John or even Paul, but from someone. Part of the work of the Spirit has been to see that this gospel has been preserved and passed down from one person to the next faithfully. Even if you or I get it wrong, the Spirit-inspired scriptures are there to set it right again. But Paul’s point is that he didn’t get the gospel from another human being. If he’d got his gospel from someone else—even from Peter or James—it’s always possible he got something confused or wrong in the transmission. If he’d got it from another human, then it’s possible their accusation could stick. So Paul stresses: “I didn’t get it from anyone else. It wasn’t taught to me by anyone else. The gospel came to me directly through an unveiling—he uses that word apocalypse, the same one John uses to describe his “revelation” of Jesus—the gospel came to Paul through an unveiling of Jesus the Messiah. In other words, Jesus, who was raised from the dead and now enthroned in heaven, suddenly and unexpectedly became visible to Paul. God’s future was revealed to Paul in the present and it changed everything, because Paul now can’t help but see everything in light of this Jesus whom he knew to be crucified and now knows with absolute certainty, has risen from the dead. Brothers and Sisters, the reality that Jesus rose from the dead changes everything. It changed everything for Paul. It should change everything for us. It’s the lens through which we should see everything.
Paul surely must have told the Galatians the story of his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. They already knew the details so he doesn’t recount them all here. It’s that they’ve forgotten why that day was so important to Paul, so in the next five verses he explains why that event was so important. He writes in verse 13:
You’ve heard the way I behaved when I was still within “Judaism”. I persecuted the church of God violently and ravaged it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age and people. I was extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions.
Paul’s giving them a before and after portrait of himself. This is the “before”. Think of Paul when Stephen was stoned to death for proclaiming the good news about Jesus. He held people’s coats so they could throw stones. A few years later he sought out authorisation from the Jewish officials so that he could actually hunt down these Christians and bring them in for “justice”. Paul wasn’t fooling around. It helps us understand why and it helps us understand what Saul of Tarsus was all about if we understand what he means here by “Judaism”. To us “Judaism” means a religion the same way we think of “Christianity” or “Islam” or Buddhism” as religions. But in the First Century no one thought that way. Paul certainly didn’t think of “Judaism” over against “Christianity”. Paul uses this uncommon word Judaismos that seems to have been coined by the author of 2 Maccabees. It doesn’t just refer to a set of beliefs and practises in the sense that modern people think about a “religion”. Instead, it describes the Judeans who were loyal to Jewish faith and practise, who actively promoted and advocated these traditional ways of Jewish life, and who actively defended it against the Pagans and, especially, defended it against those Jews who would compromise it for the sake of the pagans—people pleasers.
As he says, he was “zealous” for those ancestral traditions. He was out to purify the Jewish people: to fend off pagan influences, to get his fellow Jews to take a stand for the covenant, and to bring compromisers and people-pleasers to heel. Paul had grown up with these values. His heroes were the men of the past who were also zealous for the Lord and for his law. There are various writings from that time period that give us a sense of how Paul would have thought. One of the best is the opening chapters of 1 Maccabees, where we read about Mattathias and his rebellion against the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes. As I said before, Mattathias was a priest, and when the Greeks tried to entice him to offer a sacrifice to their gods, he refused. When another of his fellow priests agreed to offer the sacrifice, Mattathias had had enough. He killed that priest right there on the altar, along with the Greek official. His rebellion went up not just against their pagan Greek rulers, but against any of their fellow Jews who were compromising the ancestral traditions in order to get along with the pagans. Mattathias’ speech meant to rouse his fellow Jews to action, focuses on the long line of Jewish heroes who were loyal to the Lord’s covenant, from Abraham right down to what was the present day. Mattathias emphasised especially Phinehas and Elijah. The later rabbis did the same. Phinehas had run a spear right through the compromising Zimri and his pagan paramour. Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal before he slaughtered them and called on the people of Israel to purge pagan influence from the land. The Maccabees called on that same tradition about two centuries before Jesus, when they went up against the Greeks and against their own people who would compromise with the pagans. This is what Paul is talking about when he says he was zealous for the ancestral traditions. I ran around the backyard with Luke Skywalker in his X-wing to destroy the Death Star. If Paul had grown up with action figures, he’d have had a Phinehas with “real spear action” and an Elijah playset where he could build an altar and call down fire from heaven on the prophets of Baal. He might have had a little Mattathias, a sword in one hand to take on the Greeks and a knife in the other to circumcise the Jewish people pleasers. This is the zealous background that drove him to persecute the church. Paul knew that Jesus had claimed to be the Messiah. He knew that Jesus had been crucified. And he didn’t believe the tales for one second that Jesus had been raised from the dead. As far as he was concerned, Jesus was dead and that meant he couldn’t be the Messiah and all these Jews claiming to follow a dead Messiah, well, they were going to undermine the faith and practise of God’s people.
