SUMMARY
Those who have been baptized into Christ’s death no longer live under the law but have been clothed in Christ and made one in him as children and heirs of God’s promise.
ANALYSIS
Through Galatians 3-4, Paul further works out the implications of justification for the life of Christians in the world. Now that faith has come, Paul says, there is no more need for the law, because all have become children of God through faith. In language of both promise and imaginative vision, he describes the effects of that new life. To be baptized into Christ is like putting on new clothes that have the power to transform the lives of those wearing them.There is hardly anywhere in Paul’s writings a more forceful or dramatic image of the power and the possibilities of this new life and its implications for the community. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (verse 28). Perhaps no words in all of Paul’s letters have so disappointed Christians in their failure to be realized and yet have so inspired Christians with the possibility and promise for the new vision of community that is ours in Christ through the gift of God’s grace in baptism.
