St Paul and Sexuality Part 3 - Galatians 3

Galatians 3:28 isn’t about gays!!!

I get this said to me, and it's because a ton of my writing either explicitly or implicitly makes people think of Galatians 3.28. I go there a lot. And if you’ve read my stuff and ever wanted to shout at me that this wonderful pinnacle of Pauline theology just doesn’t mention gay people, I apologise. 

I want to take this objection seriously and look at it full in the face. I want to answer it. 

Here’s the objection: It’s all very nice to say there’s one humanity, that all people are equal, that we’re all the same - but if one’s basic understanding of homosexuality is that it is portrayed in the Scriptures as intrinsically sinful, what then? St Paul doesn’t make grace and sin equal things. Quite the opposite! So people who resolutely refuse to live by God’s standards are not equal to those who repent and live under grace.

Well let’s put Galatians 3:28 out there for everyone:

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

And let's work through that a bit, shall we?

Neither Jew nor Gentile - OK, so there had to be an ethnic shift in the thinking of some early Christians that God’s plans were bigger than they thought. But these folk were just different races; they were still people. We are all clear on this.

No male or female - OK, so women and men together receive God’s promises; no-one is suggesting women should repent of being women. The Scriptures don’t make being female sinful - they do make certain attitudes to women unacceptable, attitudes which have to be lost as everyone is equally made in God’s image, and equally redeemed (though some conservatives still argue what equality means). We like to think we're pretty fine with this, mostly, now, though a lot of women have had to endure a lot of fighting to get us to this place. I’ve said before, it’s within my ministry life that women have been allowed equal status as priests in the Church of England; it’s since I started my current post that they have been allowed equal status as bishops. #timesup #metoo and all of these things are (sadly) the most recent reminders that all is not resolved yet. 

No slave or free - OK, so society (and this includes the church) has historically treated people with different values, but the Scriptures make clear that people are people and have ultimate equal worth even if from time to time that has got lost. The church is the place where this worth should be found again, even if back in the home or the market place or the street, true reality is removed once more. Slavery is a superficial deceit of this world. People are people.

But gay and straight? This is where we struggle. For many traditionalists, these are not equivalent categories to the ones above because they are not about the colour of a person’s skin or about natural gender or about economic happenstance. Gay and straight are about sin. Straight is ‘natural’ and therefore godly. Gay is ‘unnatural’ and therefore not. Period. And try as I might to argue for inclusiveness, there is always a difficulty for some (even if lots of us argue it is based on the supremacy of a teeny-tiny number of texts over the vast majority of Scriptural sense) in allowing such a concept of inclusiveness because it seems to mean ignoring sin.

Being clear about sin

May I be clear? I do not ignore sin. 

But may I also gently suggest that all of us need to be very clear indeed what is sin, and what sin is, before we kindly continue to condemn our own brothers and sisters to the purgatory that the spirit of previous ages placed upon them.

And let’s note that in the Scriptures the Jew/Gentile distinctive is never simply ethnic or racial. Paul writes this clearly in Galatians 2.15-16: We who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. “Sinful Gentiles”. The races who aren’t Jews ‘by birth’ are actually, it seems, intrinsically sinful. 

By nature. 

Why? How?

In the Bible story, the nations, the clans, the races, the Gentiles are “sinful” because they don’t have God. They don’t have his Law, his prophets, his story, they are not his people. The relationship is broken; they live in ‘wrong-shusness’ not righteousness. They have other gods. They are idolaters. It’s not a moral statement. It’s fundamentally spiritual. Sin in St Paul always is - and not only in St Paul. 

Here’s a helpful command from Leviticus 20, with God speaking to his people: 

You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own.

All the moral imperatives that we fixate on in the Old Testament Law are secondary to the religious imperatives. They cannot be understood without being seen from that spiritual perspective. When looking at the Old Testament Law, always ask - what does this reveal about the character of God? What does this reveal about the contrasting character of the religious understanding of Israel’s neighbours? 

The division between Jews and Gentiles isn’t racial. It isn’t about morality. It’s rather about the very heart of sin. On the one hand we have God’s own people who are called to follow the Lord with all their heart, and on the other all the other nations of the world who exhibit with every breath the very broken relationship between creature and Creator, loving first anything and everything other than the One who loves them. One nation lives in relationship; every other lives at best in ignorance, and always in brokenness.  

This is the sin of the Gentiles. Romans 1. Broken relationship with God. Idolatry. 

And yet in Christ, says St Paul, this is swept away. 

What is the result of the saving work of Christ upon the sin of the Gentiles? Romans 15: 

That the Gentiles may glorify God for his mercy.Rejoice O Gentiles with his people!The Gentiles will hope in him.So that the Gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.

No wonder St Paul had opponents, people who couldn’t believe it, people who looked at “sinful Gentiles” claiming to follow Christ and all they could see were unnatural branches grafted into their vine. It wasn’t right. Make them do it properly! But it was happening properly, and wonderfully, and - naturally.

Naturally Superior?

