The first reading today begins: “For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.” The larger context of his message to the Galatians is about reports he is receiving that some among them are advocating an adherence to the Law of Moses as the basis of salvation – hence his reference to slavishly following the precepts of the Law. To be clear, Paul holds that the Law is God-given and good, and he is certainly not arguing that Christians have been liberated from its moral obligations. However, Paul will go on to describe a new foundation for moral agency: the Christian is no longer trying to earn a relationship with God through obedience but is called to exercise freedom because that relationship has already been given in Christ. The key word being “exercise.” Christ has set the believer free, but that does not mean that nothing is now required of the believer. With freedom comes responsibility.
Our belief in Christ and the grace received does not eliminate human agency. Grace makes a new kind of agency possible and this is central to the life of all Christians. Paul is clear that Christian life is not passive and because Christ has accomplished salvation our actions are not irrelevant. The question is not whether our choices and actions matter, but rather, what makes them genuinely Christian.
The first reading concludes: “For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.” (Gal 5:6) The Greek is pistis di’ agapēs energoumenē meaning faith becoming effective, active or operative through love. The believer’s choices become the place where faith takes visible form. Those choices become the basis of our moral life. It is no longer “what must I do so that God will accept me” but now the basis becomes: “Because God has already loved and accepted me in Christ, how shall I now live?” The latter understands obedience as the response of a person who has been loved.
Just beyond our reading Paul admonishes the Galatians to “use this freedom as an opportunity… [to] serve one another through love.” (Gal 5:13) In other words, Christ frees us from slavery so that we may freely become servants of one another. Or put another way, this is how we are to exercise our moral agency, which is neither autonomous self-sufficiency nor passive dependence on God. It is cooperation with the Holy Spirit which transforms our capacity to decide well. We still must choose whether to forgive, whether to tell the truth, whether to be generous, whether to respond to another person’s suffering. But now those decisions can arise from a heart being transformed by grace.
Returning to Paul’s admonitions about the Law of Moses, think of this way: the Law can tell us what love requires; grace and the Spirit makes us capable of loving. This is more demanding than a secular understanding of freedom, the ability to make one’s own choices without interference. Freedom in Christ asks that we not only choose, but choose the good, especially that which is good for the other.
Christ frees us not merely from external constraints but from the powers within us that prevent us from loving as we ought. And the Spirit gradually forms a person capable of acting from love rather than fear, resentment, compulsion or self-interest. That is moral agency in its deepest Christian sense.
In the everyday choices we make when we choose whether to forgive or hold on to resentment, to speak kind words instead of gossip, to be generous and in all the small choices we make over the course of a single day. Paul asks us to consider something deeper than the choices themselves – be clear about what is moving us to make them. He admonishes us to work toward a position in life where our faith is working through love.
Paul begins with freedom and ends with love because, for the Christian, love is what freedom is for. Christ did not set us free so that we would have nothing more to do. He set us free so that what we do might finally be done in love.
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