No Longer I

Paul is not composing poetry in a quiet study. He has just faced down Peter at Antioch (Galatians 2:11), where the gospel itself hung in the balance: are we set right with God by keeping the law, or by trusting Christ? Out of that argument the sentence breaks loose — "I have been crucified with Christ" (Galatians 2:20). It is a strange thing to say, for Paul is plainly alive; his hand is moving across the page. So what died on that cross, and who is doing the living now?

To be crucified with Christ does not mean Paul labored at self-denial until the old self finally expired. He is describing something done to him, once, from outside himself: when Christ died, something in Paul died with him — the self that stood condemned under the law was nailed up in the body of Another, so that Christ's death now counts as his own (Romans 6:6). "Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God" (Galatians 2:19). The whole demand of the law fell on the Son, and the one joined to him went down under it and came up past its claim forever.

Now the sentence turns on its hinge: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). This upends the only project most of us know. By instinct we spend our days assembling a self — curating it, defending it, polishing the "I" at the center — hoping that if we make it good enough it will at last be safe. The gospel does something stranger: it puts that self to death. Union with Christ is not self-help with a religious finish; it is a death and a resurrection, a real participation in his — the condemned self exchanged for the living Christ, who takes up residence where the old tenant stood (Colossians 1:27).

And yet we are not dissolved into a haze, our lives blurred away; Paul is careful. "The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God" (Galatians 2:20). We go on in ordinary, embodied days — but on an entirely new footing, resting not on our own record but on his, received by faith and worn like a robe we did not weave, clothed by Another. Long before, Habakkuk had heard the promise that would become Paul's banner: "the righteous shall live by his faith" (Habakkuk 2:4). The old accountant in us keeps reaching for the ledger, adding up whether we have done enough to be kept; faith reads a closed account, and a life that is now Christ's life in us.

The whole weight of it rests on the last clause, the most personal in the letter: "who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20). Notice what Paul does not write. He does not write "who loved us," though that is true. He does not write "who loved the world," though that is gloriously true as well (John 3:16). He writes me — a single person, known by name, chosen by the Son before a word of this letter was drafted. Every believer may personalize this as Paul does, and it will be just as singular and just as true: not a love distributed thinly across a crowd, but a love fixed, one at a time, on each particular person Christ died for. The cross is not a general goodwill we admire from a distance; it is where the Son of God looked at us — knowing everything — and handed himself over anyway. This is why we are no longer our own: we belong to Another who bought us. The One in whom we are hidden does not rise and fall (Colossians 3:3), and so neither does the life we are given. The self we could never make good enough has been crucified with him, and the life we could never live, he now lives in us.