Our Mother Gen 21:1-14; Ps 122; Gal 4:21-31; John 8:31-47 St Mark’s 2.7.16
Introduction
““Man who is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble.” (Job 14:1) Sometimes the pressures of life make you feel like this; death dying, family and marital pressures never cease to end. You feel like the image I saw in my mind when praying during the week, someone held bound to the earth by invisible chains. Much of this has to do with the powerless legalistic “ground level religion” described by Dale last week. Galatians 4:21-31 is an unusual and difficult passage but its message about the priority of things above rather than things below is urgently needed by today’s struggling Church.
Paul puts the struggle for Christian freedom in terms of the differences between the two key women in the life of Abraham, Hagar and Sarah, and their sons, Ishmael and Isaac. He says about these mothers and their children in the Old Testament story, “this may be interpreted allegorically” (v.24). An “allegory” is a symbolic form of communication that involves going beyond the surface meaning of a text. Jesus’ teaching in John 15 with Christ as the vine and his disciples the branches is a simple allegory. The Chronicles of Narnia are allegories with the dying and rising lion king Aslan symbolising Jesus. A Christian allegory must have Christ as its central message, and this is true of our passage today when we remember the strong words of Paul immediately before and after our passage; “my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!” (4:19)….“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (5:1).
Exposition
Paul begins by speaking to those Christians who wanted to come under the Jewish law.
v.21 Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law?
Here, “the law” refers to the whole of the first five books of the Bible, the Torah. It is in Genesis we find the story of Abraham’s family.
22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman.
The slave woman is Hagar who had a son called Ishmael, and the free woman is Sarah Abraham’s wife who gave birth to Isaac. The Jewish teachers of Paul’s time identified Ishmael and his descendants with the gentiles outside of God’s saving covenant with Abraham, and law keeping Jews like themselves as the spiritual heirs of Sarah. But Paul’s interpretation of the story reverses things in a way that was scandalous to these religious people.
23 But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise.
After years of trying to conceive the child God promised the aged Sarah gave her slave Hagar to her husband Abraham to continue the family line. Hagar’s son Ishmael “was born according to the flesh” i.e. by ordinary human means (cf. John 3:6). Isaac’s conception to Sarah was however a miracle, for Sarah was 90 years old (Gen 17:17; like “x” in our congregation). Isaac was a child born of the Spirit of God (n.b. v.29). Now Paul gets to his main point.
24 Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar.
As a slave Hagar gave birth to a son whose status was to be treated as a slave. But Paul now turns everything on its head by saying that Hagar does not symbolise lost Gentiles but Mt Sinai where God gave the hallowed Ten Commandments to Israel as his chosen people. To associate the Law of Moses with spiritual slavery must have sounded shocking to those in the Church attracted to rule-keeping religion. Now Paul has even more incendiary things to say.
25 Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children.
The preachers of the law were proudly upheld the earthly Jerusalem as the centre of their religious system. But Paul proclaims that their Jerusalem is as spiritually enslaved as Hagar. These false teachers were promising the Christians in Galatia that if they accepted circumcision they would align themselves with the great mother-church in Jerusalem as the true followers of Christ. Paul however is adamant that such a move would return a person to the fear –filled mindset of a slave in place of the freedom of a son who joyfully cries, “Abba! Father!” (Rom 8:15-16; Gal 4:4-6). Coming to the centre of our passage the apostle suddenly shifts perspective by dramatically turning from the earthly to the heavenly plane.
