Living the Gift

Living the Gift November 10, 2014

“Gifts,” writes John Barclay (Galatians and Christian Theology, 307), “typically express and reinforce a preexistent system of values.” Gifts are given to the deserving, and signify their merit.

According to Paul, God’s gift of Christ is given to the undeserving, and that “dangerous and unsettling” gift (308) upends social conventions and expectations. It requires a quite different social practice, one that is not dominated by the rivalries of the flesh – of ethnicity, status, or gender – but a community “constituted by the gift to the unworthy” where “the greatest honor is for those who work against the competitive system of honor” (312).

What might this mean? Barclay concentrates on the final chapters of Galatians to explain. “Bear one another’s burdens,” Paul says, and Barclay explains that “Burden-bearing, the work of slaves, is made a task for all, in relation to all. Submission to the interests of others is saved from becoming a charter for the crushing of the weak by being turned also into reverse, such that service and honor are continually exchanged. . . . What matters is not to gain superiority but to cede it, and in ceding it to be honored in return” (313). If there is competition, it’s to see who can be most fully serviceable to others.

Paul urges gentle restoration of those who transgress, countering the typical scenario: “when someone has transgressed a communal norm and is vulnerable to public disgrace, others naturally seize the opportunity for competitive advantage” (314).

In these and other practices, “the gift of God in Christ is articulated as an unconditional gift in the creation of a community that neither mirrors nor endorses the regnant systems of value. Indeed, the incongruous gift is defined as incongruous in a community that marches to a different tune – and it is only in practice that that distinction can be recognized and achieved” (316). Barclay stresses the point: Without the social practice, the Christ-gift doesn’t get realized, so that “theology” and “social practice” are “mutually constitutive” (317). Paul’s theology of grace is such that it cannot be judged true unless it forms communities that express in their life together the grace of God in Christ.


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