First Presbyterian Church
Hallock, Minn.
June 13, 2010
Justification
Gal. 2
Sometimes there really is too much of a good thing. This week, for instance, I was in Louisville for a few days, meeting with the committee that is developing the next Presbyterian hymnal. I’m not exaggerating when I say we must have sung at least 500 hymns, maybe more. I’m really enjoying my work with the committee, but just like playing more than 36 holes of golf, or running a marathon, sometimes even good things get to be a little much.
But now I can say, with complete certainty, that there are many types of hymns and congregational songs out there these days. Some hymns are a simple paraphrases from verses in the Bible, others are a paraphrase with a final verse that’s a lesson or call to action. Other hymns paint beautiful images or express our deepest thoughts and fears. And, some hymns, I have to say, are absolutely ridiculously bad.
Singing all these different types of hymns has put me in a reflective mood lately, and Paul’s letter to the Galatians continued the theme. If Paul had written a hymn when he wrote this chapter of Galatians, it might have gone something like this:
We’re not like you holy Gentiles,
We are Jewish by our birth.
Yet we too are saved by Jesus,
we do not make our own worth.
We are saved, like you — all servants –
not through deeds, or through the law.
Justified by Christ, our savior,
we are saved by grace. What awe!
(Ok, Paul’s hymn would have been much better, but after reading so many rhyming couplets this week, I couldn’t help myself.)
There’s not too many hymns that really explain what Paul attacks in today’s lesson, because it’s a tricky concept. Justification. In truth, it’s probably one of those words you learn in confirmation and then forget. We talk around justification in the church. We sing about it, in many hymns, for sure. But, we never really break it down and explain it.
Like those other tricky churchy words — incarnation, sanctification, transubstantiation — we assume we all know what justification is about, but we seldom talk about it directly. So let’s take up Paul’s letter today as an opportunity to do just that.
So, what is Paul talking about when he says: “And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.”
Reading Galatians is like joining a conversation and only hearing one of the speakers. We don’t have the letters that the church in Galatians might have sent Paul, and we don’t quite know the entire context. But, from what we can tell at least, the community in Galatia which had been doing perfectly fine, now found itself in some turmoil. Other leaders after Paul were teaching against Paul’s take on the gospel. They were saying things like: you are justified by your acts, or by how closely you follow the old Jewish law given to Moses. They were telling Gentiles to convert to Judaism, and — Paul figured — they were limiting the work of God. In short, they were making justification about what they did, rather than about what God does.
So what is justification? Well, it’s a fancy theological term, but it’s also something you probably deal with on your computer every day. Justification, in your word processing program, is the word used for the straightening up of the words you type so they’re in right relationship with the margin of the paper. That’s what God does when God justifies us — straightens us up so we are in right relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Rather than the code in the computer program, justification, for us, happens through the grace of Jesus Christ.
Jaime Clark-Soles writes that she learned justification with a simple pneumonic device: justification makes things “just-as-if-I” had never sinned — “just-as-if-I” had never separated myself from God and God’s creation. Now, of course, justification doesn’t mean we should go on and sin as much as we can because we know we will be forgiven — God’s justification doesn’t disregard God’s justice — but justification is all about making our relationship with God right again.
There’s a fancy-schmancy Latin phrase — articulus stantis et canensis ecclesia — that means “justification is the article by which the church stands or falls.” In other words. It’s a big deal, a huge deal. Justification isn’t quite the whole enchilada of the faith, but it is like the whole point of the meal in the first place. It’s a crazy idea. Instead of us earning our salvation, justification says the work of salvation is already done by Christ. We don’t have to worry, we don’t have to — in fact, we can’t — earn our way to heaven. We can’t get on God’s good side by our actions, Christ is on our side so it’s already taken care of.
I hope this isn’t sounding too foreign to you, since justification was an essential part of the Reformation. Here’s how one of our old confessions puts it (the Second Helvetic Confession written in 1561):
WHAT IS JUSTIFICATION? According to the apostle in his treatment of
justification, to justify means to remit sins, to absolve from guilt and punishment,
to receive into favor, and to pronounce a man just. For in his
epistle to the Romans the apostle says: “It is God who justifies; who is to
condemn?” (Rom. 8:33). To justify and to condemn are opposed. And in
The Acts of the Apostles the apostle states: “Through Christ forgiveness
of sins is proclaimed to you, and by him everyone that believes is freed
from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses”
(Acts 13:38 f.).
That’s an old way of putting justification. The shorter main phrase of the Reformation is more simple: we are justified by grace through faith. The point is we can’t save ourselves. We can’t stop sinning. We can’t buy our salvation. We can’t earn our way to grace. Grace comes from God. We are justified by God’s gifts to us. Romans calls it “a free gift.” We’re justified — made right — by Jesus Christ alone.
One way to explain it is by the old question, “When were you saved?” It might not be as common up here as it was for me growing up in the Bible belt around Baptists, but it’s a helpful tool for thinking about justification.
I know some Presbyterians who know exactly when they came to an understanding of their salvation, when their faith in God came to a clear moment they can point to. But the answer that I give myself, and one that is most common to Reformed Christians is more like this. Q: “When were you saved?” A: “I was saved about 2,000 years ago by Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. And every day I try to live into that understanding more and more.”
The distinction here is that grace is a free gift from God. It’s not something you can earn or decide to receive, it’s something that God gives. If grace somehow depended on our being perfect we’d never get it because none of is perfect. So thank goodness we are made right, justified, by Christ’s actions and not ours.
Shirley Guthrie, even though he was a fancy Presbyterian theology professor, never liked talking about justification as only a head thing, as only an intellectual event. Guthrie said, instead, that justification is less about theology and more about practical living. Justification is the knowledge we are accepted — that no matter what we do or say, God loves us and redeems us. For Guthrie, justification was the struggle to hear the message, “You are somebody.”
Paul, in Galatians, emphasizes justification and then moves to how one lives because of it. Because Paul is justified by Christ, Paul now lives for Christ — or even further, Paul lives in Christ and Christ lives in Paul.
It’s a tricky balance. In our world that is always looking for results and improvements and increased yields, we don’t want to move too fast from justification to living in response. Sometimes, we need just to linger in the message — we are made right, we are somebody, we are accepted. We don’t have to do one thing for God to love us and for Christ to have died for us. It’s already done. We are accepted. We are loved.
But we should’t get stuck there. Sometimes we need to linger there and that’s ok, that’s important, but at some point justification moves to action as well. If we are truly made right with God, then we should certainly give God thanks. If we are truly loved unconditionally, then we should love in return.
The Scottish pastor and hymn writer George Matheson understood this love and its consequences. The story goes that Matheson was a smart young scholar preparing for the ministry in Scotland when he learned that he was going blind. He was engaged at the time, and when his fiance found out he was going to lose his sight, she returned the engagement ring and left him.
He continued in his studies and became a successful pastor, but the pain of that broken engagement never left him. And it came back in a flash, when later he heard the good news that his sister was engaged. He was happy, of course, but was still questioning the power of human love. So he put his mind on God’s love, and composed the hymn “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go” in five minutes. He said it was as if God was writing it for him.
O love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in Thee;
I give Thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.
Thanks be to God, for justification. Thanks be to God for the love that will not let us go.
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