You assigned to my report the title: "Promise and freedom in St. Paul" and I have added as subtitle the verse 3, 29 from the Letter to the Galatians, del "Simply by being Christ’s, you are the progeny of Abraham, the heirs named in the promise". To be heirs of a promise takes us out of every logic of calculation and, on the other hand it puts us in the situation of verifying in freedom if the promise can be kept. Therefore, to be before the promise of God in the Lord Jesus Christ saves us from every calculation of convenience and, in freedom, puts us before a deep relation of faith and trust.

The letter to the Galatians is very important. Someone finds it a bit difficult, but it is in syntony with the theme you are treating in this Assembly, namely the theme of the promise and the promise in Christ. We can start from a verse of Paul, which is quite tasty but also a bit problematic, "You stupid people of Galatia. After you have had a clear picture of Jesus Christ crucified, right in front of your eyes, who has put a spell on you? (Gal 3, 1). The translation of this text by the CEI is an elegant translation. In fact, Paul says anoetoi, a word used not much in academies as in comedies. The term means "without head", without nous, without brain.

Then we find another popular term "who has put a spell on you?" The verb baskanizo, indicates the fascination of a magician or of a sorceress, in the sense that – it says – "you have allowed a street magician to guile you".

"You who have had a clear picture of Jesus Christ crucified, right in front of your eyes!". The meaning of the verb "was represented" is the exegetic problem of this verse. We understand the general sense: you have received the Gospel of Jesus as a gift and yet you have gone after superstitious chattering. What does Paul intend to say with the expression "right in front of your eyes?" Some commentators think that Paul might have used images representing Christ: the literal translation of the verb proegrapho is "I write in front of", and in reality, the verb indicates also "to draw a design, a fresco". May Paul have made some drawing? I do not think so. You know that Hebraism, and consequently the very first Christianity, was aniconic, that is without representations. Paul did not make pictures of the passion of Jesus. Therefore, we must give this verb a certain emphasis, a theatrical interpretation of high profile, the representation of a personage. We know how much value the theatre had in the Greek-Hellenistic time of Paul. Here he puts himself into play.

"Galatians, I have re-presented Jesus Christ crucified not in the way of ambassador or painter, but in the way of him who, somehow, makes the drama to live again". Ultimately, refused by this community, Paul is as if he were on the cross, but in the Pauline thought, this cross –as we know- is grace. Therefore, the apostle, who lives the authority within the community for a service of authoritativeness, the moment in which they contrast him, re-presents, interprets Jesus crucified.

This verse expresses the very configuration of Paul with Jesus. A few verses before he had said, "I have been (co) crucified - sunestauromai – with Christ, and yet I am alive, yet it is no longer I, but Christ living in me. This life that I am now living, subject to the limitation of human nature, I am living in faith, faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me " (Gal 2,19-20). There is a handing over of the Son on behalf of the Father –as we shall see after a while- a handing over to Paul, and Paul hands himself over to this community, just as Jesus did. The title of your Congress is, "In Christ to humanise life": Paul speaks to us of a humanisation that does not come from ouside, but from within and that we, so to say, "breathe" through the incarnation of the Son. In the Gaudium et spes (22), Vatican II tells us that in Jesus we discover the true face of man, the true image of God that is carved in man. In the year 55 A.C., therefore, only a few years after the death of Jesus, Paul had already understood this doctrine and he expresses it with lucidity. It is just in this important picture that we can conduct our reflection.

What is the context of the Letter to the Galatians? We can understand it well from the first verses (Gal. 1, 1-10). These communities had welcomed Paul in a moment of illness (he himself gives us a brief note in 4, 13). Paul communicated his Gospel, the Gospel of Jesus the Saviour, the unique Saviour. No religion work, no precept, not even the circumcision (which for the Hebrew was the sign of the covenant), can free us as Jesus does. We cannot free ourselves. Works acquire their meaning only as works of faith that is as a response of conversion and of love to the gratuitous and foreseeing grace of salvation that we have in Jesus, in his passion, death and resurrection.

After the evangelisation of Galatia, Paul goes on with his mission, but, probably in Corinth (some say in Ephesus) he comes to know that the communities had suffered a contra-mission on behalf of some Judaic Christians. They were converted Jews to Christianity who, however, imposed, as an essential element for salvation, the observance of circumcision and of Judaic traditions.

This is the matter of a delicate and complex question of the first Christian communities. It is the matter of submitting the freedom, which comes from the Gospel, to the practise of the law. Jesus sets us free only if we enter the covenant of Abraham, therefore, if we live the circumcision, if we accomplish the works of the Law. Paul reacts vigorously against whatever appears as limiting the gift of freedom and salvation coming from Jesus Christ alone, a freedom that cannot depend on any element of religious culture.

