Galatians 6:11–18
11 See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. 12 It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. 13 For even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh. 14 But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which1 the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. 15 For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. 16 And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.
17 From now on let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.
18 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen.
1 Or through whom
Section Overview: Paul Summarizes His Concern: The Letter’s Closing
Paul now takes the pen from his secretary and summarizes his main concern in his own hand. Taking up the pen himself and writing in large letters (Gal. 6:11) emphasizes the depth of his feeling about the false teachers’ success among the Galatians. The heart of the paragraph is the comparison Paul draws between his and the false teachers’ widely differing perspectives on circumcision (vv. 12–16).
The enthusiasm of the false teachers for seeking to compel the Galatians to accept circumcision originates in two motives: they want to avoid persecution for the gospel (v. 12) and to boast in the success of their Galatian circumcision campaign (v. 13). In other words, they want to make the gospel palatable to the unbelieving world in order to avoid suffering, and they want to make themselves look impressive to others.
For Paul, however, the standards of the world and the good opinion of others have become irrelevant (vv. 14–15). Crucified people in the Roman world experienced one of its worst forms of persecution and were robbed of all public honor. The world held nothing for them any longer. Through the crucified Christ, God has led Paul into a new world, where old boundaries such as circumcision and uncircumcision no longer matter (v. 14). This new world is God’s creation (v. 15), and Paul desperately hopes that both the Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians (“the Israel of God”) will live within this world and experience the peace and mercy that reigns there (v. 16).
The final two sentences in the letter sum up its two main parts. Paul has been faithful to Jesus, whom God revealed to Paul and through whom God called Paul to preach the gospel to the Gentiles (v. 17; cf. 1:10–2:14), and Paul wants the Galatians to return to the gospel of God’s grace (6:18; 2:15–6:16).
Section Outline
IV. Paul Summarizes His Concern: The Letter’s Closing (6:11–18)
A. The Importance of the Letter’s Central Concern (6:11)
B. The False Teachers’ Motives (6:12–13)
C. Paul’s Contrasting Motives (6:14–17)
D. A Prayer for the Galatians to Experience God’s Grace (6:18)
Response
The false teachers in Galatia were apparently well-connected leaders in the church, and yet they distorted the gospel and sought to coerce those under their influence to turn away from its true form. They did this to enhance their own comfort and prestige. It is a sadly familiar tale that only underlines Paul’s point throughout Galatians about the depth of human sinfulness.
Identifying with something good and God-given, such as the Mosaic law, does not guarantee that we are faithfully obeying God but may mean simply that we are using this good thing for sinful purposes. This is what Paul did before his conversion and call, when his zeal for Jewish tradition became the basis for his persecution of the church. This is what Cephas did in Antioch when the Jewish food laws became the basis for compelling Gentile Christians to become Jews. This is what the false teachers were doing in Galatia when they used Scripture to compel believers there to be circumcised. Christian leaders today follow the same path when they trim and twist the gospel, ever so subtly, to make it more attractive to larger crowds, who, in turn, yield larger budgets, bigger buildings, and enhanced prestige.
Paul supplies the antidote to this kind of gospel-hindering self-deception in 6:14–15. We need to realize that, as Christians, we are marching to a drummer beating out an entirely different set of steps than those the world around us follows. If comfort and prestige are our goals, we have not yet been crucified to the world nor begun to experience life in God’s new creation. Yet elements of the world’s rebellion against God keep trying to creep into our lives, as Paul’s comments on the struggle between the flesh and the Spirit in 5:16–24 show. All Christians, and especially those with some leadership responsibilities in the church, should frequently pray for God to open their eyes to ways in which they might be distorting the gospel, manipulating others to do their own bidding, and using the church to enhance their own comfort and prestige. That prayer might end on a positive note, asking God to display in them the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (5:22–23).
Or through whom
6:11 Paul normally dictated his letters to a secretary (e.g., Rom. 16:22), but occasionally he penned a few words of greeting in his own hand in order to give the greeting a more personal form (1 Cor. 16:21; Col. 4:18), to guarantee the letter’s genuineness (2 Thess. 3:17), or to certify a promise (Philem. 19). Here, in an unusual move, Paul apparently writes the rest of the letter in his own hand, and in large letters for emphasis.
6:12 The Greek verb that the ESV translates “make a good showing” (euprosōpeō) is uncommon but appears in a late-second-century-BC papyrus letter in which a city official encourages his brother to “make a good showing” when writing up a financial report so that its figures do not fall short of the previous year’s revenues. The term refers, then, to giving a good impression and carries the nuance of fudging the truth to make the situation look better than it actually is.
Circumcising the Galatian Gentiles would mask the true nature of the cross-centered gospel they had believed by regularizing their status as Jews. Left as non-Jews whose primary distinctive was the worship of a religious leader crucified for political sedition (Matt. 27:37), the Galatian Christians might well bring persecution on themselves and others, such as the false teachers. The false teachers were probably also concerned about persecution from non-Christian fellow Jews who might correctly understand the gospel to say that, through Christ’s crucifixion, the blessing of Abraham (and full inclusion in God’s people) could now flow to uncircumcised Gentiles (Gal. 3:13–14).
