Reflecting on this week’s sermon text, Galatians 3:23-29, led me to recall our denomination’s favorite image for Christian unity across the diversity of human differences: a mosaic. The ancient art of fashioning an image by laying down bits of stone or ceramic of different colors is an excellent metaphor for how Christians are joined to each other in the Body of Christ.
As we come to the verses of the text at the end of Galatians 3, Paul has been responding to controversy in the Galatians church in regard to demanding conformity of Gentiles to Jewish religious observances, especially circumcision. Lurking under that issue appears to be the general feeling among Jewish Christians that Gentile believers were in some way inferior. Paul takes great pains to undermine that attitude and demonstrate that anyone must come to Christ in the same way, through faith rather than by “works of the law.”
The “new perspective on Paul,” perhaps most famously represented by N. T. Wright, would have us reassess our typical understanding of Paul’s insistence on that faith supersedes works. The “works” at issue are not all efforts at moral goodness, but the specifically Jewish “works” which marked off their identity as a people, circumcision, diet, observance of holy days, etc. In contrast to those identity markers, faith in Christ is now what distinguishes God’s people, and does equally regardless of one’s social status, gender, or racial origin.
Verses 23 and 24 argue that the Jewish law was not the fundamental basis of Jewish identity, but actually functioned as a kind of baby-sitter–“disciplinarian” in the NRSV–so that God’s people might maintain their relationship with the Lord until Christ arrived and brought all people to Himself by faith. Jewish relationship with God was based in faith from the outset. See what Paul says about Abraham in chapter 3 verse 6. The law was a kind of guardian to keep them connected to God. Yet the law is not simply tossed aside. Only those aspects, like circumcision, which were tailored to preserve identity have now become unnecessary.
God’s ultimate aim was that all people might come to Him in the same way, by faith. That was accomplished in Jesus Christ. So “in Christ,” says verse 28, old important distinctions are displaced. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
This oneness in Christ and the suggested absence of human distinctions is not some sort of mystical disappearance of genuine differences among people. In the churches of Paul’s time and on into our own time, we continue to see racial, social, and gender differences among Christians. Only wrong-headed utopian cultists have attempted to vanish those differences entirely. Instead, the point is that different sorts of people “fit into” the body of Christ like the pieces of a mosaic. There are different colors, different shapes, yet they each have an equal status as an equally important part of the whole.
We can see how Paul worked out the practical implications of this equality in Christ in each aspect. He constantly welcomed Gentiles into the church and some of them, like Titus, became leaders. At various points in his letters he greets or mentions female colleagues in ministry in ways that point to their status as leaders alongside men. And his letter to Philemon in regard to the slave Onesimus calls on the former owner of the slave to welcome Onesimus as an equal to Paul and a brother in the Lord.
Thus Galatians 3:28 stands out as a verse at the heart of our Covenant understanding of what the church and the ultimate kingdom of God is meant to be: a mosaic of diverse people united in Christ to portray the beauty and glory of God. May we continue to unpack the implications of that great Gospel declaration in our own time.