Paul expresses all this very clearly, "I am astonished that you are so promptly turning away from the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are going over to a different gospel –not that it is another gospel, except that there are trouble makers among you who are seeking to pervert the Gospel of Christ" (Gal 1,6-7). This opening of the Letter to the Galatians is surely strong and tells us how anguished, worried and offended Paul was. There is no other Gospel; nothing that can free us as Jesus does. There is no freedom, unless in the freedom that Christ brings. Here we could start a reflection regarding the idea of stability in which we receive the promise. Paul says to the Galatians that to taste the freedom of Jesus one must be stable: the stability in faith. This does not mean that we should not be searchers of God. It does not mean that we should not be persons who interrogate themselves and search using their reason, as well as their emotive sense and life; persons who need to understand always more the promise of freedom that the Lord hands over to us. Paul soon gives us the criterion of stability, which is not an external criterion, but the stabilitas that St. Benedict recommended to his monks.

It is the matter of an interior stability, that is, the matter of listening to a call, which has surely taken the form of religious life, but before being religious life, it is a call within our existence. This means that as Christians, and much more as consecrated beings, we must feel what prophet Isaiah says at the beginning of his book: we have been called from the time we were in the womb of our mother (Ger 1,5-10). Man and woman, for us Christians, are not the result of a biological concatenation, but each man and each woman receive the call to spiritual life. In a mysterious way, God has come at the very start of our biological life and has created our soul there where the cells were going to become our body.

The central chapters of the Letter to the Galatians are extra-ordinary for us to understand the theme of freedom. They are chapter 3, 4 e 5, where Paul begins to speak of the liberation that Christ has brought to us. I would say that these chapters could be exposed with the following three passages: the rooting of the promise (Gal 3), the space-temporal modality of the promise (Gal 4), the identity of the promise (Gal. 5).

Chapter 3 is that of the rooting: to say how Christ has delivered us, Paul does not pronounce a theological talk on the life of Jesus. We are in the year 55 A.C.: when persons who had known Jesus and Paul, who had not known him, bring their testimony. Though he does not need a written narration of the life of Jesus, Paul fetches from the Scriptures, from the Old Testament, the roots of the promise of freedom. In fact, chapter 3 speaks of Abraham’s progeny, "Abraham, you remember, put his faith in God and this was reckoned to him as uprightness. Be sure that the children of Abraham are the children of faith. It was because Scripture foresaw that God would give saving justice to the Gentiles through faith that it announced the future Gospel to Abraham in the words: all nations will be blessed in you. So it is people of faith that receive the same blessing as Abraham, the man of faith" (Gal 3,6-9).

What is the argument of Paul? The rooting of the promise is not a legislative code, or the work of such a religious foundation as that of Moses, obviously inspired by God. It comes before Moses and rests on the fact that a man trusted God.

In chapter twelve of Genesis, where the story of Abraham starts, at the beginning we find a true passage, a true change. There is a whole story of sins, of progressive an inexorable going far from Eden: the original sin, or the first and radical going far because of mistrust on behalf of the creature. The mistrust causes the collapse of relations between the creature and God his Creator, between the creature and the creatures. The story of Cain and Abel follows, therefore, the sin that spreads through the social structure; then the story of Noah and the tower of Babel.

In this collapse, Abraham, without any external motive, (there is no theme of punishment and deluge like that of Noah), recuperates the frontal relation with God, a relation of call. Abraham had faith in God and this was reckoned to him as justice. Here Paul quotes Genesis 15, 6. What is this promise about? It is not about the earth or about freedom; it is about the progeny. In the ancient world to have a son was the condition for the possession of the earth and the identity that establishes freedom. A man without children, without descendents had no future. It is not by chance that the promise often in the Bible takes the "form" of a son.

This aspect is important to define the Christian spirituality, which is a spirituality of relation, even more: a generating relation. The Christian spirituality does not exist if it does not generate. Obviously, this is not only about the biological generating, but also about a stronger, a more interior one that starts from generating the true man and the true woman. The promise to generate a son returns in the Bible several times. For instance in 2 Samuel 7, David appears like a second Abraham. Here we do not find the problem of sterility, because he already has children, but he wants to build up the temple, thinking of it as a chapel of his royal palace. Perhaps there is here also a kind of political calculation. The prophet Natan applauds the king: yes, great David, you have built up the kingdom, now build also the temple. However, in the night God reveals himself to the prophet asking him to go to David and to tell him: it is not up to you to build a house for me, it is I that will give a family to you.