It’s a difficult word - ‘natural’. Yesterday, whilst looking up something for this post, I came across an article that was quite clear gay sex wasn’t ‘natural’. The way the word was used in that article was loaded with moral meaning. Today as I showered, I noticed my shower gel claims to consist of ‘natural’ ingredients. I’m pretty sure my shower gel isn’t trying to persuade me of its moral superiority -  it’s a marketing ploy. In the same way, back in my early thirties I was blond for a year - lots of people were at the time. That’s my excuse. And I had enough hair for it to matter. Happy memories. Anyway, I recall that a group of us went to a karaoke evening on Aberystwyth pier, and the compere commented as I got up to sing, “At last, a natural blond”. All my mates laughed. No-one thought any character judgements were being made.

When St Paul uses the word ‘natural‘ he too does so without any moral judgement. We read of men and women who ‘abandon natural relations‘ in Romans 1 but we need to be Biblically literate and not morally prurient when we see that line. The Scripture interprets the Scripture, and St Paul uses the same word for ‘natural‘ in Romans 11 as he does in Romans 1. ‘Natural sexual relations’ and ‘unnatural ones’ in Romans 1 take on quite a different tone when placed in the context of the Jew/Gentile discussion of Romans 11. There, the Gentiles belong to a wild olive tree, and are grafted into the tree of God’s people ‘against nature’, with the Jews being ‘natural branches‘ able to be grafted back in when they respond to Christ. 

The imagery here in Romans 11 is, absolutely, rife with overtones of righteousness and idolatry, of belonging to God or to the gods of the nations, but a cheap superior  judgement of others’ sexual behaviour as ‘not quite the thing‘ is simply absent.

Cheap moral judgement never has a place at God’s table. There’s something far more costly at issue. Jesus’ death and resurrection deals with the fundamental human failure of all humanity, natural Jew and unnatural Gentiles alike, caused by the fundamental sin of the absence of knowing God in all the nations. 

You see, “neither Jew nor Gentile” is not a liberal humanist statement about modern attitudes to racism. We fail as Biblical Christians when we think it is. It is not St Paul’s commitment to the FA’s ‘Kick it Out’ campaign. It is much, much more. It goes much, much deeper. 

Hope for all

Biblically, “neither Jew nor Gentile” was entirely about sin. Because of the gift of God one of these categories (in a traditionalist telling of the Old Testament story) might lay claim to all of God’s promises and because of their sin the other might never be able to do so, and yet St Paul says -  

Through Christ there can be no dividing wall, no barrier separating people into better or worse, no second class humanity, no moral underclass, no in or out, favoured or disgraced, Jew or Gentile, or any other category we can devise, male or female, slave or free or anything. That’s the real telling of the fulfilment of the Old Testament story, the real fulfilling of all God’s promises. That’s the true wonder of his word.

Modern society wants equality to go at least skin deep. 

Jesus has no interest in us being so superficial. Our problems are not so shallow, and his solutions are far, far more searching. 

The conservative objection that Galatians 3:28 couldn’t be extended to include “neither gay nor straight” because one of these is sinful is plain ridiculous because in a Biblical world view, that’s exactly what ‘Gentile’ was, and Paul says Jesus has blown that out of the water. Jews and Gentiles are now equal in God’s eyes in his church, and every sinner in every category gets the same treatment. 

By God’s great mercy, people are people. 

The point of Galatians 3:28 is not that male/female, slave/free, Jew/Gentile just don’t matter any more. It’s much, much more radical than that: there is now in Christ one new, equal humanity. That’s a revolution. Paul sees how Jesus deals with us and has no other conclusion. All have sinned. All get the gift.

The remarkable thing is that in a culture which knew all about gifts, but where gifts went to those worthy of receiving them, this gift of God's redeeming love, the greatest gift, went to the unworthy. The sting in the tail is - that’s everyone. That’s the utterly radical offence of Paul’s gospel to the Jewish community. We fixate on Romans 1 and find it unpalatable in our day; I’m not sure if Paul would be amused or bemused. In his day it was Romans 2 that caused the fuss! The Jews were as sinful as everyone else! They got no free pass! More - no pro-Jewish change was required of those coming into the trajectory of hope, the story of redemption that he told about Jesus. That’s the reason for the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. That the whole tale of Galatians. There is one, new, equal humanity in Christ. One remarkable gift, given freely, and it is for all - unworthy as we are - and it is for us.

So when we develop some new cultural division, some new cultural barrier that we haven’t thought about before, some new way separating people out, some new focus for a two-speed humanity with some new minority being made second class, Galatians 3:28 is always freshly vital. It doesn’t matter it doesn’t mention the case at hand. 

We’ve already dealt with it. 

Galatians 3:28 is about all of us. And it is a gift of priceless love that keeps on giving. A gift for every single person everywhere. The Bible is not the preserve of some imaginary 'straights only' club - and if it were, the force of Galatians would be that the straights are the ones most in need of repentance. Yet God's great love is for all. Equally. St Paul is the one who makes sure of it. He is the gay person's and every person's constant advocate and friend in all our debates and conversations.