Divine Un-Bragging Rights--February 21, 2024

Divine Un-Bragging Rights--February 21, 2024

"May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world." [Gal. 6:14]

For people who worship an executed criminal, condemned, among other things, on charges of blasphemy, the religious credentials game is a pointless one.  And for the apostle Paul, it's not even worth playing. As he writes here to the Galatians, you can waste your time trying to impress yourself or your friends or your enemies or your God with your little pious checklists, or you can give up on the whole game altogether and give up on the need to impress.

That's the logic in Paul's sentence here about boasting in nothing but the cross of Jesus. Remember that when Paul writes, "the cross" is one of the most shameful, tragic, cruel images around--you could boast about someone dying on a cross about as much as you could boast about someone "getting the chair" or "waiting for lethal injection" or "going before the firing squad." This gives us a clue to Paul's thrust--he's not still playing the religious accomplishment game with Jesus as a trump card. We might hear it that way at first, though--"Those other people might have their religious ceremonies to boast about, but well, I've got Jesus in my back pocket, so I beat you!" But Paul doesn't pick a very glamorous or glorious description of Jesus if he's still playing the old religious accomplishment game--he doesn't say, "May I boast of nothing but our glorious, miracle-working Jesus" or "May I boast only in the fact that I believe really hard in Jesus" or "May I boast only the fact that I made my decision to choose Jesus as my savior." Those kinds of sentences would be still stuck in the old religious accomplishment game, just trying to one-up the competition with Jesus as the ace up his sleeve. 

But instead, Paul shows his cards and reveals that he doesn't even have a meager pair of deuces--and yet he's convinced that the game is up because we belong to a Lord who went to a cross for us, ending once and for all the silly gamesmanship we get sucked into. Paul overturns the whole notion of impressing people with religiosity by holding up the shameful, cruel, seeming failure of Jesus' death. It's really sort of an anti-boast or un-boast. Boasting in the cross undercuts the whole logic of boasting in the first place--instead of pointing to my own accomplishments, it gives up on the game playing and says we're free from wasting our time trying to make God love us. In fact, the cross stands as God's anti-boast, a divine declaration that even God isn't interesting in playing the religious accomplishment game. Instead, Paul sees that in Jesus, God has ushered in a new age, a new community, a new world--one that is free from the old game playing, and one in which there is no need to puff ourselves up to make ourselves look better. Paul invites us, too, through his anti-boast to continually let go of the old game playing and see that we've been brought into the new reality of being God's people simply by the free grace of God.  I guess you could call them divine un-bragging rights... and they're ours for the taking.

We are often not aware of it, but today listen to your own voice for that old, needy boasting that looks to puff ourselves up. Who are we still trying to impress today? What would it look like today to be freed of the need to keep up those appearances? Now hear the announcement of the good news--you are already freed from it.  That's what the cross of Jesus does.

O God our Table-Turning, Liberating Lord, free us from adolescent games and let us find our value, our identity, our direction, and our wholeness in you. And in your ever table-turning ways, make us instruments to bring that same freeing word to all we meet today.