The law of Christ

This morning, when I read this Sunday's epistle lesson (Galatians 6:1–16), something jumped out at me: "Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." It was that phrase "law of Christ" that caught my attention. Law of Christ? What's that? And why is Paul, the suspected antinomian, writing about any sort of law as if it belonged to the one who set us free from the law? 

I did a quick search for the word law in the Bible. Not surprisingly, it comes up a lot in Galatians—27 times! In the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, only Romans has more incidences of that word (51). In this letter, Paul is deeply and emotionally concerned with a faction in the Galatian church that is insisting that Gentile converts to Christianity be circumcised. At times combative, this letter is Paul's most vehement treatise against those who would require followers of Christ to be adherents to the law of Moses. Among the 27 times that the word law appears, 26 of them refer in one way or another to the law of the old covenant. Each time, Paul is laying out a reason why that law is not operative in the lives of those converts. But then there's the exception.

"Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." To the original readers of this letter, it must have leapt off the page in a way that I missed earlier this week. Law of Christ. If Paul is going to call something the law of Christ, he must really mean it. To someone who wants to be absolutely clear that the law of Moses is fruitless, those are dangerous words. But Paul chooses them carefully and for powerful effect. This is the law of Christ—this is what we, as followers of Jesus who have been justified by faith, are beholden to: we must bear one another's burdens.