It’s also worth noting how Paul refers to the “church of God”. It’s literally “assembly of God”. Paul likes to use this phrase to distinguish the church from the Jews and from the Greeks. He borrows it from the Greek version of the Old Testament, which talks about Israel as the “assembly of Israel”, “assembly of the Lord”, or “assembly of God”. And Paul’s point in using it to refer to the church is that now this multiethnic body of Jews and gentiles—now it is the assembly of God. And not just the local assemblies, but it makes the point that they’re all part of this bigger thing, this bigger assembly.
So Paul looks back to his past life and reminds the Galatians who he was. He was zealous for the traditions of his ancestors. Not just that, but he was no novice. He was a diaspora Jew, but he wasn’t like some others who knew just enough of the ancestral customs to get by. He was steeped in it all and he was utterly devoted to it—again, to the point that he actually sought out permission from the Jewish officials to hunt down Christians in Damascus. And, of course, that’s when everything changed for Paul.
He goes on in verses 15-17:
But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, was pleased to unveil his son in me, so that I might announce the good news about him among the nations—immediately I did not confer with flesh and blood. Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me. No, I went away to Arabia, and afterward returned to Damascus.
This is another point in Paul’s story where we have to be careful. As modern people we read this and we think about it in terms of Paul “converting” from Judaism to Christianity. Again, that’s a very modern understanding of “religion” that didn’t exist in Paul’s day. Paul never stopped being zealous for the God of Abraham, for the law and the prophets, and the promises of God. He was a faithful Jew and as a faithful Jew he longed for the coming of the Messiah. He prayed for the coming of the Messiah, for the Lord to come and rescue his people and set the world to rights. It’s just that when it came to Jesus—well—the idea of a crucified Messiah was blasphemous. That’s why he hated Christians and persecuted them. But then the risen Jesus met him on the road to Damascus and it changed everything. Because suddenly Paul knew that all the stories about Jesus having been raised from the dead were true. He’d been wrong. The impossible had happened. The Jews and the Romans had killed Jesus, they—just as Paul had been doing—ruled him a false Messiah, but then God raised him from the dead and, in doing that, God vindicated his son. That meant that Jesus really was the Messiah. The God of Israel proved it. And for Paul this meant that all the stories he’d grown up with, all the promises of God he’d longed to see fulfilled, all of it, all of them were fulfilled in Jesus.
Again, Paul uses that word “unveiled” again. This same God who had set him apart in his mother’s womb, this same God who had called Paul by his grace—think of that as Paul personalizing what Jews thought of themselves as a people chosen and called by God’s grace to be his people—this same God of Israel had now unveiled his son.
And as Paul writes this, if you know the Hebrew scriptures, it’s really obvious that he’s telling his story in a way that will make people think of the old prophets, especially Jeremiah and Isaiah. Jeremiah wrote about the Lord knowing him and calling him before he was even formed in his mother’s womb. And when Isaiah writes about the servant—the one who in some places embodies Israel and in other places stands over against the people of Israel—Isaiah writes about the Lord forming him in the womb—calling him and naming him, giving him his prophetic vocation—before he’s even born. I think Paul calls back to the calling of Jeremiah and to Isaiah’s servant, because when Jesus met him on the road to Damascus he gave him just this sort of divine calling…like the servant, the Lord “formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him”. And as the Lord said to Jeremiah, “I appoint you a prophet to the nations” and to Isaiah, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
So these people in Galatia are claiming that Paul has forsaken the faith and traditions of his people, but what Paul is saying in response is that, one, it was Jesus himself who called him to this work and, two, that he has in no way forsaken the faith and traditions of his people. To the contrary, he knows those traditions well and in light of this revelation that Jesus really is Israel’s Messiah, then this good news isn’t just for Israel…it’s for everyone. They think that Paul, in going to the gentiles—or maybe better in the way he’s going to the gentiles—they see him as a people pleaser who is disloyal to the faith and Paul’s saying that, no, it’s just the opposite. His message to the gentiles is the fulfilment of that faith—the fulfilment of Israel’s calling and of the law and the prophets. Paul had thought that being zealous for the law meant opposing Jesus, when in fact, in light of Jesus having risen from the dead, being zealous for the law means being zealous for Jesus and even taking this good news to the gentiles.
This transformation in Paul and in his thinking points to another thing we might miss—or, in some cases, that’s obscured by some translations—but Paul says that God unveiled his son in me. We might expect him to say to me, but that’s not how he puts it. It’s in me and I think Paul chose his words—as always—very carefully. It’s not just that God commissioned Paul to proclaim the good news about Jesus to the nations, as if it was just about what he said. It is that, but I think Paul’s key point here is that Paul himself has become a sort of embodiment of the gospel. This Pharisee who was zealous for God, but in such a way that it made him zealous in his hatred for the gentiles and any Jews who might compromise with them, this Pharisee has been so transformed by the unveiling of God’s son in Jesus, that his zeal for God has been turned upside-down—or maybe we should say, right-side-up—and now that zeal is taking him to the nations with that good news.
