Christ Died for Nothing?

Today, as we continue to our Galatians’ series, our scripture reading is Galatians chapter 2: 11-21. It can be found on page 824 of you pew Bibles.

I invite you to listen for the word of God.

When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.
When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?
We who are Jews by birth and not ‘Gentile sinners’ know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified.
If, while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! If I rebuild what I destroyed, I prove that I am a lawbreaker. For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”
-The Word of the Lord
-Thanks be to God
Sermon
For many of you who are reading from your own Bibles, some of the words I just read may have been slightly different from what you see in your own translations. The pew Bibles, which offers the same translation as the one I just read, is called the New International Version. Some of you may be reading from the Revised Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, The King James, the New King James, the Message, or the New Living Translation.
All these translations have aspects that make them unique from the others. In seminary we always used the New Revised Standard Version, so that translation is the one that I always read first when preparing for a sermon for through the course of seminary I wrote a whole bunch of notes in the margin, notes that some times offer good ideas, or pictures that remind me of how board I was in a particular class.
Translations of the Bible are important because not Jesus, nor any of his disciples, nor any of the great hero’s of the Old Testament, spoke English. As I am sure many of you know, our Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, and while Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic, a dialect of Hebrew in much the same way that Haitian Patois is a dialect of French, the New Testament was written in Greek because Aramaic was considered to be too vulgar a language to be worth writing, at least that is what the ancients thought.
Because of these issues, sometimes the Bible seems like a story that has been passed from one person to another as children often do in a circle playing a game we used to call telephone, where the original message ends up getting muddled up as it is whispered from one person to the next. Often though, the original Hebrew or Greek author’s message ends up getting smoothed out, where a translator or scribe some where in the thousands of years of history tries to change a word just so slightly as to make the intention more plain.
Such is the case with a very simple word in today’s passage: “Peter.” It is a word that may make you wonder how it could be messed up at all, and indeed, the original writer’s intention remains intact, it’s someone’s name, and in English we almost always refer to this person as Peter. However, Jesus never called this person Peter, and neither did Paul, the writer of this letter to the Galatians. In the Gospel of John, chapter 1, verse 42, Jesus first meets this person that we call Peter and Jesus says to him, “you are Simon, the son of John, you will be called Cephas”, and then the author of this Gospel adds, “which is translated Peter.”
The reason I go to all this trouble of discussing a single word is simply to say that Jesus calls ol' Simon son of John “Cephas,” an Aramaic word that literally means Rock. This name that we may all assume had never been given to anyone before this incident, as it is an incident that predates even Rocky 1, not to mention Rocky 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. But the name makes sense in Mathew’s Gospel when the same incident is retold and Jesus says, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it.” This verse didn’t make any sense to me until I found out that the Greek word “Petros,” just like the Aramaic word “Cephas,” means Rock, so that the original Greek translation of Matthew’s Gospel reads much more like “And I tell you, you are to be named Rock, because you are the Rock that I will build my church on.”
To kind of sum things up – the name Peter that our pew Bibles’ use is OK, because it is the English way of saying the Greek word Petrus, which is a translation of the Aramaic word “Cephas” which literally means Rock.
But not everybody knows that.
It is something that we too often take for granted, that our English translations give us exactly what we want from the Bible – that there are no mistakes, that there has been no error made, but the sad truth is that as English speakers we sometimes miss out on cool stuff like this part about Peter really meaning Rock.
However, no editorial change or my explanation can take away the strength of the last sentence in our passage from Galatians, for this sentence reads the same in Greek or English or Aramaic: “for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”
Even if we were like the Muslims who only recognize the Koran in its original language, Arabic, and do not recognize translations as we do as having equal authority, this closing to our scripture reading would read with the same strength, with the same peculiarity, forcing us to ask ourselves, how on earth could Christ have died for nothing?