There is this play of words. The Prophet goes on saying, "A son born from your bowels will build up a temple for me". Here is another aspect of the promise: this is always before us, but it keeps a distance because it is the object of desire, not of possession. Let us remember that the narration of the story of Moses takes four Biblical books. Yet Moses does not enter the Promises Land! God allows him to see it from afar, from mount Nebo. The same thing happens to Abraham, "I shall give you all this land … ". Then Abraham dies leaving behind only 2 square metres of land: the tomb in which he will be buried with Sara, after paying an exorbitant sum to the Hittites. The promise is before you, it is a promise of generating, a promise that comes out from you, but which realizes in "another" life. This is because a son is something that belongs to you, but is not "yours". For a mother the son has been part of herself for nine months and the mother has been part of her son for nine months.

For the son, his father identifies with the world: he is the first "other from self" and will not have a balanced growth if the parents will not be the first to acknowledge and educate his "otherness". The promise will be realised if it comes out of you and you do not keep it incorporated in yourself.

Paul says, Abraham had faith in God and this was accredited to him as justice. The faith of Abraham is extrovert, the capacity of coming out of oneself in order to give oneself in a relation with God. Therefore, the root of the promise is a dimension of offspring. Paul faces the whole problem of the relation between the law and the promise, "Brothers, see, I speak to you as a man: a legitimate testament, though it is only a human act, nobody declares it vain or adds anything to it. The promises were made to Abraham and his descendents. The Scripture does not say "to his descendents", just as if they were many, but to his offspring, as to a single person, namely Christ. Now, I say: a law that comes four hundred and thirty years later cannot declare as nothingness, a testament established by God himself previously, therefore, annulling the promise " (Gal 3,15-17).

If the heritage were obtained based on the Law, it would no longer be based on the promise. Instead, God has granted grace to Abraham through the promise. With a refined play of Hebrew exegesis, Paul says: the Law of Moses is not superior to the original promise of God, but depends on it. God gave the Law because Israel did not succeed in being faithful to the desire signed by this original promise. Therefore, the Law –Paul will say- brings sin and our frailty to evidence. We do not need a Law because the behaviour that it states is a dangerous one. The Pharisaic Judaism rests on the application of the Torah as a strong level of identification. Paul challenges this and refers to Abraham, not to Moses.

Then, what is the use of the Law? God gave it because of the transgressions (Gal 3,19). A law finds its sense in revealing the sin, for which the law cannot set us free. In Paul we read, "We were kept under guard by the Law, locked up to wait for the faith that would eventually be revealed to us safeguarded and shut up under the Law before faith arrived, and waited for the faith that had to be revealed to us. So the Law was serving as a slave to look after us, to lead us to Christ, so that we would be justified by faith. But now that faith has come we are no longer after a slave looking after us; all of you are the children of God, through faith in Christ Jesus, since every one of you that has been baptised has been clothed in Christ. There can be neither Jew nor Greek; there can be neither slave nor freeman; there can be neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Simply by being Christ’s you are the progeny of Abraham, the heirs named in the promise" (Gal 3, 23-29).

To be baptised in Christ means a sacramental immersion in the promise, to be clothed in Christ, therefore our participation. This is the treasure we have, rather than the right and dutiful works that we perform. Our works become important in the light of the great news that Paul transmits to us: to be baptised and clothed in Christ. This brings to evidence that we have been generated to the Gospel of freedom.

Chapter 4 of the Letter to the Galatians outlines the space-temporal modality of the promise. Paul expresses it through the theme of offspring. "What I am saying is this: An heir, while he is still under age is no different from a slave, even though he is the owner of all property; he is under the control of guardians and administrators until the time fixed by his father. So too with us, as long as we were still under age we were enslaved to the elemental principles of this world" (Gal 4, 1-3). The expression "elements of the world" sounds strange. We do not know well what the syncretistic ideas were which the Galatians referred to. Probably they connected the Hebrew religious feasts to the astral times; thus the elements of the world could be the almanac, the calendar, a kind of astrology, that is, religious practices.

Paul contra-poses them saying, "When the completion of the time came, God sent his Son born of a woman, born a subject of the Law to redeem the subjects of the Law, so that we could receive adoption as sons. As you are sons, God has sent into our hearts the spirit of his Son crying ‘Abba, Father!’, and so you are non longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir by God’s own act" (Gal 4,4-7). Paul speaks of the promise and of its fulfilment using the language of conception and of birth. Pleroma means fullness and its fulfilment that reveals itself within, exactly as the pregnant womb of the woman in the last months of pregnancy. The kronos is the real time, the time of the watches, of the calendars; the "fullness of time" is not the goal, it is the unveiling and the full and extra-ordinary revelation of the promise.

Therefore, the place, the space and the time of the promise are not something external. Christ is the fullness of history and the deepest unveiling, because it is rooted in the unfathomable and inexpressible promise of God. That story, at a given point, -as the prophets say- was the story of a woman incapable to generate, she was sterile. It seems that I am listening to the poem of Horace (a vertex of pagan thought): while pouring wine into the cup, a slave woman asks him something about the future and he answers to her not to interrogate the tomorrow, to be wise. He dedicates to her the famous "carpe diem" "catch the instant".

