Lectionary Commentaries for June 22, 2025
Second Sunday after Pentecost

If there is one thing the gospels agree on, it is that Jesus performed miracles through the power of deliverance and the presence of healing. Whether it was an illness or a situation that felt impossible or, as in this case, a possession, Jesus was known for showing that what felt like the end for so many was not the end of their story. Right before this text, Jesus had calmed a storm (Luke 8:22–25), and from this rocky ride they arrived at the region of the Gerasenes. This text comes within a lineup of miracles, and here we encounter one with many layers.

Recognition of Jesus’ power

“When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him shouting, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me’” (verse 28). This cry from the demons that had taken over this man is intriguing. They are asking for mercy that they have not given to the person they have occupied. They recognize and name that they need life to exist, and that to exist is, for them, better than the torment of an abyss where they can occupy no life.

The approach to Jesus, begging for this mercy, is a recognition that they know Jesus’ power. Demons are not unique to this story in ancient history but are found across many cultures and in different religious sects. What is important to note about spiritual powers is that they submit to the higher and stronger power. This line of questioning suggests that they knew that Jesus’ power was greater than theirs and that in his presence, they were under his authority.

This is an important point as Jesus’ ongoing narrative unfolds and he continues to perform healings. The foundation is that there is no power that is more powerful than his through God, and that those things that torment the living cannot overtake Jesus’ power. 

Preacher’s note: There is a consistent tendency to lean heavily into metaphor when preaching this text and to make the things that “torment” people, especially mental health, aligned with these demons. It can create a shame spiral for people seeking an immediate “deliverance” when care, mental health practitioners, and other earthside resources are a way to healing, and their diagnosis should not be deemed demonic. We must be very mindful in our practice of trying to create a metaphor that we don’t create a parallel of things that are harmful and that should not be included in a metaphor when they are people’s lived realities.

What about the person, the people, and the pigs?

This section, as posed, asks more questions than it offers ideas, but sometimes the questions get us to the wisdom we are seeking. As we read this text, three entities are curious and should be considered.

1. What about the person known as the demoniac?

Even after he is released from the demons, he is still identified by what he has gone through. What type of compassion was possible for the people around to offer him something more in his identity than the most difficult part of his story? What are the ways that, even when folks are at their worst, they are not sent away in isolation?

2. What about the people that were afraid?

It is easy to think that the people who were afraid after Jesus performed this miracle should have been in awe. Yet, I imagine they were witnessing things that felt impossible to believe. Their friend, brother, son, colleague, or community member returned, and in the same moment, some of them completely lost their work because their pigs were gone. How can we hold the reality of fear and the possibilities of faith together in compassion?

3. What about the pigs that were the casualty?

My hang-up with this text is always “What about the pigs?!” If all that is living was crafted by God from love and seen as good, why were these pigs’ lives not deemed as valuable as the man who was living? More importantly, why would the request of demons not to be driven into the abyss mean more than the life of the pigs?

Deliverance into community

One of the important things to remember about the healing narratives and deliverance narratives is the other side of what one might deem as miraculous. Many times, the afflictions that people were enduring did not only have them hurting individually but had them isolated from the possibilities of community because they were considered unclean. Jesus sat with the man who had been isolated for so long. The one who was known to be possessed was rested and clothed, when he had been tormented and naked, and was found sitting intimately with Jesus.

While he wanted to stay with Jesus, begging to come with him, Jesus sent him back to where he came from—home—inviting him to bear witness to what can happen. In one sense, it was a beautiful and important way to get the story out and the word about Jesus out. In another sense, it reminds us that he could actually return home for the first time in a long time. In a way that was new, there was space beyond the tombs and out of isolation that he could go and be, now that he was more than the one off in the tombs and possessed.

Deliverance is a step in healing, not the whole experience. The deliverance was from the demons, but the healing was that there was a community of people that this beloved could now be a part of—most immediately, the community of Jesus. 

One of my favorite aspects of the prophets in general, and Isaiah specifically, is the emotional self-revelation of God. Isaiah 65 is the last turn in an ongoing emotional conversation about loss, betrayal, longing, and unresolved hurt among God, returning exiles, and the people of the land. It is not abusing a metaphor to say that the final chapters of Isaiah should be read as a father and son who have struggled with each other for decades. 

