Around the year 55 AD Paul had preached the Gospel to pagans living in Galatia, a region approximately comprising modern-day Turkey, where he established a number of churches.  These new Galatian converts welcomed Paul with warmth and were receptive to his teaching.  We might assume that Paul left his Galatian project with a feeling of confidence, a feeling of gratitude, given some of the other environments he would face.

Some time in the years following Paul’s visit to Galatia, other Christians visited the Galatian churches, who believed that to be a good Christian, one also had to be a good Jew.  These visitors were most likely associated with a movement centered in the Jerusalem Church, ostensibly led by the Apostle James.  These visitors convinced the Galatian converts that Paul had not shared the fullness of the true Gospel with them, and that they still had much to learn

Most Jews in the ancient world believed that Jerusalem was the center of the world, the “umbilicus mundi,” the navel of the world, as it was called in the Middle Ages.  Their fathers and forefathers, for generations, had given their lives to worship in the Temple, and for the protection of Jerusalem, in the hope that the Messiah would come one day.  These Jewish Christian visitors insinuate that Paul had only preached a part of the Gospel, because Paul had not insisted that Gentile converts not be circumcised, not follow Torah, not enter and perpetuate the ceremonial life of Israel.  For these Judaizing Christians, Jesus is the Jewish answer to what is essentially a Jewish question, a Jewish hope.  Paul was leading the Galatians, Gentile converts only partially down the path of salvation.

Paul, and these more Jewish Christians, did not disagree on the end, on the goal, of their work; their disagreement lay in the “means” to this end.  Both Paul and the Judaizers believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, the Messiah of both Jew and Gentile.  The question is not the who, what, where, or why of Jesus as the Messiah, but rather the How.  How are the Gentiles, the non-Jews, to become part of this new Jerusalem?
I don’t doubt that Paul was seen as a traitor by many of these more Jewish Christians.  Because Paul believed that the coming of the Messiah implied another sort of invitation; something very different from simply doing the old things over and over again.  For Paul, the coming of this Messiah meant that the old verities, the old certainties, the comfortable repetition, of maintaining and sustaining the old covenant, would have to move aside for something new; in fact, move aside for the very thing for which those old certainties had been created; a new day, a new life, a new covenant.  This Jesus Christ is the Messiah who makes all things new, who does away with business as usual or religion as we have known it, because Jesus is the fulfillment of that old religion.

Paul’s message is that there is now a new doorway standing open to a life of salvation.  There is now a new doorway through which we may walk if we would know the living God.

So inevitably, as Paul carries his Gospel to the Gentile world, he finds that he is stepping on the toes of Jewish Christians who would like to continuing doing their same “religious” things over and over again: circumcision, Torah, Temple worship, yet expecting that these might yield different results.

 And Paul is saying that if you keep doing these things over and over again in the face of this Messiah, in the face of this new day, then you are missing the mark.  Because, as he writes, “we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ . . . by faith in Jesus Christ.”  It is by faith, it is by faith, not simply the repetition of ceremonial, religious, or pious behavior, that we are justified, that we are saved, that we come to know the living God.  It is by faith in THIS Messiah that we ultimately walk as children of Abraham.

   
There is only one essential: faith.  For Paul, the existentialist of all existentialists, it is simple.  “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”  This is the one thing that is needful.  This is the one thing that you do over and over and over. This is the umbilicus mundi, this is the navel of the world, faith in Jesus Christ.