But, I have found sense in this claim when I think about Peter, not only the character himself but the actual word - as we now know it is a word not perfectly represented by the English name, and that our Bible, as it stands before us in English, does not always tell us exactly what we need to know, but reading and understanding our Bibles necessitates real study, interpretation, grammatical explanation, group discussion, the willingness to question things we have always been told, and, above all, the workings of the Holy Sprit. For the truth of the matter is that this Bible of ours is not perfect, it has been translated and retranslated, told and retold, used to justify slavery, the subordinate role of women, discrimination of gays and lesbians, tainted by the sin that resides in the human hands who shape its words and their meaning. In other words, we cannot trust in the goodness of this book as it stands alone, for this book is not the Word of God because it is perfect as it appears before us - but because God has chosen this medium to work through.
The same idea should be applied to our friend Peter, or whatever you want to call him, as we read in today’s passage.
In this passage Peter has been tempted to trust in his own goodness, his own potential for perfection. He has been tempted back to trust in his own ability to achieve perfection, his own innate goodness, rather than trust in the God who works through him.
Peter, like this Bible, is not the Rock that the Church is built on because he is good, but because God is good and God has chosen Peter to work through.
Paul, who wears his life as a persecutor of Christians as a constant reminder of his own sinfulness and a real sign of how God worked and is working in his life sanctifying him for the work of the church, must remind Peter of his dependence on the grace of God and so Paul takes Peter aside to say, “We who are Jews by birth and not ‘Gentile sinners’ know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified.”
It may be hard to navigate this thin line between right and wrong that Paul draws in the sand, this line between trusting in our own goodness rather than trusting in God’s goodness, trusting ourselves to achieve salvation rather than trusting in Christ’s salvific work for our salvation, because we do as Peter has done all the time.
I say from personal experience that the temptation to trust in the Law or in myself is especially strong for clergy – the world seems to think that we are special, especially good, especially wise, especially holy – as some people still hide their drinks from my judging eyes at parties, seeming not to notice my hair which signals exactly how far I have strayed from sainthood.
The Bible is the same - as some still attempt to trust in the words alone without realizing they use these words for their own human devices, condemning what works for the good of one group but threatens the needs of the powerful, as the Bible was used to justify slavery in this region of the country, by people who mark the Presbyterian Heritage that I hold dear.
But in this realization lies the reason Paul calls Peter back to trust in Christ and not in the Law, lies the reason Paul claims that “if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”
For if we could be justified by our own goodness, if righteousness could be gained through the Law, if we could be perfect by our own actions, had the capability of serving God out of our own volition – than God, the judge and arbitrator over us all would have to be exactly that, a judge and arbitrator, judging us on our ability to serve and obey according to the statues of tradition.
If this description were the true identity and role of our God than there can be no doubt of God’s judgment over each and every one of us – God will proclaim us all guilty.
But God has not chosen to do so, God has not chosen to judge us according to the standards set forth in the Bible, in tradition, or by our own self righteousness – for our redemption comes not through our own actions, but through Christ’s.
The God embodied in human form who gave his life for us is not the image of a judge, but a savior, and so we must affirm that it is not we who are good, but it is the goodness of God that works in us.
So why then would we, like Peter, raise ourselves behind the great desk, holding the gavel that God has willingly vacated?
We are the church, and those outside too often see us as the self-righteous judges of this society, though we, more than all people know that the God who has the right to judge us chooses not to.
Just as the Rock, the foundation of the church, Peter, fell into the temptation to find status and justification through the works of the law, so the church that has been built on that foundation does the same.
By doing so, we boast in ourselves, but we also willingly place ourselves back in the prison that God liberated us from – “for if justification comes through the Law, than Christ died for nothing.”
But, just as this passage reads, God will not be a servant of sin, and the truth of the gospel will rain forth – the sign of God’s presence will be vividly displayed in this place, not because we are perfect, as we have faltered and we will falter again, but because God works in this place, through us, in us, and despite us.
-Amen.