• Reading I: Galatians 3:1-5
• Resp. Psalm:  Luke 1:69-70,71-72,73-73
• Gospel Reading:  Luke 11:5-13

"Napakatatanga naman ninyo, mga Galateo!" That is the way I would translate the !Galatians 3:1 It is a cry of disappointment.  Paul had taught the Galatians to put their trust in God and in the good news about Jesus, not on laws.  For him, the greatest symbol of the gratuitousness of God’s grace is the cross of Christ "who loved me and gave his life for me."   But in his absence, they have embraced a gospel that put observances, regulations and sacred times between the Galatians themselves and the grace of God in Christ.  And that goes against the grain of all that Paul had taught them.

"Grace" is first of all something gratuitous.  It is undeserved but still given.  It is a gift, given simply because.  It has always been the conviction of the Church that the first grace (conversion), the "ongoing" grace (perseverance), and the conclusive grace (the beatific vision) are all from God.  The sinner who puts himself under the mercy of God in conversion, the initiate who allows him/herself to be led along the ways of the Spirit, and the saint who beholds the face of God — all these are products of God’s hand, His poemata. 

The foolishness of the Galatians consists in the fact that by embracing a gospel that made them Jews first before being Christians is to allow themselves to fall into slavery.  Christians have received the Spirit of sonship that makes them co-heirs with Christ, not with Abraham.  Only a Jew like Paul, passionate for freedom, could have said:  "when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption (!Galatians 4:4-5)".  The Jewish spirituality that Paul was trained in is a continuing exodus:  the move away from the bonds of slavery (Egypt) to the freedom of the sons of God (Promised Land) .  In between this trajectory, the Law (Sinai)  was a training ground.  Paul realized however the inability of the Law to empower Israel to rise above himself.  Israel kept falling back despite the Law and the prophets.  In the end, God had to recreate Israel out of "his Son" so that through him a new people may come forth.  The Galatians were a part of this "new people" born from a son’s obedience to the Father’s will. They did not come from a slave as was Israel who had to be trained to be a freedman through the discipline of the Torah.   They came from the Son, that is, from someone who was ever since the beginning already free.  All they had to do is to live from the Father’s bounty and according to the dignity conferred by their received sonship.  To live in the freedom of the spiritual sonship received, not by the laws imposed by another. The rest of Paul’s epistle underscores the powerlessness of the Law and the triumph of Grace in Christ.

Since all is grace — as Georges Bernanos would put it — then all can be received in prayer.  And this is the point of the day’s gospel.  Prayer, Augustine once said, is the desire of the heart.  "The greater one’s desire, the louder is one’s prayer."  But the desire that Augustine speaks of here is not the libidinal one that Paul would consider "of the flesh".  It is the desire of a rightly ordered love, much like the love of Jesus, the Son, to His Father.  If one loves the Father as Jesus did, would one be denied one’s earnest requests?

Read an explanation of the Gospel reading here: The Disciples’ Prayer

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