The Forty Days of Lent

  Till Christ shall be fully formed in you
A reading from Augustine's explanation of the letter to the Galatians, 5th century

So the Apostle says, ‘Become as I am’ who though born a Jew, have now learnt by spiritual insight to treat all carnal matters with contempt; ‘for I also have become as you’, which is to say, I also am a man like you.  After saying that, he very properly and becomingly added a reminder of his love for them, fearing no doubt that they might otherwise begin to suspect him of having turned against them.  So he says, ‘Brethren, I beseech you, you did me no wrong’, as if he would prevent them form thinking he wanted to do them wrong.

He even calls them ‘my little children’, so that they would imitate him as they would a parent.  ‘With whom I am again in travail’, he adds, ‘until Christ be formed in you!’

Now Christ is formed in a believer through faith implanted in his inmost soul.  Such a one, gentle and lowly of heart, is summoned to the freedom of grace, and he does not boast of the merit of works which are of no value. But from the grace itself there is a beginning of merit, so that Christ who said ‘As you did it to one of the least of my brethren, you did it  to me’ can call him the least bit of himself.  Christ, then, is formed in him who accepts his form; and he receives the form of Christ who cleaves to Christ with spiritual love

The result is that through this imitating he becomes, in the measure permitted to him, the same as Christ whom he imitates.  ‘He who says be abides in him’, says John, ‘ought to walk in the same way as he walked’.

But since human beings are conceived by their mothers in order to be formed and once they are formed are brought to birth through the pangs of labor, we can ask what is meant by the words, ‘with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!’  We can take ‘travail’ to mean the anxious care with which he was in labor so that they might be born in Christ; and now again he is in travail because of the danger he sees them in of being led astray.  The anxiety of such concern about them, which leads him to say that he is in some way in travail can endure ‘to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, so that they may no longer be carried about with every wind of doctrine’.

Hence, it is not in reference to the beginnings of faith by which they were born, but concerning the strengthening and perfecting of faith that he says, ‘with whom I am again in travail until Christ is formed in you’.  Elsewhere he commends this sort of travail in other words when he says, ‘There is the daily pressure on me of anxiety for all the churches.  Who is weak, and I am not weak?  Who is made to fall and I am not indignant?’

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(c) 2000 Don Schwager