Thursday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
What a passage! What drove Paul to call the Galatians “stupid,” not once but twice? These are hard words given the importance of this letter and the Churches that made up the Galatian province. It was the Magna Carta of the early Jesus believers and Martin Luther’s favorite — masthead of the Reformation, of which Luther said, “This epistle is my epistle. To it I was, as it were, wedlocked.” It may be the oldest writing in the New Testament, although that is debated, and possibly the only letter written by Paul’s own hand. So why “stupid?”
Paul is persistent, even shameless, because of his great love. Sort of verbal “this hurts me more than it will hurt you!”
The Galatians were a hardheaded Celtic people, related to today’s Irish, Welsh, and Scots. Caesar said of them: “They are fickle in their resolve, and fond of changing their minds. They are not to be trusted.” These words resemble Winston Churchill’s exasperating words about the Irish, Galatia’s distant cousins: “The problem with the Irish is that they refuse to be English!"
My DNA being 95% Irish, I concur! Is fearr duit e a chreidiuint!
One can appreciate why Paul was so persistent. Galatia, after all, consisted of the Jesus communities dear to his heart —- Pisidian Antioch, Iconic, Lystra, and Derbe — all founded by Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey. Galatia may be Paul's problem child, but Paul’s eldest and his great love, second only to his beloved Philippians. He never gave up on them. I’d like to think he would likewise be as persistent with my Celtic kin today.
Today's parable features the word "persistence." But is it a mistranslation? The Greek anaideia is translated "persistence” but also "shameless." I grew up a few blocks from the roaring steel mills of Youngstown’s Mahoning Valley, where every corner had a bar. In those long ago days no respectable woman would enter a bar unaccompanied. (Up until the mid ‘60s women were also “suspect” if they drove a car or had a job outside the home.) Yet one night, while my father was on the night shift at the Republic Steel, I was sick with the “dry heaves.” My determined Irish grandmother, ignoring all taboos, went straight into Carlin’s Corner Bar to get blackberry brandy to help me. I can hear my Irish family’s reaction to this, “What in the name of God were you doing at Carlin’s Corner in the middle of the night of all things?” She acted "shamelessly,” out of love.
Paul was similarly “shameless” due to his great love for his foundling Church. Like my grandmother, he acted persistently. Name calling aside, who are those in our lives for whom we are willing to break taboos and act in a persistent, even shameless (in the eyes of the world) way?
-Timothy J. Cronin