12I plead with you, brothers, become like me, for I became like you. You have done me no wrong. 13As you know, it was because of an illness that I first preached the gospel to you. 14Even though my illness was a trial to you, you did not treat me with contempt or scorn. Instead, you welcomed me as if I were an angel of God, as if I were Christ Jesus himself. 15What has happened to all your joy? I can testify that, if you could have done so, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me. 16Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?
17Those people are zealous to win you over, but for no good. What they want is to alienate you from us, so that you may be zealous for them. 18It is fine to be zealous, provided the purpose is good, and to be so always and not just when I am with you. 19My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, 20how I wish I could be with you now and change my tone, because I am perplexed about you!
Dig Deeper
During one season, while coaching high school basketball, we were in a bit of a down stretch. We weren’t losing that many games, but we were losing more than we should have. More importantly to me, we just were not playing up to our potential. I had tried nearly every motivational technique that I could think of and it was just not working. It was the first time in my coaching career that I felt like I might not be able to motivate a team. Any coach knows that one of the worst things that can happen is to lose your team, to the point where they stop listening. At halftime of a game, where they were again not playing well, I had nothing left but to get personal. Rather than talking strategy or using any tried and true motivational techniques, I sat down, looked them in the eye and talked to them as close friends. I reminded them that we were a close family. I had been to their houses, they had been to mine. We knew each other’s families and had shared more hours together than we could count. I reminded them that there was a time when they would have given me everything they had without giving it a second thought. What had changed, I asked? They were more than they had become. I’ll cut the story short here to report that they went out and had one of the best halves of basketball I had ever seen.
Up to this point, Paul has appealed to the Galatians theologically and intellectually. He has laid out why his presentation of the gospel has been the true announcement of the kingdom of God, while the Judaizers have presented a false gospel. In this section, none of that is in sight. Paul is perplexed, he really doesn’t know what else to do, so he appeals to them at a heart-to-heart level. Paul is appealing to friendship, to family loyalty, and to the common experience of what God has done in their lives.
Paul begins by pleading with them, this is a personal appeal that only a friend could make. He appeals to them to become like him just as he became like them. What exactly does he mean by that? It is a difficult figure of speech to translate but it most likely means something along the lines of ‘look, I became like a Gentile for you and shared in your life, are you now going to walk away and Judaize’? This is the sort of appeal that only a true and loyal friend can make. To this point in time, they have done no wrong to Paul, why would they start now?
We don’t know exactly what Paul is referring to in verse 13, but the actual term, ‘bodily weakness’, does necessarily imply illness as the NIV has translated it. Whatever it was, Paul’s condition was something that could have caused them to treat him with contempt or scorn, yet they did not. In fact, they treated him so well that Paul says they treated him as though he were an angel delivering the gospel message, or even the Messiah himself. They saw through his physical condition to recognize that something powerful was happening as he announced the message of the Messiah. It was the sort of power that could only come from God himself working through a human being. There is the underlying implication here that if they didn’t care about physical appearances then, why have they listened to these agitators and become so concerned about the flesh of circumcision now.
When I talked to my team, one of the things I mentioned is that they weren’t having fun anymore. In losing focus, things had changed and they had lost their joy. This is exactly what Paul says to the Galatians. They were once so full of joy; they had encouraged each other greatly, but now things have changed. Again, there is an implication here that since they have listened to the teachings of the Judaizers, they lost their source of joy. This is usually what happens when someone becomes bonded to a motivation other than the life in Christ. At one time, they would have done anything for Paul, including tearing out their eyes (this was a pretty common figure of speech in the first century, where we might say something like ‘bend over backwards’). They had shared such a strong common bond, could it be possible, Paul wants to know, that he has become their enemy by simply telling them the truth. This is a strong appeal to their friendship. Surely they wouldn’t turn away from him simply because he has taught them the truth? Paul, of course, makes another implication about the Judaizers, namely that they have not told the truth.
The real problem is that these outside agitators have come in with their zeal, abut it was for no good. Paul doesn’t doubt that they are sincere, but sincere people can be even more dangerous, often times, than insincere people. They have zeal, but as Paul says in Romans 10:2, zeal without knowledge can be quite harmful. Paul wants the Galatians to be truly zealous in the Messiah whether he is with them or not (he doesn’t want them to think the problem is with them listening to other teachers in general, but in listening to teachers that have the wrong kind of zeal), but he does not want them to have the kind of zeal without knowledge. These Judaizers want to shut the Gentiles out and alienate them from Paul. In essence they would be creating two circles of Christians, the inner circle and the outer circle. Paul knows that this just cannot be. There can be no such thing as an outer circle in the true body of Christ. This is an important concept for us today to keep in mind, to make sure that we are not unwittingly creating separate inner and outer circles within our own Christian community (at the same time, we should be careful not to go too far the other way and accuse any close group of Christian friends of having created an inner-circle that is shutting others out).
In verse 19, for the first time in the entire letter, Paul breaks with the term ‘brothers’ to address his readers as his dear children. Anyone who has been a parent watching their older child go through struggles in their life, knows what Paul is feeling as he describes feeling again the pains of childbirth. He will continue to feel this angst until they have reached the maturity of having the complete life of Christ formed in their community. His ultimate goal is no less than that the self-sacrificing love of the Messiah is fully formed and appears in their community.
Paul has talked about the love of Christ being fully formed in them, now he wishes that he could be there to show them that love in person. He wishes that they could be together in person, so that they could see his face, touch him, and remember how much he loves them. Then he would not have to use a scolding tone, because he is sure that if he could simply see them, it would remind them of the good times and would set things straight.
Devotional Thought
Paul’s great desire for the body in Galatia was to have the life of Christ fully formed in their community. Every Christian could easily look at the areas in which its church community needs to grow and have the life of Christ more fully formed in it, but the real question is what can you do personally to help assist in that growth?
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