Earning charity

 This week is on Galatians 2:15-16:

We are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet we know that no one is justified by the works of the law but by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by the faithfulness of Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified. 

 These verses are part of Paul's rebuke to the Jewish believers about believing they were better than the Gentile believers on account of following the Old Testament law. Paul himself was Jewish (as was Jesus) so he was in a good position to remind them of the big picture.

Paul was an exceptionally devout Jew. He was so zealous that he was basically like a first century ISIS soldier, physically attacking and even killing people he saw as infidels. (This was before he became a Christian.) If anyone could point to their righteous adherence to the religious law, it was Paul. But even his righteous zeal and attention to detail was not enough.

Paul agrees with the Galatian church that they are not "sinners" in any visible or scandalous sense, nor are they "unclean" by birth. We make the same distinction sometimes. "Yeah, so I don't do everything right but at least I'm not a pedophile or a racist." Or we look at our upbringing and think "I've been a Christian my whole life. I never lived as an unbeliever. Surely that's worth something. Perfect attendance record in church." By human standards both of those things are quite something, but they are not enough. 

Paul says that nobody is justified by the works of the law, but by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. In other words, we're hopeless charity cases. Has any recipient of grace or charity earned it? Earned charity isn't charity. It's a paycheck.

In the line for the food pantry, has anyone there provided enough value to the food bank that they could say that they actually earned their free bag of potatoes? Or could any of them they say that the other sorry souls in line don't deserve it nearly as much?

But we do it anyway. We look at our wealth, or our many friends, or our volunteer schedule, or giving record, or any number of other things, and think "I must be a pretty good person. Not like those other people, who don't do it as well." People brag about what they have, or what their position is at work, or who they have helped. We measure ourselves by what we find important, but we also measure ourselves against what others don't have that we do.

And that's one of the dangers of basing our self-worth on following the religious law. Yes, it's good to give money regularly to charity, for instance, but if you are doing it to feel better about yourself, or if you find that you look down on people who give less, then you are justifying yourself on the basis of your zeal for charity and not on the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.

But even if you managed to do everything the religious law asks of you, from pure motives, you're still going to overlook things. The world is not so simple that every right action can be defined in a set of rules that were handed down by word of mouth thousands of years ago. What do you do in the edge cases? What do you do about stuff like tobacco and social media that didn't exist back then? If you're focused on the rules, you miss the thing you need to be doing right now.

So, even if we're serious about being righteous, to the point even of being viewed as extremists, we're still not able to reach the level of righteousness that is freely offered to us by grace of the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. The thing we can get for free by virtue of his charity is nicer than the thing we could earn with a lifetime of grueling labor. And yet we brag about the substandard thing we feel we've earned and thereby ignore the free thing that is truly amazing. It makes no sense!

The even crazier thing is that the substandard thing we made ourselves is something our lives depend on. Imagine choosing a parachute you made yourself and never tested instead of a beautiful certified model of the finest brand. Nobody would do that! But when we anchor our righteousness to how morally correct we are, that's exactly what we're doing.

We're never going to be good enough. Even if we try as hard as we can, for as long as we live, we will never be good enough that we can outdo what Jesus offers us freely. So why not just accept his charity and live in grace?