After trials and difficulties, their relationship has weathered much abuse and estrangement. The father and adult child are finally in the therapist’s office, describing their own experiences using “I” language so that the other partner can hear the emotional difficulty. But the therapist (or Bible reader) can also hear the deep commitment on both sides to maintain the relationship. 

Before we can turn to Isaiah 65:1–9, we must read Isaiah 63:7–14, and 63:15–64:12. These two sections form a sort of nostalgic love poem from the people toward God, and then present a confession of bad past behavior with a plea for God to reengage a people who have been set aside. In thinking about these chapters as a dialogue between father and adult child who are desperately trying to overcome distance, the opening gambit of the returned exiles is both vulnerable and cunning. They seek to remind God why and how they became family in the first place, to rekindle parental affection. 

For He said, “Certainly they are My people,
Sons who will not deal falsely.”
So He became their Savior.
In all their distress He was distressed,
And the angel of His presence saved them;
In His love and in His mercy He redeemed them,
And He lifted them and carried them all the days of old.
                 (Isaiah 63:8–9, New American Standard Bible)

God, remember you loved us, and how you carried us when we were little! After attempting to remind God of the original affection, the people beg for the kind of relationship they want to have. “Where are your zeal and your mighty deeds?” (63:15). “You are our father!” (63:16; 64:8). Why don’t you save us and take care of us like you used to? Sure, we sinned against you some, but your neglect is the real problem, Dad! 

It is against this line of thinking that God responds in Isaiah 65. God’s claim agrees with the Israelites’ poem and initial descriptions of their relationship. Of course God sought out the Israelites, spreading divine arms to embrace a beloved people (65:2). But God heaps doubt on the sincerity of the returned exiles’ claim that it is God who has grown distant. God characterizes the people, and their ancestors, as never truly asking for God, never truly seeking the divine Father. In a poignant description of unrequited parental affection, God repeats, “Here I am, here I am!” to a child who does not care, and is not looking for their father in the first place (65:2). 

Not only are the children of Israel not looking for God as parent, though that would be betrayal enough; instead, they are looking for guidance from other potential parents. There is no filial loyalty here. Instead, the kids are going to family meals in other houses! They make sacrifices—share food—with gods and goddesses in gardens. They spend the night in graveyards, hoping for a familiar spirit or an ancestor to come and give them wisdom, inspiration, and power. And we can feel the sense of betrayal when God tells them they are eating food that God raised them not to eat! 

After a brief time in London, I learned to drink tea with milk and a bit of honey. I’ll never forget my dad looking at me pouring milk in my tea after church one Sunday. The look on his face would have been the same if I showed up for a Bears game in a Packers jersey and a tutu. It was partially betrayal, and partially just weird. I imagined him saying, “Who taught you that? Is black coffee not good enough for you anymore?” 

The Israelites responded to God much as I had to my dad: Keep your preferences to yourself. I am holier/more sophisticated than you (Isaiah 65:5). God’s response makes sense at being repudiated by flippant, disloyal children. It is like acrid smoke in God’s nostrils, and like an offense carved into God’s retina, so that it is the only thing God can see. This is the precise moment we expect the therapy session to explode into shouting, tossed pillows, and angry walkouts. The people have made a claim against God’s neglect. God has made a counter-claim against the people’s hubris, disloyalty, and indifference. Now we expect an explosion of anger. But that is exactly what doesn’t happen. 

Instead, God steps back and, as any good therapist would suggest, evaluates the relationship to see if it is worth saving. God sees that the children of Israel are like a sometimes-disappointing vineyard. But the grapes this year are overflowing with tirosh—the lightly fermented oozing that comes out of cut, but not yet pressed grapes. This is like a bonus pre-harvest of wine. 

Rashi, the great 11th-century sage, says that the returned exiles here are like Noah in his generation, preventing the coming destruction. Noah was not so righteous in himself—it is not such a prize to be “outstanding in his generation” in the Worst. Generation. Ever. Instead, Noah found grace in God’s eyes (Genesis 6:8). In the same way, the sweetness of this generation of returned exiles is found in God’s gracious eyes. Instead of blowing up and walking away, God considers God’s children with love and grace that both God and Israel knew was the key to their relationship all the way along. 