26 But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.
The true mother of Christians, symbolised by Sarah, is the heavenly Jerusalem. This is reality is of crucial importance to the Christian life because the heavenly Jerusalem is where Jesus us and where we “are seated with him in the heavenly places….raised up with him…our lives hid with God in Christ (Eph 1:20; 2:6; Phil 3:20-21; Col 3:1-3). The book of Hebrews striking contrasts earthly law-bound religion with things above by saying; “you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to countless thousands of angels in a joyful gathering. 23 You have come to the church of God’s firstborn children, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God himself, who is the judge over all things. You have come to the spirits of the righteous ones in heaven who have now been made perfect. 24 You have come to Jesus, the one who mediates the new covenant between God and people, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks of forgiveness…” (Heb 12:18-29; cf. Rev 3:12; 19:7-8; 21:2-27 cf. Isa 65:17-18). In the spiritual framework of the New Testament the real deal is not what we see around us but the world above; and this is especially true of how we must understand the Church (Ex 25:40; 1 Chron 28:19 etc.).
The reality of the heavenly Church first became real to me when I was led to today’s passage during a prayer time with a group of pastors in 1999. I was overwhelmed with a conviction that the one lasting city filled with the people of God was being constructed by God from above as people from all over the world were being brought into heaven (cf. Heb 11:10-11; Rev 21:24). It was like another experience I had with unusual clarity of the tremendous pleasure in the heart of God the Father as the words of Psalm 87 about the heavenly Jerusalem were becoming true, “Egypt…Babylon…Philistia…Tyre…Ethiopia — “This one was born there,” they say. And of Zion it shall be said, “This one and that one were born in her.”” (vv.4-6 ESV). But why all this heavenly “mother” talk anyway.
Mothering is about birthing, nurturing, caring, teaching, guiding and a correcting embrace. Motherlessness symbolises the fruit of legalistic religion; abandonment, loneliness; insecurity and a sense of being orphans in a cold world. It is Jesus who gives us rights as free born citizens of heaven. Earlier in Galatians we read that Jesus himself is the supernatural offspring promised to Abraham (Gal 3:16) and by his resurrection Christ is the “firstborn from the dead”; apart from Jesus the heavenly Jerusalem would be empty (Col 1:18; Rev 1:5 cf. Isa 26:17-19 L.X.X.). But Paul has even more wonderful things to say in his allegory about Hagar and Sarah. Now he quotes from another Old Testament passage about a barren woman who becomes fertile, Isaiah 54:1.
27 For it is written, “Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear; burst into song and shout, you who are not in labour! For the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband.”
This prophetic text was originally a word of hope for the Jewish exiles in Babylon, though feeling barren and hopeless the time would come God would miraculously deliver and multiply them. When the New Testament quotes a text from the Old it commonly carries with it a wider context. Isaiah 54:1 follows on from 53:10-11 which is a prophecy of the sacrifice of Christ; “But it was the Lord’s good plan to crush him….Yet when his life is made an offering for sin, he will have many descendants… 11 When he sees all that is accomplished by his anguish, he will be satisfied…my righteous servant will make it possible for many to be counted righteous, for he will bear all their sins.” (cf. Isa 51:1-2). By his sufferings resurrection and the preaching of the gospel Jesus is constantly populating the heavenly Jerusalem with children for the glory of God. Surrounded by these children, Jesus is filled with a joy of unimaginable intensity (Heb 2:10-13; 12:2 cf. John 16:20-22). The Law promoters in Galatia lacked something crucial to an overcoming life. Earlier in this chapter Paul interrogated his hearers, “Where is that joyful and grateful spirit you felt….(when) I preached the gospel to you at first.”” (Gal 4:15, 13). No amount of law-keeping can ever give you a share in Jesus’ victorious resurrection joy (Luke 24:41).
Have a guess at approximately how many people across the world each day are coming to Christ….170,000, 50,000 in China alone. No wonder this word, ““Rejoice, O barren one”” is so powerful today. In heaven Jesus has an “inexpressible and glorious joy” as he sees the multitudes pouring into the heavenly Jerusalem (1 Pet 1:8). And he wants to share his joy with us (John 17:13).