Now, it took Paul a good while to work this out. Meeting the risen Jesus forced him into a massive paradigm shift in his thinking and even his identity. He had questions. Big questions. But he stresses he didn’t go to “flesh and blood” to ask his questions or to get help sorting it all out. Again, people were accusing him of having a human-made gospel and Paul reiterates that it not only came directly from Jesus, but even in sorting it all out for himself, he went to the Lord, not to other people. Specifically, he says, he didn’t go up to Jerusalem. That’s what most people probably would have expected him to do. That’s what I would have done, if I were in Paul’s shoes. That’s where Peter and James were. They were the chief apostles and the leaders of the church. They’d been wrestling with all this good news stuff for a while already. They were the ones who had spent years with Jesus himself. They had the answers.
But instead, Paul says he went to Arabia—in First Century geography, that meant Mount Sinai. Why did Paul do that? Because, again, he knew the prophets. This time Paul echoes the story of Elijah. If you’re a First Century man of zeal, it makes sense to follow in the footsteps of Elijah—one of the greatest heroes of zeal.
Think of the story of Elijah. After the events on Mount Carmel and Elijah’s slaughter of the prophets of Baal, King Ahab was angry. Elijah was forced to run and hide, so he ran to Mount Sinai. It made sense. That was the place where the Lord had made his promises to Israel. So Elijah went there. He was tired. He was depressed. Despite all the Lord had done through him, Elijah was done. He’d lost hope. He went there to tell God as much. He’d done everything he was supposed to do and—he thought—he’d failed. He declares to the Lord, “I have been very zealous for the Lord of Hosts.” (Notice how much that sounds like Paul.) But the Lord wouldn’t let go of Elijah. He wouldn’t accept his resignation. Instead, he sent him to the wilderness of Damascus (again, sound familiar?) and there Elijah would be given the task to anoint a new king and a new prophet.
So Saul of Tarsus, zealous for the Lord, on his way to Damascus, is met by the risen Jesus. It was the most natural thing in the world, for Paul, to go from there to Mount Sinai, to take his zeal to the Lord, and to wrestle with the God of Abraham—to work it out until it all made sense again in light of Jesus the Messiah. And from Mount Sinai, Paul says, the Lord sent him back to Damascus (just like Elijah) to announce the new king: Jesus the Messiah.
So Paul’s point is that after he met Jesus, he didn’t go to Jerusalem—as his enemies seem to think he did. He didn’t go to work this all out with the original apostles. He went, as Bishop Wright puts it so well, “he went off to do business with God, and he came to do business for God.” And this business was to announce to the whole world that this Jesus, who was crucified and risen, Israel’s Messiah, is the world’s true Lord. Paul includes these echoes of the old prophets to show how rather than being a betrayer of Israel, he’s actually smack in the middle of God’s Israel-shaped promises. In calling back to Elijah, Jeremiah, and Isaiah, he’s making the point that if anyone is being disloyal to the God of Israel or to the covenant—well—it’s definitely not him. The real betrayers are those who reject God’s calling of Paul and his commission to take the good news of Jesus to the nations.
That’s as far as I’ll go today. There’s a bit more to Paul’s introduction and his telling of his own story, but we’ll look at that next week. So what does this mean for us? Brothers and Sisters, notice again how everything for Paul is about Jesus the Messiah and how Jesus’s resurrection from the dead is the lens through which he sees everything. It ought to be the same way for us. We need to be clear about what the gospel is and then we need to live in that gospel, live in this story with Jesus as its centre. The gospel is the good news that this Jesus who was crucified has been raised from the dead and that he’s the world’s true Lord. His death for sins has won the victory over sin and death and inaugurated God’s new creation. Brothers and Sisters, that’s the story, that’s the reality we need to live with and to live in. Consider how it reshaped Paul. He was zealous for the Lord, he was zealous for the covenant, he was zealous for the scriptures—for all the right things, but in the wrong way. Meeting the risen Messiah didn’t mean throwing it all away; it meant refocusing that zeal through a different lens—through Jesus. For others—I’m thinking of those who came from a zealously pagan background—inhabiting the gospel was different in that it meant throwing everything away. Or maybe it meant seeing the world, seeing life, seeing others through the new lens of Jesus rather than the lens of the old pagan gods or their old sinful ways of life or through the corrupt systems of the present evil age. Inhabiting the gospel and reorienting ourselves and our lives around Jesus isn’t an easy thing to do. Even Paul had to go to Sinai for three years to wrestle with the reality of the risen Jesus. But however hard it is and however long it may take, Brothers and Sisters, it’s essential that we do this—we personally and we the church. Part of being gospel people—of being slaves of the Messiah, as Paul puts it—means taking every thought captive to Jesus the Messiah and filtering it through this gospel lens. Every thought, every value, every priority, every act, every bit of our zeal and turning it over and turning it inside-out, deciding whether we keep it or throw it away or rethink it in light of the good news about Jesus the Messiah.
Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, as you’ve unveiled your Son in Paul, you have also unveiled him in each of us. We pray now for the grace to be faithful to this gospel calling and this gospel life—that your Son, Jesus, would truly be unveiled to everyone around us by the gospel work you are working in us by the power of your Spirit. Keep Jesus, his cross, and his resurrection always before us, keep our eyes focused on him, and by your Spirit, help us to truly live in your good news. Through Jesus we pray. Amen.