God’s words in closing this section are the words of a loving, but sometimes distant Father, reunited with sometimes-wayward, sometimes-clingy children. I will take care of you. I will give you a space where we can be together. You will inherit good from me. (65:9). As anyone who has maintained a faith-life across decades knows, there are rough patches. But the God of the returned exiles is our God as well. Despite hurts and betrayals, God longs for our embrace and offers us open divine arms.     

Considered part of the Historical Books of the Christian Old Testament, the book of 1 Kings includes the chronicling of the death of King David, the reign of King Solomon, the construction and dedication of the temple, the death of Solomon, the ascension of King Jeroboam, the national transition from a united kingdom to a divided kingdom, and the reigns of King Nadab, King Zimri, King Omri, and King Ahab in the northern kingdom of Israel. This book also includes the ministry of one of Israel’s early prophets, Elijah. As a prelude to our focal passage, in 1 Kings 18, the word of the Lord comes to Elijah, instructing him to go to King Ahab during a drought (18:1). 

Before readers encounter Elijah in 1 Kings 19, we learn of his confrontation with King Ahab and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18. Here, Elijah demonstrates the power and sovereignty of God when he challenges the prophets of Baal to call upon their god to consume a bull offering with fire. When the prophets’ bull is not consumed, Elijah elaborately crafts a wood and stone altar that includes a trench around the edifice, places his bull on the altar, douses his bull with so much water that it pools in the trench, and calls on the name of the Lord. In response, the fire of the Lord falls on and consumes the bull, the wood, the stones, and even the water in the trench (1 Kings 18:38).

When Ahab reports the defeat of the prophets of Baal and Elijah’s slaughter of all the prophets with the sword to his wife, Jezebel, she vows to kill Elijah (1 Kings 19:2). Jezebel sends a messenger to him, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” In the first part of our focal text, Elijah leaves his companion and flees into the wilderness. While alone under a tree, Elijah begs God, “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4).

After being divinely nourished on his journey to Mount Horeb, Elijah spends the night in a cave (1 Kings 19:9), and in the second portion of our focal text, the word of the Lord tells Elijah to stand on the mountain before the Lord because the Lord is about to pass by. And the passing-by of the Lord is something to experience! Elijah encounters great wind, an earthquake, a fire, and silence, but not the Lord. Finally, Elijah hears a question: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 

Elijah experiences the Lord not in a response to his question but in the form of a new question. Whereas Job is humbled and repents after the Divine responds to his question (Job 38:1–42:6), Elijah complains that, despite being zealous in his commitment to his ministerial assignment, he is now eluding those who seek to kill him. The passage ends with the Lord directing Elijah to return to Damascus to anoint Hazael and Jehu as kings of Aram and Israel, respectively, and Elisha as his prophetic successor.

Commentary

We can learn at least three lessons from Elijah’s experience in 1 Kings 19. The first is that when the Lord is about to pass by, the Lord is already on the move. What does this mean? At the beginning of the canon, the biblical writers give readers their first glimpse of the Divine in action. Aside from the Divine speaking things into being, the writers illustrate the physicality of the Divine in action. The writers’ anthropomorphic depiction of the Divine includes the Divine separating light from darkness (Genesis 1:4), crafting a dome for the waters (1:7, 16), placing lights in the sky to illuminate the earth (1:17), making the animals (1:25), and shaping humankind (1:27). In the second account of creation, the Divine forms humanity from the dust of the ground and breathes life such that the humanoid becomes a living being (2:7).  

Modern readers do well to remember that God is a God of movement. In the same way the Divine moved to separate things at creation, God can create distance between you and the things that might cause you harm. In the same way the Divine took action to craft new things, God can build opportunities for you. In the same way the Divine moved to place things in order, God can arrange circumstances on your behalf. Although you may not see evidence of it yet, God is on the move and moving in your direction.

Modern readers should also be aware that when the Lord is about to pass by, there may be chaos. The inconvenient truth of Elijah’s story is that chaos sometimes precedes our encounter with the Divine. Moreover, there may be a direct correlation between our level of desperation and the degree of chaos and confusion. Chaos presents itself in some of the most bewildering ways when we are in “life and death” circumstances and need the Divine to “come and see about us.” 

