Galatians 2:19-21

What prompted Paul to write “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”?  It was not some abstract theologizing done on a sunny afternoon; it was prompted by Peter’s screw-up, a screw-up that had everything to do with true identity.

The risen Jesus graciously gave the “keys of the kingdom” to Peter, who used them to “open the doors” of that kingdom to a group of Gentiles gathered in the home of a Roman centurion (see Acts 10).  It took some serious and repeated prodding from God to even get Peter to go, but once he saw Gentiles responding to the Good News of Jesus and receiving the same Spirit Peter had on the day of Pentecost, Peter got it.  God is no respecter of our various personal identities, but welcomes anyone and everyone who entrusts himself or herself to Jesus.

Peter got it; until he didn’t.  He had gotten into the habit of hanging with, even dining with, Gentiles in this new community called “church.”  The old identity markers that separated Jews and Gentiles no longer mattered.  These real differences were not denied or erased; instead, because of Jesus, they were no longer reasons for separation and superiority.

Until.  Peter was in fact living his way into the Jesus-created new creation by sharing table fellowship with (gasp) Gentiles until some Seriously Religious People got wind of things.  “Certain men came from James,” Paul writes (Galatians 2:12).  We’re not really sure who they were, but the effect of their visit was that Peter stopped eating with Gentile believers.  What is the identity of a “real Christian”?  According to the Seriously Religious People, it meant that you continued to keep the Law.  

Well, when Paul saw what was going on, “I opposed Peter to his face.”  Yikes: Paul, a former persecutor of the church (there’s an identity marker for you!), rebukes Jesus’ #1 Apostle—in public (“to his face”)?

Yes. This is why Paul wrote, “I have been crucified with Christ.”  All our identity markers—religious, racial, ethnic, economic, gender, and everything else we use to define and identify ourselves, to separate and rank ourselves—went to the cross with Jesus.  Jesus did not only die for you; he died as you.  The me I think I am, the me I have tried so hard to construct and sustain over all these years?  It all went with Christ to the cross.

Once I’m dead, no one cares about my race, gender, bank account, clothes, style or memberships.

But once I’m dead?  Then it’s possible, by God, to be raised to a new life—a new identity—in Christ.  “It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.  And the life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Having been hung with Christ, there is no one we can’t hang with.

Have you ever been “opposed to your face”?  Has that ever been a good—or God—experience for you?