This is history in the pagan sense: a "fleeing moment". Paul, instead, says that the filling of time has happened, the pleroma of the kronos, that is, history "gives birth" to newness. Paul does not want to deliver a Mariological speech: the expression "born from a woman" could be only general, that is, it could indicate the effective humanity of the Son. However, we can recognise that here Paul says something that has effectively been realised in Mary, in the woman who said "yes" and the absolute "yes" for which the whole history, through the Holy Spirit, has become a history of newness, of childbirth, of a kept promise.

"Born from a woman, born under the Law, to ramson those who were under the Law, so that we might receive the adoption as children". What is, then, the promise? It possesses an identity: the Son sent by God, and continues, "The fact that God sent into your heart the Spirit of his Son, who cries "Abbà, Father!": is the divine act itself.

The inhabitation of the Spirit in the heart of the faithful is like the Word, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity incarnated in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and history can say, "Here there is something, which we had never heard or seen before". It is the same work: God sent His Son, God sent the Spirit.

Paul sets the equation. The identity of the promise is not only a son, the Son, namely Christ, but through him also something more: the possibility for us to be children as Christ is Son. From Christ onward, every child is newness in history, as Christ was. This is why we can say that we repeat the promise in us. Each of us is the promise. Our life, your life handed over through the consecration is the promise. Every sinner who returns to the house of the Father can be recognised and re-established as son, can be forgiven and re-generated in love, because now the promise is stronger and more determining than the Law. The freedom of Christians is not a "conditioned freedom". This is why Paul can say, "Christ has freed us for the freedom" (Gal 5,1). It is never a sociological liberation or a unique ideal enfranchisement: it is the handing over of this original identity, for which we are no longer the children of Hagar the slave, but of the promise: we are children of the free woman: Sara.

Therefore, to be children of the promise means to feel that the deliverance operated by Christ in us is authentic, because it hands our origin over to us. Paul says, "As far as we are concerned, for the Spirit and thanks to faith, we firmly wait for the hoped justice. It is not the circumcision or the non-circumcision that is valid in Christ Jesus, but faith that becomes active through charity" (Gal 5,5-6). We feel as if we were listening to John, "In all truth I tell you, whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself, and will perform even greater works, because I am going to the Father" (John 14, 12). The Christina, every Christian, is not simply an imitator of Jesus: hr is an alter Christus. He will accomplish greater works, not in the sense that Jesus has made one miracle and we make three of them, but because, in his grace and in the Holy Spirit, we can repeat this newness within history. The life of Jesus, the life for, with and in Christ, becomes, then, the possibility of multiplying the newness of unveiling the promise in history. You will make greater works. This newness may become a project of life.

To conclude: A project is in my life, therefore I can reconcile with death: the promise flows from my life, and I know that I have a future, a tomorrow. However, the proposal of the Scripture is even more radical, because more or less all men and women have tried to reconcile with death, as even the thought of Freud proves. Ancient people reconciled with death through the idea of heroism, which brought glory and fame, "it is beautiful to die for our motherland". Not all of us are ready to die as a hero, but all of us try to do it. However, a great interrogative on the frailty of life remained.

The Bible asks us to reconcile not only with death, but also with our birth, avoiding to be like Job and Jeremiah who, before suffering, curse their birth, "A curse on the day when I was born … why not killing me in the womb; my mother would have been my grave and her womb pregnant for ever " (Ger 20,14-18).

To reconcile oneself with one’s birth. I, too, was born in frailty: if they had not taken care of me in the first months, I would have died. Now I am a hero, but I have become a hero because I was born limited, in frailty and welcomed by love. To reconcile with birth is more difficult than to reconcile with death. Nobody can give birth to oneself. Unluckily, in an extreme situation, we could give death to ourselves, but nobody can give birth to oneself. Only Jesus, in the fullness of time has handed this newness over to us. He tells Nichodemus, "In all truth I tell you: no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above" (John 3, 3).

I think that religious life is within this project of freedom: it is the promise of freedom that guards us, not our rules. This is religious life: promises of a freedom that enters life and makes us see it with the eyes of the Spirit.

We conclude with a page of St. Theresa of Lisieux about her journey to Italy, "I cannot still understand why women are excommunicated in Italy so easily. At every step, they said to us, "Do not enter here, do not enter there otherwise you will be excommunicated ". Poor women, how much despised they are! Yet they love the good Lord more than men do. During the passion of our Lord, the women had more courage than men had and defied the insults of the soldiers. They had the courage to wipe off the adorable face of Jesus" (Storia di un’anima, Manoscritto A, 184).

To go deeper into this theme, see the happy synthesis of the catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1987-1995.

Guido Benzi
Biblist and Director National Catechism Office
Circonvallazione Aurelia 50
00165 Roma