I am reminded of the spiritual “Kum Ba Yah,” in which the psalmist entreats the Lord to “come by here” because they or somebody they know needs divine intervention. In modern times, this song is sung by young and old alike across the globe as part of various gatherings. Although the origin of the spiritual is unknown, many understand it to have been sung by enslaved Africans who lived under the hand of American chattel slavery and entreated the Divine to protect them in the face of oppression. Like when the biblical Elijah faced dire straits, our circumstances may be chaotic, confusing, or unpredictable; we might need the Divine to kum ba yah. 

Our kum ba yah cry may be when there is chaos in our finances. Some of us may need the Lord to kum ba yah when we are overwhelmed by circumstances at work. And for some of us, our kum ba yah may be the “parade of power” we need as we watch others suffer injustice. We need the Lord to comfort us when we are low. But the very fact that these kum ba yah circumstances are present in our lives may indicate that the Lord is in fact about to pass by.

Finally, at the end of our passage, the Lord gives Elijah a new assignment. The biblical writer records that after speaking with Elijah, the Lord says, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram” (1 Kings 19:15). As modern-day believers, we should be prepared—after we have been nourished, have rested, and have encountered the Divine—for a new assignment. We should not be the same after the encounter. We should be emboldened to take on the next God-sized assignment.

The Lord is about to pass by. First Kings 19 reminds us that our God is active and in motion. This passage encourages modern readers to withstand the chaos in our lives. If we understand some harsh experiences as the opening acts of the Divine’s mainstage performance in our lives, we might take a different position when we encounter chaos and confusion. Finally, this passage offers the reader inspiration that chaos in our lives may be the preamble for our next God-sized assignment.

This psalm was used to guide worship, rather than as a record of the particular faith journey of an individual in time.¹

Its words offered the community of faith a structure in which to express their deepest suffering to God even as they remembered God’s promises and salvation, to lament and praise in harmony.

Lament is like the blues—a tenacious articulation of reality insisting, even demanding resolution. Laments, like the blues, can make intimate friends of strangers, awakening us to our shared experiences of humanity: vulnerability, love, loss, ecstasy, anguish, and everything in between. Like the blues, lament is a language of faith, an assertion of reality rooted in hope. Though we are lonely, we are not alone. Though we cry out to God from the depths of our true feelings, God hears us and is present with us.

In Psalm 22, the psalmist expresses bewilderment, surrounded by enemies depicted as animals intent on pulling the psalmist limb from limb. God is nowhere to be seen, and the psalmist is sure that death is the only possible outcome.

The psalmist holds God accountable, invoking God to intervene on their behalf. As the lament turns to praise, it seems that the psalmist is naming God’s past work of deliverance not as praise but as petition, begging God to reprise God’s acts of salvation: “My God, you have always provided, so please show up now for me!”

Verses 19–21 signal a shift from petition to affirmation. Remembering God’s help ushers in a new tone, reversing the narrative from earlier in the psalm. Whereas the psalmist was mocked by those around them, now the community celebrates with the psalmist in praise of God. Now the psalmist is surrounded by a community of love, feasting together in praise of God. Now the community is fed to satisfaction physically, emotionally, and spiritually, all within a covenant of faith.

Not only has God responded to the psalmist’s suffering, but God has answered from the depths of the suffering (verse 21b). While the afflictions are still real, God is present with the afflicted in their suffering. God does not hide nor ignore those who cry out to God, but hears them and dwells among them.

The psalmist names things that God has promised and done for Israel. The psalmist praises God in suffering, which breathes new life into the psalmist’s certain death. Commentator J. Clinton McCann phrases it like this: “To praise God is to live.”² Nothing can separate us from God’s love for us, not even death. So, rather than describing death as that which surrounds the living, the psalmist’s praise rooted in suffering offers the opposite: Life constantly surrounds death. God’s power transcends boundaries (scientific, political, economic, racial, gender), restores what is broken, and breathes life into death.

In the practicing faith community, this praise turns into a celebratory meal, drawing all to a common table where God provides abundantly for everyone. The psalmist’s suffering has revealed a source of life for all who suffer. The psalmist becomes a witness of God’s salvation in ways that have strengthened the community and ushered in a new reality of love. You could say that the psalmist’s kenotic lamentation-turned-to-praise signals a reorientation of the world toward God.

