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Office Of Readings | Week 5, Sunday, Ordinary Time | A Reading From Saint Augustine’s Explanation Of Saint Paul’s Letter To The Galatians | The Need To Understand The Power Of God’s Grace
‘Let us understand the workings of God’s grace.’
In this reading, Saint Augustine explains the situation that prompted Saint Paul’s letter to the Galatians and clarifies its central theological concern: the nature of God’s grace and the freedom it brings. Augustine reads the letter as a defence of the Gospel against a misunderstanding that threatened to obscure its core message.
Augustine begins by identifying Paul’s purpose. The Galatians had been taught that, through grace, they were no longer bound by the law. However, some Christians of Jewish background, whom Augustine calls ‘circumcisers’, insisted that faith in Christ was not sufficient for salvation unless it was supplemented by circumcision and observance of the Mosaic law. These teachers failed to recognise what the Galatians had already received.
The law, Augustine explains, had a specific role in God’s plan. It was given to reveal sin, not to remove it. Its purpose was to show human beings their need, not to provide the remedy. Sin is taken away only through faith, and not through faith alone in a narrow sense, but through faith that is active in love. This gift had already been given to the Galatians through the preaching of the Gospel.
The problem arose because the Galatians began to doubt Paul’s authority. Since he did not require Gentile converts to adopt Jewish practices, they wondered whether Paul’s Gospel was incomplete. Augustine notes that even Peter had once acted inconsistently under pressure, withdrawing from Gentile believers. Paul corrected this behaviour openly, not to undermine Peter, but to protect the truth of the Gospel.
Augustine points out that Paul faced similar tensions in other communities, particularly in Rome, where Jewish and Gentile believers struggled to live together. In that case, Paul was able to resolve the conflict more fully. In Galatia, however, the influence of the circumcisers was stronger, and the community had already begun to turn away from Paul’s teaching.
This explains the sharp tone at the beginning of the letter. Paul expresses astonishment that the Galatians are so quickly abandoning the one who called them through grace. Augustine draws attention to Paul’s insistence on the divine origin of his apostleship. By stating that he was called not by human authority but directly by God through Christ, Paul places his teaching on the same level as that of the other apostles and exposes the circumcisers as acting on merely human authority.
For Augustine, the reading underlines a decisive truth: salvation is the work of God’s grace, received through faith and expressed in love. Any attempt to place additional burdens on believers risks emptying the Gospel of its freedom and power.
A Reading From Saint Augustine’s Explanation Of Saint Paul’s Letter To The Galatians | The Need To Understand The Power Of God’s Grace
Paul writes to the Galatians to make them understand that by God’s grace they are no longer under the law. When the Gospel was preached to them, there were some among them of Jewish origin known as circumcisers – though they called themselves Christians – who did not grasp the gift they had received. They still wanted to be under the burden of the law. Now God had imposed that burden on those who were slaves to sin and not on servants of justice. That is today, God had given a just law to unjust men in order to show them their sin, not to take it away. For sin is taken away only by the gift of faith that works through love. The Galatians had already received this gift, but the circumcisers claimed that the Gospel would not save them unless they underwent circumcision and were willing to observe also the other traditional Jewish rites.
The Galatians, therefore, began to question Paul’s preaching of the Gospel because he did not require Gentiles to follow Jewish observances as other apostles had done. Even Peter had yielded to the scandalized protest of the circumcisers. He pretended to believe that the Gospel would not save the Gentiles unless they fulfilled the burden of the law. But Paul recalled him from such dissimulation, as is shown in this very same letter. A similar issue arises in Paul’s letter to the Romans, but with an evident difference. Through his letter to them Paul was able to resolve the strife and controversy that had developed between the Jewish and Gentile converts.
In the present letter Paul is writing to persons who were profoundly influenced and disturbed by the circumcisers. The Galatians had begun to believe them and to think that Paul had not preached rightly, since he had not ordered them to be circumcised. And so the Apostle begins by saying: I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you to the glory of Christ, and turning to another gospel.
After this there comes a brief introduction to the point at issue. But remember in the very opening of the letter Paul had said that he was an apostle not from men nor by any man, a statement that does not appear in any other letter of his. He is making it quite clear that the circumcisers, for their part, are not from God but from men, and that his authority in preaching the gospel must be considered equal to that of the other apostles. For he was called to be an apostle not from men nor by any man, but through God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ.
Christian Prayer With Jesus Christ
God of grace and truth,
you call us not through human effort
but through the gift of your Son.
Give us understanding hearts,
that we may trust fully in your grace
and not place our confidence
in what cannot save.
Keep us faithful to the Gospel we have received,
a Gospel of freedom, love, and new life.
Guard us from confusion and fear,
and strengthen us to live by faith
working through love.
