Thaumazo!

Rhona Cathcart September 02, 2024 6 4

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Galatians 1: 6-7 (NIV)

6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7 which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.

I used to frustrate a former flatmate who claimed that I was almost impossible to startle or catch unawares. No matter how many plastic spiders she cunningly hid in my bed or around the flat at Hallowe’en, I regularly failed to scream. But I think I would have jumped when the reader of Paul’s letter blasted out that ‘thaumazo!’ The English translation of the Greek, ‘I am astonished’ is a little tame for a rebuke that is building to up to cursing.

The Paul we are meeting anew this week was anything but tame. Interestingly, what makes him pounce on the Galatians is not an insult or attack on himself, but an attack on the core of the Gospel. Anyone who perverts the truth of the Gospel should be cursed, he thunders — even me if I were to change my mind and teach something different.

He goes on to explain that he’s not a people pleaser. Somehow, I don’t think that would have surprised anyone! But although Paul wasn’t tame, he wasn’t unruly either. If he were unruly, then instead of being a people pleaser he would have pleased himself. But that wasn’t Paul either.

The only one Paul wanted to please was God, because the truth of the Gospel — that Jesus died to set us free from fear or the need to earn favour — was seared on his soul. And he wasn’t afraid to startle anyone who tried to tame that liberating Gospel into something more easily domesticated.

Pray:

God of order and rhythm

Of tides and orbits

Of all that is steady, unchanging, eternal

You still have the ability to startle us.

How astonished we are when your untamed grace

Releases us from fear or the need to please others

How freeing to discover that following Christ is not a sentence,

committing us to a life of domesticated rule-following,

but rather an invitation to enter his holy wilderness

where the only thing waiting to catch us unawares is love.

Amen