6th Sunday of Luke
Scripture: Galatians 2:16–20
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to carry guilt into the Church?
For those of you who grew up Catholic or Lutheran, you may be familiar with what people call “Catholic guilt” or “Lutheran guilt.”
You know the feeling. There is a right way to live and a wrong way to live. God has given us his commandments, so we know what we’re supposed to do. And when we fail, guilt crushes us under its weight.
Perhaps we haven’t prayed enough. Perhaps we’ve lost our temper, neglected our responsibilities, or fallen into the same sin we promised ourselves we would never commit again.
And so we try harder. We resolve to do better. We promise God that this time will be different.
Until it isn’t.
And then the guilt returns, heavier than before.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a conscience that recognizes when we’ve done something wrong. Repentance is essential to the Christian life. But there’s a difference between recognizing that something in our lives needs healing and believing that our fundamental problem is that we haven’t obeyed the rules.
One leads us toward God, and the other leaves us perpetually afraid of him.
And that brings us to today’s epistle.
St. Paul writes to the Galatians that we are not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.
Now, when Paul speaks about the “works of the law,” he’s addressing a particular controversy. Some Christians were insisting that Gentile converts needed to take on the distinctive practices of the Judean people, including circumcision and the observance of the Mosaic law, in order to belong fully to God’s covenant people.
Paul insists that we are brought into God’s life through Jesus Christ, not by adopting those particular identity markers.
But I think there’s a question here that reaches beyond that particular controversy Paul was addressing.
Let’s take a step back and ask: what if we’ve misunderstood *the purpose* of God’s commandments?
What if we have come to think of the law primarily as a set of rules God has imposed upon us, when it’s supposed to be a way of life that God has given us for our healing?
These are two very different ways of understanding the Christian life.
In the first, God tells us what is right and what is wrong, and our job is to obey. God is the authority. We are the subjects. He gives the rules, and we try to follow them.
And when we fail … well, here comes the nun with the ruler to shape us up.
But what if God’s commandments are not arbitrary rules? What if they reveal something about the kind of life for which we were created?
Consider the commandment not to lie.
We might think of it simply as a rule: God says lying is wrong, so we must not lie.
But why is lying wrong?
Because God is Truth. When we lie, we distance ourselves from the truth. We distort our relationships with others. We become people who must hide, deceive, and remember what we have told whom. We damage our ability to live honestly with our neighbors and even with ourselves.
The commandment isn’t simply a prohibition imposed from above. It points us toward a way of being. We learn to become truthful, and more like God.
Or consider the commandment to love our enemies.
God doesn’t give us this commandment because he enjoys making our lives difficult. He gives it because hatred deforms us. Resentment takes up residence in our hearts. We begin to see other people not as human beings made in God’s image, but as enemies who deserve our contempt.
To love our enemies is to start *becoming* like God, a God who loves even those who reject him.
God is not merely someone who happens to tell the truth or occasionally acts lovingly. God is Truth. God is Love. And, God is the source of all beauty and goodness.
And the Christian life is about becoming like him.
In this light, the virtues are not hoops we jump through to earn God’s favor. They are ways of participating in God’s own life. We learn to be truthful because God is Truth. We learn to be merciful because God is Merciful. We learn to love because God is Love.
And little by little, through repentance, prayer, worship, and the life of the Church, we are transformed.
In the Orthodox Church, we call this theosis: becoming by grace what God is by nature … being drawn into his life, becoming more fully what we were created to be: partakers of the divine nature.
And that brings us back to guilt.
If we understand the Christian life primarily as obedience to a set of rules, then every failure becomes evidence against us. We have broken the rule. We have failed the test. We have disappointed God.
But if we understand the Christian life as healing, our failures look different.
Imagine that you go to the doctor because you’re sick. The doctor tells you that you need to change your diet, take your medicine, and begin exercising.
You could treat those instructions as arbitrary demands. You could resent the doctor for imposing restrictions on your life. And every time you failed to follow the instructions, you could feel ashamed.
But that’s not the point of the treatment. The point is that you are sick, and the doctor wants you to get well. The doctor’s prescription is the path toward healing.
In the same way, God’s commandments show us where our lives are out of harmony with God, with one another, and with the people we were created to be.
Sin is real. Our failures matter. We hurt ourselves and others when we turn away from God. But sin is not simply a list of rules we’ve broken. It is a sickness of the heart, a distortion of our humanity, a departure from the life of God.
And repentance is not merely feeling bad about ourselves. It is turning toward the Physician who can make us whole.
This is why St. Paul says something so remarkable in today’s epistle:
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”
It’s a transformation of his very existence. Paul is being made into a new person through his union with Christ.
And this is what Christ offers us, here and now.
He comes to heal what is broken. He comes to offer us the grace to be freed. And He comes to call us to follow him into the life for which we were created.
So if you carry guilt from your past, if you find yourself constantly measuring your Christian life by how well you’ve followed the rules, perhaps it’s time to see the “rules” a little differently.
Brother and sisters, Christ’s Church is not a courtroom in which we spend our lives waiting to hear the verdict. It is a hospital in which Christ, the Physician of our souls and bodies, is healing us.
And the commandments are not a criterion by which God determines whether we’re fit for heaven or hell. They are a path by which he teaches us to walk in his life, become more like him.
We will stumble along that path. We will fall. But, we will also repent, again and again.
But we do not have to remain trapped in the guilt of our failures, because we have been crucified with Christ, and it is Christ who now lives in us.
And, so, our healing begins …
Amen.