Reading of the Word of God

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia

This is the Gospel of the poor,
liberation for the imprisoned,
sight for the blind,
freedom for the oppressed.

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia

Galatians 1, 11-24

Now I want to make it quite clear to you, brothers, about the gospel that was preached by me, that it was no human message.

It was not from any human being that I received it, and I was not taught it, but it came to me through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

You have surely heard how I lived in the past, within Judaism, and how there was simply no limit to the way I persecuted the Church of God in my attempts to destroy it;

and how, in Judaism, I outstripped most of my Jewish contemporaries in my limitless enthusiasm for the traditions of my ancestors.

But when God, who had set me apart from the time when I was in my mother's womb, called me through his grace and chose

to reveal his Son in me, so that I should preach him to the gentiles, I was in no hurry to confer with any human being,

or to go up to Jerusalem to see those who were already apostles before me. Instead, I went off to Arabia, and later I came back to Damascus.

Only after three years did I go up to Jerusalem to meet Cephas. I stayed fifteen days with him

but did not set eyes on any of the rest of the apostles, only James, the Lord's brother.

I swear before God that what I have written is the truth.

After that I went to places in Syria and Cilicia;

and was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judaea which are in Christ,

they simply kept hearing it said, 'The man once so eager to persecute us is now preaching the faith that he used to try to destroy,'

and they gave glory to God for me.

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia

The Son of Man came to serve,
whoever wants to be great
should become servant of all.

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia

After the greeting, Paul addresses the Galatians as "brothers and sisters," as if to incline them towards listening by appealing to the fraternity that is born of welcoming the one Gospel. It is not a matter of etiquette or good manners, but of the fraternity that the Word of God generates in those who listen to it with their hearts. Paul clarifies that the Gospel he announces "is not of human origin" because he "received" it directly from Christ himself, just as had happened with the other apostles. He notes that he received the Gospel by "revelation." He first recalls his "earlier life in Judaism" when he was "zealous" for the Jewish traditions. The apostle clarifies that his detachment from these traditions is not the same thing as denying that he belongs to them; indeed, he speaks of "his" people and the traditions of "his" ancestors with respect. But he insists on the altogether extraordinary and unjustified fact that "God was pleased" to reveal his own Son to him, the persecutor of the Church. On the road to Damascus he was transformed from persecutor to apostle. Paul knows that everything that happens, and, in particular, everything that happened to him, comes from God. It was the Lord who "set him apart" from his mother’s womb to make him a minister of the Gospel. This awareness makes the apostle live and hope to "please" God more than men and women. And "God’s approval" means obeying His call; that is, beginning the new life that God revealed to him. Paul goes first to "Arabia" (south-east of Damascus) and then to Jerusalem to meet the one whom the Lord named "Rock" (kephas). From there he turns to the north and preaches in Syria, whose capital, Antioch, contains the first large community of ethnic-Christians. He then continues north to Cilicia, where the Christian communities only know Paul by what they have heard. It is with surprise that they learn that the persecutor of the past is now preaching the faith that he once wanted to destroy. Obedience to God’s call, which changed Paul’s entire life, is what it means for every disciple to "please God" rather than men and women or oneself.