Mulling over the prospectus of the boarding school to which I was bound, my father discovered that one of the hobbies on offer was printing, and he encouraged me to give it a try. Some weeks later I turned up at the ramshackle building which housed the school printing press and signed on as an apprentice. Older pupils explained what was in store. One tradition, having your head tapped against the polished flat stone used to level the type sounded scary. But there was a genuine treat to anticipate, the Wayzgoose, the annual printers’ feast. I was told that to earn my place at the feast I had to qualify as a compositor by passing a test. This would involve typesetting the Lord’s Prayer (this was, after all, a Methodist boarding school) in not more than fifteen minutes, and it had to be justified - and at this point it may be dawning on you how this reminiscence relates to today’s Epistle, for in it St Paul tells the Christians in Galatia that:
“…the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith.”
In traditional letterpress printing, justification meant ensuring that there was a straight right-hand margin as well as a straight left-hand margin. Nowadays I could type the Lord’s Prayer on my computer in a fraction of fifteen minutes and justify it with a couple of mouse clicks. If you’re setting up text using movable type, justification involves filling up whatever space is left at the end of a line by inserting small lead spaces between words and sometimes very small ones called hair spaces between the individual letters of a word. When we took the test, we were not allowed to cheat by ending a line in the middle of a word and using a hyphen. Thanks to expert tuition, I passed first time and earned my place at the Wayzgoose, which turned out to be a fish and chip supper at a local cafe - a big improvement on school food.
It’s interesting that printers took a theological term, justification, and applied it to one of the skills of their craft. It was appropriate that they did, for one of the key meanings of justification is making things right, and to make things right you need to provide what’s missing, to fill up whatever space there is. That’s a helpful clue to part of what St Paul meant when he wrote about justification by faith.
As a young man Paul had been brought up to believe that obedience to the Law was all that God required. As a Pharisee he had been particularly strict in his observance of the Law. His dramatic encounter with the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus gave him a powerful sense of his own sinfulness and inadequacy - of the spaces in him that needed filling. He came to realise that the love of God was not something that could be earned by obedience to the Law or by any other kind of effort, indeed not something that needed to be earned. All that was needed was acceptance of the love of God embodied and enacted by Jesus. That’s what he meant by faith - not just believing in a set of propositions about who Jesus was and about the significance of his Passion and Resurrection, though the propositions are important and helpful. Faith is acceptance of the love of God embodied and enacted by Jesus.
To accept love is to open oneself up. It’s rewarding and the reward comes in the form of fulfilment - the meeting of our needs - the filling up of the spaces in us. But for Paul there was more to justification than the filling up of spaces. He understood that to accept love should also involve accepting a vocation to live lovingly. He also understood that in accepting that vocation we receive the grace of God which enables us to live lovingly. We are justified, we are made right, in order to play a part in the God’s purpose of making the whole of creation right.
You can see that theme of vocation in today’s Gospel story of Jesus healing the man possessed by demons. Jesus has crossed the Sea of Galilee to the eastern side and has clearly landed in an area inhabited by Gentiles - the fact that there was a herd of pigs, an animal regarded as unclean according to Jewish Law is evidence of that. The unfortunate man is doubly unclean - he’s naked and he’s living among tombs, which were also regarded as unclean. Once the man is healed, restored to his right mind, the local people ask Jesus to leave. Whoever owned that herd of pigs must have been particularly angry with him. And when the man who has been healed asks Jesus whether he may accompany him, he is given his vocation:
“…but Jesus sent him away, saying “Return to your home, and declare what God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.”
St Paul makes the point about the Christian vocation beautifully in his letter to Christians in Ephesus.
“For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” Ephesians 2:10
The Greek word which is translated as “made” is poiema, from which we derive our word poetry, and the great New Testament scholar Bishop Tom Wright suggests that the phrase “we are what God has made us” could helpfully be translated as “we are God’s poetry”.
Poetry moves us, poetry makes us see the world and see people in new ways. In accepting the love of God embodied and enacted by Jesus we can become part of God’s process of putting things right. We are called to be God’s poetry and, in Tom Wright’s words:
“…to break open existing ways of looking at things and spark the mind to imagine a different way of being human.”
There’s a great need for that in a world marred by conflict, cruelty and prejudice. That’s our vocation, to:
“…spark the mind to imagine a different way of being human”.