23/072024

Today's short reading from St Paul is very,very short but has to become a life-time of reflection. The Galatian Church to whom he writes must be of mainly Jewish origin for how could pagans have understood what he meant by "Law".

I am at fault for treating this letter as an isolated communication. There is a context. He had previously taught this community and had left behind a framework of inspired teaching on which his converts could ponder. St Paul's letters are all "preaching to the converted" and in the process developing Theological doctrine by which Christians could judge themselves.

I am wondering how these descendants of, Hellenized by two or three centuries of living among Greeks, Gauls could have understood " Through the Law I am dead to the Law so that now I can live with God."

The Paul whom they had met as a physically unprepossessing though charismatic Jew was definitely a living man. Why does he now claim to have been crucified and yet be still alive? They knew that his preaching was not about this world. He had lived with them and only spoken about God and the events that had happened twenty or so years before in Jerusalem. It was somebody else not he who had been crucified and become the "Resurrection".

We too today two thousand years later have to ask the same questions, doubt the same doubts and come to the same conclusions as did those men and women long ago in Anatolia. Paul is inspired by God to present the only Truth that can bring us to perfect peace of mind in this world and to the welcoming arms of the Angels and Saints in the Presence of Father, Son and Holy Spirit at the end of our bodily lives. 

Our Faith and theirs is in "The Son of God who loved me and sacrificed himself for my sake." In his short public life-time Jesus reinforced everything that the Law had revealed and the Resurrection has confirmed.

Dear Lord, our lives on earth have to be lived out strengthened by Faith in your word, Hope for Eternity and Love for you and our fellow men. Help me to be true to these thoughts for today which have not got beyond the "first reading". Perhaps they can get no further for if I can live with you as my being is there anything else that I might need? I am nowhere near  perfection with much accumulated dross that prevents my soul from being near to the holiness with which you lived those first years on earth in your Holy Family. I am a hermit amidst the hustle and bustle of everyday life. If it be your will let me be alone no longer but knowing that I am sincere in these efforts is, in reality, enough for me. Come Lord. Jesus come.