The bride waits for the groom to return

By John Pearring

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/101020.cfm
Galatians 3:22-29
Luke 11:27-28

In our overly politicized world, today’s reading from Galatians offers a spiritual challenge. How do we balance the law of God, or any fundamental legal system that rules our life, with the freedom from all burdensome legalism when we align our will to the will of God? In a pure, honest, and holy life the practical law and spiritual love work seamlessly. That perfection is rare, only visible in the saints among us. 

By not breaking any of God's law we love more easily. Law and love then work seamlessly. Seamlessly and easily are not the same thing. In fact, the balancing act of law and freedom are quite difficult to keep in synch as long as we’re under the umbrella of sin.

I am having a personal difficulty with the sin side of this spiritual dilemma. Both my own sin and the sin of the world. I know personally this pull and pushing of sinful choices that overwhelms my daily progress to love. I cannot expect that the world made up of so many knuckleheads like me would have any less difficulty. So, what do we do about this?

There’s an answer in today's verses from Galatians. Paul that helps deal with this conundrum. Living under freedom from legalism, though, requires a shift from focus on doing the right things to relating to the right person. Some background might help set the stage for Paul’s answer.

This scripture on Galatians, a short segment of one chapter, may be the earliest writing from St. Paul. Jesus’ Ascension happened sometime around 29 or 30 AD — 33 years after Jesus' birth in 3 or 4 BC. The fledgling Church of the third decade after Jesus' death began its development with Spirit-filled certainty. These people knew Jesus personally. They saw him live, die, rise from the dead, and then watched him rise into heaven. In addition, they all received the indwelling of the Holy Spirit unlike any creature since the first creation of sentient human holy beings. 

Imagine, then, the scant few thousand members of Jesus' Church. They slowly built a Jewish-bred Christianity. Because they took Jesus'  metaphor of their faith community as his waiting bride to heart, the early Christians expected Jesus’ imminent return from heaven. The waiting bride, in Jewish culture, stays at her parent’s home while her betrothed goes to make a place for their new life. This could take a month, or even more than a year. The wedding feast is only held when the groom is done making a home for their marriage.

The early Christians lived as the metaphorical bride of Christ. They understood waiting for Jesus in the same sense as any betrothed. Days were filled with preparation, which included gathering items for their home, sequestering from other suitors (of many divinely stated origins), all the while not knowing when Jesus (their husband) would come to get them.

For four years, the Christians lived in this waiting, preparing mode with Saul (renamed Paul) as their antagonist. They followed, basically, the same patterns of rules they had as Jews — going to temple and reading the Torah and the prophets. Just like their Jewish background had taught them, they consecrated themselves to the Lord, serving only him. Their numbers expanded, converting their people into fulfilled Messianic Jews. They awakened religious Jews, familiar with the Messianic story, with hearts open to a Jesus-borne faith. 

The Christians held Eucharistic celebrations wherever they were allowed, mostly in homes. This blatantly Christian ritual of bread and wine created consternation for the Jewish leadership and its unconverted followers. Sacrifice took place in the temple, with severe expectation regarding animal sacrifices. 

Very early following Pentecost, a separate order of leadership formed in Christianity, shifting away from the cultural structure of the Jewish faith. Theirs had been a law-based existence. As a Torah-people, they owned a holy land, offering priestly sacrifices for forgiveness. They followed innumerable food and health regulations, and their culture was riddled with now visible contradictions for the Christians. Jesus taught freedom from a centralized legalism. The law didn't win eternal life. Jesus won that for them in his death and resurrection. Their sanctified existence as Jewish people sacrificing in a temple with a priestly representative was over. Every Christian became the temple of the Holy Spirit. They all now ate the consecrated bread and wine. The sacrifice was completed. 

As Jews, these early Christians still saw the Law, or Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, as sacred scripture. They did not abandon it. Almost everything they discussed, however, was how Jesus had both reinterpreted the Law and how he had fulfilled it, and what that now meant for them. The Messiah had come and left them with an apostolic mission, not a parochial, culturally and racially sequestered nation, separated from Gentiles.

During these first few years, Paul was a member of a kind of Jewish police. He looked for Christians who went outside the lines of the law of the prophets. Around 34 AD, very early in the Church's still Jewishly aligned existence, Paul attended the stoning of the blaspheming Stephen. The book of Acts tells this story of Stephens’ martyrdom. The law, with increasing intensity, had come up against the Messianic community. The Christians more and more eagerly witnessed the unimaginable lifestyle of living an eternal life of love with eagerness to die and be joined with God. They were free to die, free to live only for Jesus, and operated entirely from love rather than regulations.