But our participation in this triumphant joy (# “happy, clappy”) is so often blocked by a major confusion, an idolatry actually. When the influential Early Church Father Cyprian famously said, “He can no longer have God for hisFather, who has not the church for his Mother.” he represented a mindset that has plagued Christianity down to this day. Multitudes of Christians have looked to the earthly Church for guidance and instruction in place of looking to our mother who is in heaven and have ended up as abusers or abused, controllers or disillusioned and wounded! The great problem in either idolising the Church or hating it for that matter, as we see it with our natural eyes, is that one person is always left out of the centre of things. Who is that….? Jesus. Wherever I go I (it’s a source of ongoing distress actually) I encounter people whose misplaced expectations both magnify the inexcusable hurt the Church has caused them and blocked their healing.
When I was in Yarloop a while ago my friends took me to meet one of the survivors of the bushfire, who happened to have a visitor there that day. After a minute or two the visitor said, “What do you do?” to which I replied, “I save people from the Church.” None of us knew that he was even a Christian but straightaway he launched into a “hurt by the Church story”. When I see him again I will do all in my power to point him away from institutionalised religion to….Jesus.
28 Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise.
If you believe in Jesus your salvation to his life-giving miraculous word of God sent from heaven (Col 1:5). All of this is so exciting, but always practical Paul follows up this encouragement with a BUT.
29 But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now.
As in the Genesis story Ishmael laughed at Isaac so the Jewish religious leaders mocked the crucified Christ (Gen 21:9; Mark 15:29). And wherever Paul preached the gospel the promoters of the Jewish Law persecuted him and his fellow believers in Christ (Acts 13:50; 14:2-5, 19; 1 Thess 2:14-16). Commenting on this verse the famous Anglican John Stott said, “the greatest enemies of evangelical faith today are not unbelievers…but the church, the establishment, the hierarchy.” (John Stott). Why is this? The gospel is more threatening to religious people than non-religious people because it exposes their fundamental spiritual insecurities. The motive which led the religious authorities in Jerusalem to kill Jesus and persecute the apostles is clear from this text in the Gospels; Pilate “perceived that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up.” (Mark 15:10 cf. John 12:19). The joyless are always jealous of the joyful and seek to rob them of their joy (Acts 5:17; 13:45).
30 But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.”
As Hagar and her son had to be sent away so the believers in Galatia were to have nothing to do with the preachers of the law (Gen 16:4-14; 21:8-21). The child of the flesh and the son of the Spirit, legal bondage and gospel freedom cannot coexist.
31 So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.
Is this true of the Church as you and I have experienced it? (Certainly not of a lot of my preaching as a young man.) In practice most churches/Christians are a strange unhealthy mixture of Law and gospel which leads us to keep on hurting people inside the Church and putting forward a false image of what it means to follow Christ to those outside the Church. Let me use an example. A friend of mine has started hosting a small group of non believers who are long term drug addicts who are also heavily medicated for psychiatric illnesses. The other week I questioned a woman there who used to attend a church. “What’s keeping you from becoming a Christian “C”. “The rules are too strict.” “What rules?” “The Ten Commandments….” I actually think the Lord has shown us the way to reach these addicts– we’ve started to sing with them about the reality there is in Jesus.
Conclusion
In their heads every Christian knows that death, dying, family and marital pressures are temporary and that Christ is greater than all suffering. What stops us allowing into our hearts the dominant tone of our heavenly mother, “Rejoice…burst into song and shout…” The resurrection joy of the presence of Jesus who changes everything; but faced with pain we make habitual choices that block the supply of joy from heaven. We have what a friend calls, a “happy place” where we go to escape our feelings of uselessness, failure and barrenness. His happy place is work, mine has usually been study. What is your “happy place”, coffee, TV, sex, alcohol, food, friends, sport or even perhaps the core problem in Galatia, human religiosity? If in your times of deepest spiritual honesty you feel like a barren woman it is time to turn to the gospel of Christ who alone can bring you the wonder of knowing his presence from a world above that will never leave you abandoned or useless. Let us pray.