Galatians 1:11-2:10
In The Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack Skellington is the king of Halloweentown, bored with the same routine every year, and one day he stumbles through a doorway into Christmas Town. He’s amazed. Snow, lights, carolers, joy, decorations. He wants to share it. So he kidnaps Santa Claus and takes everything back to Halloweentown to reproduce it.
The problem is, the only tools Halloweentown has are Halloween tools. Skeleton reindeers pulling coffins. Terrifying Santas. Gift boxes full of creatures that eat people. They’re genuinely trying to do Christmas. They’re just seeing it through the wrong lens, and it distorts and destroys the whole thing.
What the Judaisers Were Doing
The people causing trouble in the Galatian churches, the Judaisers, as biblical scholars call them, weren’t anti-Jesus. They were enthusiastic. Hallelujah, the Jewish Messiah has come! He fixes our problem of sin! Now everyone can follow the Jewish law and be perfect Jews together.
The problem is that Jesus changes everything. The Old Testament story is real and precious; God’s promises to Abraham, the Exodus, the law, the prophets, but it all finds its fulfilment in Jesus. What Jesus ushers in is not a better version of ethnic Judaism. It’s a multi-ethnic, multi-national, global people of God. Anyone who puts their faith in Jesus Christ, regardless of nationality, regardless of ethnicity, is in. There is no other requirement.
The Judaisers had heard the gospel and got excited. But they couldn’t get past their own lens. They filtered Jesus through their commitment to Jewish heritage and law, and what came out the other side was distorted. Jesus plus circumcision. Jesus plus food laws. Jesus plus becoming Jewish.
Paul says: that’s not the gospel. That’s no gospel at all.
Paul’s Defence
The Judaisers had an explanation for why Paul got it wrong. He’d heard the gospel secondhand, passed down through whispers, distorted along the way, not Jewish enough because it had been filtered through too many hands. Paul demolishes this one by one.
Secondhand? He says in verse 11: the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it. I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. He didn’t pick this up from the other apostles. He heard it directly from Jesus, and then spent three years preaching before he went to Jerusalem and met Peter and James. The rest of the apostles didn’t even know him.
After 14 years of preaching the same gospel, he went back to Jerusalem and presented it to the recognised leaders of the church. Their response: they added nothing. Not a correction, not a clarification, not a red mark on the essay. Everything Paul had been saying for 14 years was confirmed as accurate and true.
Not Jewish enough? Paul is, by his own account, the most Jewish person in the room. He advanced in Judaism beyond his peers. He was zealous for the traditions of his fathers. He persecuted the church and tried to destroy it. If anyone was going to be excited about a Jewish gospel, one that kept the works of the law and celebrated Jewish heritage, it would be Paul. And Paul is telling them: that’s not the gospel.
Every accusation falls apart. The argument collapses.
The Lenses We Wear
But here’s where it gets closer to home. The Judaisers’ mistake is obvious to us from 2000 years away. We’re not likely to be tempted by a gospel that requires male circumcision and Jewish dietary laws. So what do we do with this?
The same trap is available in different forms. All of us wear lenses; perspectives shaped by our backgrounds, our cultures, our politics, our economics, and those lenses can distort the gospel just as effectively as the Judaisers’ Jewish heritage did.
On the progressive left, the gospel can become primarily about caring for the vulnerable and marginalised, and therefore Christianity requires a particular kind of vote. On the conservative right, it becomes about standing for truth and protecting life, and therefore Christianity requires a different kind of vote. Both can contain real gospel implications. But if the gospel never challenges your prior political preferences — if it always conveniently confirms exactly what you already believed — that’s a sign you’ve been Jack Skellingtonised. Something else has gotten in front of the lens.
In a culture that equates monetary success with virtue, it’s easy to assume that the person with the most followers, the most book sales, the most entertaining content must have the truest gospel. Two million followers can’t be wrong. But success doesn’t equal truth. Neither does its opposite, the assumption that being marginalised or opposed automatically makes someone right. Both are distortions.
A third lens, perhaps the subtlest, is middle-class comfort. A gospel filtered through the values of efficiency, ease, safety, and financial independence doesn’t want to be rescued from the present evil age, because life in Sydney is actually pretty good, if you’re doing okay. It produces a gospel that’s comfortable, doesn’t ask too much, certainly doesn’t challenge the Australian dream. It can distort just as effectively as Judaising, just more quietly.
None of us is lens-free. We all see through something. The question is whether we’re aware of it, and whether we’re letting the gospel itself correct our vision, or letting our lenses correct the gospel.
The New Prescription
This is one of the reasons community matters so much. Not just community with people like us; same age, same stage, same background, same politics, but the kind of intentional diversity that means someone across the dinner table sees things differently. When a 44-year-old and a 17-year-old compare their reading of a passage, and notice the difference, that’s not a problem to solve. That’s the community doing what it’s supposed to do, helping each other see more clearly.
The gospel gives us a new prescription. But we often need each other to help us notice when our old lenses have crept back on.
Paul’s summary in Galatians lands it: neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything. Neither progressive nor conservative politics. Neither market success nor anti-establishment opposition. Neither comfort nor hard work. Neither financial independence nor crushing debt. None of the lenses we carry mean anything.
Only new creation.
That’s what the gospel produces. Not better Jews. Not better progressives or conservatives. Not more financially secure or more spiritually disciplined versions of what we already were. New creation people, shaped by the gospel itself, checking each other’s lenses, seeing Jesus more clearly together.
Soul Revival Church gathers across the Sutherland Shire [Kirrawee, Yarrawarrah, Miranda, Cronulla] and Ryde.