6:13 Paul’s “for” shows that he is about to back up his claim about the deceptive intentions and cowardly motives of the false teachers. His statement that they do not themselves keep the law could be an echo of his point earlier in the letter that no one can keep the law (2:16, 21; 3:10–13; cf. 5:3). Since the focus of the immediate context is the hypocrisy of the false teachers, however, Paul probably means that they are requiring a higher standard of conformity to the Mosaic law for the Galatians than they require of themselves. His additional charge that they want to boast in the Galatians’ flesh must mean that they intend to report to others, probably other Judaizing Christians (e.g., 2:4–5, 12; Acts 15:1), the results of their work among the Galatians.
6:14 Paul now contrasts (“but”) his own perspective with the description he has just provided of the false teachers. Crucifixion was a brutal form of execution reserved for the lowest social classes of society, especially slaves and insurrectionists. It was associated with intense shame in a culture that valued honor highly. Among some Jews, as we just saw in the comment on 6:12, the central place of Christ’s crucifixion in Paul’s understanding of the gospel may have been associated with the inclusion of the Gentiles within God’s people and therefore viewed as a threat to the status quo.
For Paul, however, the crucified Christ had turned the standards of the unbelieving world on their head. Through that unselfish act of deliverance (1:4; 2:20), God forgave Paul’s sins and sent him out to preach the reconciliation of all kinds of people to God and to one another through the gospel (2:15–21; cf. Eph. 2:11–3:13).
6:15 Next Paul explains how this new perspective on the world affects his view of circumcision, the main concern of the false teachers. Unlike the false teachers, Paul would never boast in circumcision, but he would also never boast in uncircumcision. Paul has nothing invested in this issue, for it represents a distinction that has no ultimate significance. For those who believe the true gospel, the era of dividing people up into circumcised and uncircumcised has ended. Since the redeeming death of Christ (3:13; 4:5) and the coming of the Spirit (3:1–5, 14; 4:6; 5:5, 16–18, 22, 25), God has begun re-creating the world, beginning with a new, nonethnically oriented configuration of his people (3:28; cf. 2 Cor. 5:17).
6:16 Paul returns to the ethical language of “walking” (Gk. stoicheō) in step with or in line with a particular person or standard (cf. 5:25). The “rule” that forms this standard is the pithy sentence in 6:15, particularly its second part concerning the new creation. In Galatia, walking in line with this norm would mean accepting everyone, Jew or Gentile, into the full fellowship of the various Christian assemblies there. Faithfulness to the true gospel means there can be no barriers to Christian fellowship, such as the one Cephas and the other Jewish Christians in Antioch sought to impose between Jews and Gentiles (2:11–14).
Paul recognizes the special place that Israel occupies in salvation history (Rom. 3:1–2; 9:4–5; Eph. 2:12; 2 Tim. 3:15), however, and he makes this clear with his benediction on “the Israel of God.” This is probably a reference to Jewish believers, and just as with the statement that uncircumcision is also nothing in Galatians 6:15, it reveals that Paul has no interest in this letter in polemicizing against circumcision, the law, or the Jews but only against the false teachers who have made becoming Jewish a requirement for salvation.
6:17 The noun “marks” (Gk. stigmata) is derived from a verb meaning to “prick” (stizō). “Marks,” then, were usually tattoos made through pricking the skin with needles and applying ink. Tattoos in antiquity were sometimes simply decorative, but most often they had either religious (e.g., Isa. 44:5) or punitive (e.g., Petronius, Satyricon 103.1–5; 105.11–106) significance. In Paul’s world, they were usually a sign of social degradation.
Since Paul has just charged the false teachers with avoiding persecution by advocating circumcision (Gal. 6:12), it seems likely that here he refers, by contrast, to the scars he has received through faithfully preaching the true gospel and experiencing violent mistreatment as a result of this faithfulness (2 Cor. 11:23–25). Paul’s reference to the “marks” of Jesus, then, has both social and religious significance. They are a sign of his degradation at the hands of the unbelieving “world” (Gal. 6:14) but also, at the same time, of his dedication to Jesus (cf. Isa. 44:5).
6:18 Every surviving letter of Paul includes a grace benediction similar to this near its conclusion, and in all but two letters (Romans and 1 Corinthians) it is the last line of the letter, as here. This grace benediction is nearly identical to the ones in Philippians 4:23 and Philemon 25, which are identical to each other. Here Paul adds only the pronoun “our” and the last two words, “. . . brothers. Amen.”
None of this means that this final statement in the letter is a mere formality. It matches the opening grace benediction (Gal. 1:3) and envelopes the whole letter in one of its most prominent themes. Paul defines the problem he seeks to address in the letter as the Galatians’ abandonment of the God who called them in the grace of Christ (1:6; cf. 5:6), and he defines the essence of the gospel as God’s gracious action of reconciling his people to himself through the death of Christ (2:21; cf. 1:4; 3:13; 4:5).
The “grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” then, is the costly kindness Christ has shown in willing obedience to God the Father (cf. 4:4–5) and as a free expression of his own love for God’s people (1:4; 2:20). It is a gift that, unlike typical gifts in antiquity, is given to completely unworthy recipients (2:16; 3:10–13, 22–23) but, like most ancient gifts, requires of its recipients a life lived in gratitude to the giver.