Because Jesus evoked this psalm from the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—this psalm is typically associated with the climax of Jesus’ ministry. Since the psalm was written for liturgical use, designed to help a community pray through suffering, we can see why Jesus turned to it in the midst of his suffering. For those who believe, this prayer deepens our intimacy with God, pointing not to an empirical change in the world but to an experiential change, where prayers of affliction and prayers of praise, as well as suffering and celebration, are part of a continual arc of faith, and cannot be understood without the other.

Faith is not an escape or a cure but, rather, a witness to a new world where love and life, rather than suffering and death, have ultimate power.

How are you suffering? How is your community suffering? What snares entrap your feet? To what promises do you cling when you are suffering? How does your preaching encourage your congregation to understand suffering and celebration as twin strivings of faith? How does lament deepen intimacy with God and within a congregation?

Notes

1. Commentary previously published on this site for June 23, 2019.
2. J. Clinton McCann, “Psalms,” New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, vol. 4, ed. Leander E. Keck et al. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 764.

References

Brueggemann, Walter, Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).

Cotter, Jim, Psalms for a Pilgrim People (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1998).

deClaissé-Walford, Nancy, Introduction to the Psalms: A Song from Ancient Israel (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004).

Mays, James L., Preaching and Teaching the Psalms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).

Mays, James L., Psalms, Interpretation (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1994).

McCann, J. Clinton, “Psalms,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 4, ed. Leander E. Keck et al. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996).

Reid, Stephen Breck, Listening In: A Multicultural Reading of the Psalms (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997).

Condensed into seven verses, our text seems to capture both the best and the worst of Pauline interpretation. The famous baptismal formula in Galatians 3:26–28 declares the end of all racial, class, and gender divisions and has inspired justice-seekers and peace-makers throughout the centuries. But the sharp contrast between “law” and “faith” in 3:23–25 has been turned into Paul’s rejection of Torah as a birthmark of Christianity and fueled Christian anti-Judaism, dogmatic conservatism, pious individualism, and self-righteous othering of many kinds.

Meanwhile, new perspectives, as well as feminist and empire-critical interpretations, have significantly transformed our understanding of Paul, offering new insights for this pivotal text and for Galatians as a whole (see also the following two reflections on Galatians 5:1, 13–25 and 6:7–16).

The law of universal incarceration (3:23–25) 

The first part of our passage is permeated by prison language. The law has held us and everything (ta panta; 3:22) captive and in jail. Terms like sygkleiō (imprison; 3:22, 23) and froureō (guard; 3:23) suggest non-voluntary confinement and detention. Twice Paul portrays the law as paidagogos, typically a slave in charge of children, whose role can vary from a well-meaning “guardian” (New International Version; New Living Translation) and “tutor” (New American Standard Bible) to “schoolmaster” (King James Version) and harsh “disciplinarian” (New Revised Standard Version). Within the prison setting of our text the negative connotation of enforced compliance and subjugation under the law/paidagogos (hypo; twice in 3:23, 25) is most plausible. Louis Martyn even uses the term “jailer.”¹

What law?

It is crucial to understand that the Greek nomos/law in Paul’s world means much more than Jewish law/Torah, which also covers customs, principles, laws of the universe, and specific laws. In Galatians at least three different connotations are intertwined: Torah, Roman law, and the law of binary opposites as metaphysical foundation of the universe. Paul’s great messianic project of bringing circumcised Jews and uncircumcised Gentiles/nations like the Galatians together in one inclusive community (3:28), without making them the same (= all circumcised), clashes with all three of them. Yet for Paul, it means the final reconciliation of Torah with God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:3, that “in you” all the Gentiles/nations of the earth shall be blessed (see also Galatians 3:1–21).

Baptism is liberation from the binary law (Galatians 3:26–28)

Louis Martyn has shown how Paul’s critique of law/nomos in its wider sense aims at the “pairs of opposites” that in ancient philosophy were thought to be the basic building blocks of the world, the stoicheia tou kosmou (4:3, 9; New Revised Standard Version: “elemental spirits”).² The baptismal formula in 3:26–28, pre-Pauline in origin, confirms this overall anti-binary thrust.