Time goes by, and the waiting for Jesus’ return continues to stretch on for three more decades until Jerusalem is destroyed by the Romans. The Jewish legal system did not save the Hebrew people. The temple was finally reduced to rubble, never to be rebuilt. The apostles and their assigned deacons and pastors spent more and more time preaching the words and interpretations of the Old Testament as Jesus had taught them. In this framework, the many settings of eager listeners, not just students but actively alive Christians with the Spirit living in them also, began to write down that preaching and teaching. They wanted to get the spirit of Paul and the apostles preaching correct.

Following Paul’s conversion back in 35 AD, he becomes a member of a Messianic community. He is brought up to speed by Jesus in personal visions and the Spirit-filled community he is living with. As Paul’s ministry begins, his legalist background assists him in forming an orderly picture of Jesus’ teaching. The order of the Law is still the framework of explaining the Christian truth, providing doctrinal backing. 

Within the next decade, the 40's, one of the Gospels is finished. It was likely Matthew. The letter of James is written. And Paul writes this Letter to the Galatians. It’s at this incredible literary and historically recorded point, less than 20 years after Jesus’ resurrection, that Paul has mastered the wide-open, mind-blowing theology of Jesus’ Church. He summarizes that into two verses.

Before faith came, we were held in custody under law,
confined for the faith that was to be revealed.
Consequently, the law was our disciplinarian for Christ,
that we might be justified by faith.

Remember, the law isn’t an evil thing. Not at all. Our spiritual conversion, however, changes the motivation of the law. A relationship to God through faith is now the primary purpose of the law. Faith given to Christians reveals the hidden Jesus, the one spoken about in every book of the Law, or Torah, the historical books, the wisdom writing, and the major and minor prophets. Jesus is revealed in our hearts, presented from the same Law through prophet writings today as when Paul was converted. 

But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a disciplinarian.
For through faith you are all children of God in Christ Jesus.

The change that takes place moves us from being practitioners and policemen of laws and regulations to a new life. We become willing, excited examples as brothers and sisters of Christ. In step with the Holy Spirit we become witnesses of the faith that is in us. That is, we no longer follow a life of all-encompassing legal conformity, including being the watchdog over everyone else. The law is still there. Nothing of the law is wrong. We, however, are different. 

We are just like the early Jews, battling with legal conformities, even arguing over which laws are good and which are bad. When faith awakens us to God’s presence, the law comes alive. God’s presence supersedes every formal lockstep behavior we previously had with an eagerness to do as our Father asks us. We can revert quite easily, though, to the requirements of the law.

Paul explains to us that in a law-based world we are confined to set rules, not the living Spirit. Lockstep to rules, our behavior marks our faith. We should not stray outside the lines of the law, because the law is there to keep everyone safe. At the extremes of such a world, the free person—the one who follows the beat of God's plans and ideals for each life—struggles to survive. 

In a witnessing world we are aligned to God. Since the law came from God its not a bad thing. We now have a positive way to live it.

The two positions can be compatible, but without a living, loving God, legal conformity has no restrictions. It’s my contention that we’re still controlled today by the Old Testament vision of authority as disciplinarian. Our societies at almost every level fail to realize that the “faith” to be revealed has actually taken place.

Before faith came, we were held in custody under law,
confined for the faith that was to be revealed.

The small community of Israelites who lived as both nomads and as landowners lived much like most societies. They had laws and regulations that held them together. Their law was specifically founded upon the one loving God. Other societies did not have that fullness, though without doubt all holiness in other faiths still recognizes the truth of the creator. For over two thousand years the Hebrew people ruled others with their law, and they were ruled by other laws. Laws projected obedience to God. They had laws and regulations which fostered their health and prosperity. They had a legal system, the “law,” that controlled every aspect of their lives. 

Now, they, and we have a faith relationship rather than just a legal contract. Jesus is our loving brother, the Father is our loving parent, and the Holy Spirit is our loving comforter. The Father gives us knowledge of everything we need to know. The Spirit fills us with courage and kindness. 

The brother, though, is our kin, and he makes every human who believes in him also our kin. Those who don’t yet believe need us to show them Jesus. This is our witness of faith, proven by Jesus' fulfillment of the law given to a holy people. And we are the receptors and the new temples of God's living Spirit. 

We still wait for the return of the groom, because we are the bride of Christ. He has not yet finished making a place for us. He has not yet finished creation, the birth of our new brothers and sisters. 

There is neither Jew nor Greek,
there is neither slave nor free person,
there is not male and female;
for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants,
heirs according to the promise.