May your grace shape our lives
and lead us into the freedom
of your children.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen
Glossary Of Christian Terms
Grace | God’s free and undeserved gift of salvation
Law | The Mosaic law given to Israel
Circumcisers | Jewish Christians who insisted on circumcision for salvation
Faith | Trust in God’s saving action through Christ
Faith working through love | Faith expressed in active charity
Gentiles | Non-Jewish believers
Mosaic law | The religious law given through Moses
Apostleship | Authority and mission given directly by God
Dissimulation | Pretending or acting insincerely
Gospel | The good news of salvation in Christ
Justification | Being made right with God through grace
Servants of justice | Those living in right relationship with God
Human authority | Authority based on human appointment rather than divine call
The second reading for today’s Office of Readings is taken from Apologia ad Autolycum (Apology to Autolycus), the only surviving work of Saint Theophilus of Antioch, a second-century Christian apologist and bishop. This work is a defence of Christianity addressed to a pagan named Autolycus, who was sceptical of Christian beliefs. In this passage, Theophilus argues that the ability to perceive God is not dependent on physical sight but on the inner purity of the soul. He draws a comparison between bodily vision and spiritual insight, explaining that just as blindness prevents one from seeing the light of the sun, so too does sin obscure one’s ability to recognize God [ … ]
In this rich Eastertide reflection, Saint Fulgentius presents the Eucharist as both the source and summit of Christian unity, drawing the Church together into one spiritual body through the bond of love. His meditation resonates profoundly with the paschal season, in which the Church celebrates the risen life of Christ not merely as a past event, but as a present, living reality—embodied in the Eucharist and shared through the Spirit [ … ]
We process. Glass exhibition cases, old reliquaries. A forearm here; here a nun’s fingertip. In chapel, at a glance, there are the usual faces. But they all stand to attention. Jonathan breaks from the procession to – fire the organ with oomph and dignity: Ride on! ride on in majesty! The angel-squadrons of the sky look down with sad and wondering eyes to see the approaching sacrifice. When we’ve done the readings, the Arch holds that tree in his hands to deliver the homily. He rocks quietly on his feet, some few seconds, as if balance defeated it. A way you might affect as the Spirit moves… Copying. Then he says: ‘Our palm fronds may seem to us today rather dry. I mean this not in a literal sense, but by the standards of those who originally lined the roadways in order to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem, as they proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, who would be clambering up and ripping their palm branches fresh from off the trees. I think perhaps also our faith is somewhat distant from that of the people there on that highroad into Jerusalem, and something of our sense of the meaning has shifted in vividness from what it was then. And of course the expectation of all those many people is markedly different, but in many important respects the same. There are the same essential qualities to all our faith in God, which springs complete from our humanity, and that is one and the same in value for all of us, and time is consistent on this point. So then, let us renew the fullness of Catholic faith, and let us ask the Lord’s blessing as we embark upon our Holy Week. ‘Our Lord enters into Jerusalem in order to refresh us. He is to die in order that we may have life. There is a living reality here, both spiritual and as entangled in the joy of our daily living. We have Ladies’ Day where I grew up. They still have it, and they close the roads off, and little children parade, dressed-up like spring brides. When I was a boy, there was a May Day festival, and there was a May pole on the field, with the people dancing, like Morris dancers might be one way of visualizing this if you’ve never seen it, with their ribbons tied onto the top of the May pole, and they would weave around each other, dressing the pole, which is what we called it. It was like a dance with red and white and blue ribbons all hung off of the top of the May pole, which stood there all year, only like a telegraph pole, but it was concreted in, and then there was a slide, and swings – one baby-swing and two you could have a go at – terrible health and safety but that’s what it was in those days. ‘There was a round-a-bout – we used to run it round and round to try to get it off its central axis. It were rusty as anything and creaked like mad – on concrete. And climb up where it was all greased up at the top. Ruth, who was big as the next four of us, used to sit there sucking on the lollipops we nicked for her from Raddies, and she’d direct matters. We were trying to destroy it, and get it to dislodge from its central axis, and fly away – roll off into that farmer’s field, which he only ever kept for silage, but we never succeeded. There was a car someone had left there so we spent forever smashing that up, until someone who lived in one of the houses there took exception to our doing that, so he put thick grease under the door handles and gave us a right talking to. ‘It would only be a few stands, hot-dogs and things like that. The man selling the hot dogs would have his records on full blast. There’d be a couple of set-up stalls. Air-rifles – that sort of thing. But we all had them, and we all went shooting, of course, if not with twelve bores then with smaller gauge. Or pay a pound – I have no idea how much it was in actual fact then – it might have only been a few pennies – and we’d get all that time smashing up the crockery the man would put up for us to smash on the dressers. That was my particular favourite thing to do at these festivals, by the way, in case you were wondering. You got a little bucket of so many cricket balls. ‘I dread to think what went into those hot dogs. Probably EE rules would forbid it now. But it was a fair mix in those days. A lot of young people then were C of E. We’ve done a lot to hang onto our young people, which is a tremendous encouragement when you consider how things are, while in recent decades the Church of England hasn’t been so successful. People still want it on feast days and what are essentially now civic celebrations. It’s strange to see, though, how all the little stands there people have are run by the police and people like that along those lines. There’s no May pole. That was a sort of faith that ran and ran beneath all the theoreticals of it in the 1960s and the 1970s and into the 1980s. The May pole isn’t there now in the particular place I’m thinking of. Considering May poles were officially suppressed hundreds of years ago – as a part of the protestant reformation. One or two of you are probably thinking I’m remembering things from that time! ‘I should have liked to say that those processionals were so hardwired into us, that even after the last thirty years, when I became a bishop, they are still with us. They were […]
