Why Don?t Y?all Pass the Bread?...Continued from page 6

Timothy George

Now is this just a matter of Jews and Gentiles, what you eat and with whom you eat and this, that and the other? Is it just days and diet and body piercing? No. The truth of the Gospel is at stake here. Look at Galatians 2:16 ? this is where this entire passage is moving. This is the culmination of it all: “We know that a man is not justified by observing the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, so we too have put our faith in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law because by observing the law, no one will be justified.”

That is why this question of racial reconciliation is a matter of the Gospel. It is not just a matter of: are you socially enlightened? Have you had the right sociological training? Which side of the political divide do you come down on? This is not about that. This is about the Gospel. We are not justified by anything or anyone except by Jesus Christ. And when we divide from one another because of ethnicity or racial distinction or any of these other artificial categories Paul talks about, then we are putting that in the place of the Gospel. We are making that a substitute for grace. We are saying, “That counts before God,” as a way of our being justified in his sight. We are saying that by our actions, whether we say it with our lips or not, and that is a blatant denial of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That is why racism is not just an error; it is a heresy. It will send a person to hell. Now where do you get that preacher?

A few years ago, I was invited to preach on Easter Sunday. I seldom get invited to preach on Easter Sunday because, of course, every pastor wants to be in his own pulpit on Easter Sunday, so us “itinerant preachers” seldom get a chance to preach at a church on Easter Sunday. But that year I did. It was because the pastor had taken a group of people from his church to the Holy Land, so he called me up a few months before and said, “I’m going to be gone on Easter and I wondered if you would come preach?” I said that I would.

You know what text I took? You may think it is a strange text for Easter Sunday, but I think it is a relevant text. It was from Luke 16, the story of the rich man and Lazarus. Jesus said there was a rich man who was dres

sed in purple and fine linen, and he lived in luxury every day. But outside of his gate there was an old beggar full of sores, named Lazarus. When people would come out from the rich man’s house with their stomachs bloated from all the food they had eaten, maybe casting a chicken bone his way every now and then, Lazarus would look up to them and say, “Why don’t y’all pass the bread?” But there were some dogs around and they saw him and they said: well, we can have a good supper off him and so they came and licked his sores, the Bible says.