If the binaries of Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female according to Galatians 3:28 are no longer valid in Christ Jesus but must give way to baptismal Oneness (3:28), this means that the law that formerly held us and all things captive (3:22–25) was the law of hierarchical binarism. It comes in endless variations, like Greeks over barbarians, Romans over Greeks (and all other conquered nations, including the Jews), Jews over Gentiles. Yet it imprisons all (3:22) in impenetrable cages of self and other, superior and inferior, enemy or friend, winner or loser, citizen or alien. It separates human from human by barbed-wire demarcation lines of self-interest, hatred, or just indifference into deserving or undeserving, righteous or sinner, us or them.

The arrival of faith for Paul nullifies this prison-law of disciplining through polarizing (3:25) that is woven into the entire socio-cultural fabric and legislation. A new kind of justice/righteousness out of faith (ek, 3:24; New Revised Standard Version: “by”) is revealed outside the justice claims of the binary law (3:23–24). Self-definition and self-worth no longer imply the competitive downgrading of an “other.”

One in Christ or “Christian”?

If baptism into Christ (3:27) means immersion in a trans-binary Oneness, it nonetheless doesn’t erase difference. On the contrary. Paul’s entire letter is an effort to protect difference and prevent the uniformity of an all-circumcised assembly of Jesus-followers, for this would mean return into the binary prison. Paul does not say that all believers become “Christians” either, but that they become one in Christ. Distinctions thought to be incompatible and mutually exclusive (such as circumcision versus foreskin) need to stay because they are messianically transformed toward solidarity across differences.

For Paul, this trans-binary practice of in-Christness is the litmus test of the new creation. It is not the foundation of a new religion in opposition to Judaism, but precisely the new messianic way for Jews and non-Jews becoming collectively children of God (3:26) and Abraham’s children and heirs (Galatians 3:29).

Clothed with Christ (3:27)

Baptism is often described as a dying with Christ (Romans 6:3–6; see also Galatians 2:19–20) that enables new life, a new quality of being human. The established binary identity markers are left behind and figuratively “drowning” in the baptismal waters. But what does being “(re)clothed with Christ” (3:27) mean if Christ died naked on a Roman cross after being stripped by Roman soldiers and his garments being divided among his crucifiers? (See also Matthew 27:27–37.) Perhaps it is precisely this nakedness of the Messiah/Christ who, according to Matthew 25:36, received clothing from “you” that signifies the “dress code” of messianic life. Stripped of all brand names, privileges, and righteousness that make “us” better and more worthy than “them,” the self emerges from baptism as entirely other, capable of being with, for, like the other: “I live no longer as I [egō], but Christ lives in me” (2:20).

One in Christ—or Caesar? 

Tensions with Roman law are simmering directly under the surface of Paul’s text. For the law of hierarchical binaries is indispensable as law of domination. Rome rules by dividing. If Jews, Celtic Galatians, and other nations inhabiting the multiethnic Roman province of Galatia³ become one in the body of a Jewish provincial Messiah who had been executed by Roman law as a political troublemaker, this is trouble.

Non-Jewish nations no longer declaring their sole allegiance to Caesar, as they had before, but to the One God of the Jews who had ridiculed Roman law enforcement by resurrecting God’s criminal son—this is even more trouble. Not to speak about the insolence of calling themselves collectively sons/children of this God (Galatians 3:26)—an honorary designation reserved for Caesar. He alone was son of God, God, Savior, and Lord for the nations.

But for Paul, the liberating disclosure/revelation (apocalyptō, 3:23; see also 1:12) of Christ-faith means resistant and transformative trust/belief that another world under a different law is possible, where human beings no longer act as one-against-other but in solidarity with One-an(d)-Other.

Notes

1. J. Louis Martyn, ed., Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, 1st ed., Anchor Bible 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 363.
2. Martyn., 403–406.
3. For a brief introduction to the context and text of Galatians, see Brigitte Kahl, “Galatians,” in Margaret Aymer, Cynthia Brigs Kittredge, and David A. Sanchez, eds., The Letters and Legacy of Paul, Fortress Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), 503–525.