Reading Paul’s Letter The Letter to the Galatians (2)
In last week’s column, I wrote about St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, from which the second reading at Mass has been taken for the past several weeks. In that column, I provided you with some background information important for understanding why Paul wrote this letter, and I noted the significance of this letter for the great split that took place between Roman Catholics and Protestants in the 16th century. In this week’s column, I will focus on the central theme of Paul’s letter to the Galatians: justification by faith.
If you are like most Catholics the language of justification by faith is strange and unfamiliar to you. And yet it plays a major role in the letters of St. Paul and in the piety of most Protestants. The essential meaning of the expression is this: We are justified, that is to say, put in a right relationship with God, on the basis of faith in Jesus Christ rather than on the basis of what we do. Another way of expressing the meaning of this concept is this: We are saved by God’s grace rather than by our good works.
Paul’s teaching on justification by faith, then, reminds us that we do not and cannot save ourselves. For no matter what we do, it would never be enough to “earn” or to “gain” our salvation. Salvation is God’s gift to us. So what must we do? St. Paul’s response is summarized in the word “faith.” Our response to what God has done for us is trusting faith in Jesus Christ. Such faith firmly believes in what God has done for us in Christ. Such faith is a response of trust and hope in God who saves us.
For St. Paul, faith is not merely intellectual ascent to truth. It is an act of obedience and submission to God. This is why Paul talks about “the obedience of faith” in his letter to the Romans, by which he means that faith is obedience to God. The Christian who lives by faith, then, will live a good life because he or she will seek to be obedient to God’s will in all that he or she does.
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul expresses his teaching on justification by faith in this way:
We who know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law because by the works of the law no one will be justified.
Notice the sharp contrast that Paul establishes between the “works of the law” and “faith in Jesus Christ.” Doing the “works of the law” refers to following the commandments of the Law of Moses, whereas “faith in Jesus Christ” refers to trusting in what God has done for us through the death of his Son Jesus Christ. For Paul, it is not what we do that saves us, it is what God has done for us in Christ that saves us.
If this is true then our salvation is a free and gracious gift from a loving and gracious God who has done for us what we could not do for ourselves. If this is true, we can and should live in trusting faith before God and each other. If this is true, salvation is ours for the asking if we give ourselves completely to God.