The Great Commentary of Cornelius a Lapide: the Epistle to the Galatians
Ver. 12. — Be as I am. As you see me neglecting Jewish feasts, relying on my freedom in the Gospel, so do you neglect them and make use of the same freedom. I would be your leader into the land of liberty ; follow me, therefore, and care nothing for what the Jews may say about the necessity of the Old Law.
I am as ye are. I live as a Gentile, and adapt myself to your needs, so far as I can with a safe conscience.
Ye have not injured me at all. If anybody, it is yourselves that you have injured. I do not say this in anger, but from love and pity. S. Jerome observes that the Apostle soothes here any feelings wounded by the rebuke of chap. iii. 1.
Ver. 13. — Through infirmity of the flesh I preached the Gospel unto you . S. Jerome explains this to mean that he gave them the first and weak elements only of the faith, because of their weakness with regard to spiritual things. He also gives as a second interpretation of infirmity of the flesh, Paul's sicknesses and headaches, and as a third, his persecutions, poverty, and sufferings in general, which might make him seem an Apostle, weak, miserable, and despicable, and so unable to gain the respect of the Galatians.
Ver. 14. — And my temptation which was in my flesh ye despised not. Erasmus takes temptation in the active sense, viz., as though Paul had tempted the Galatians by his unattractive presence and speech. But it is better to take it passively, as being identical with the object of temptation. The meaning then is : You did not despise me in my weakness and my abject condition, which had the effect of making me a temptation to you, but you received me as an angel, nay, as Christ Himself. [ Note . — The Vulgate is : “ And your temptation which was in my flesh.”]
Ver. 15. — Your blessedness. You beatified me for my sufferings for the faith, and as it were said to yourselves : Happy are we in having such an Apostle ! “ Happy they who have the privilege of hearing and seeing Paul!” S. Augustine is said to have wished to see three things — Christ on earth in the flesh, Rome at the height of her power, and Paul thundering in his preaching. S. Paul now asks the Galatians what had become of their former opinion of him ; why they had so soon changed their minds, and given up their love for him, which was once ardent enough to make them pluck out their eyes for him; and inquires whether he had become their enemy for telling them the truth, viz., that no one is justified by the law, but only by faith in Christ.
Ver. 17. — They zealously affect you. The Judaisers do all they can to woo you to espouse their cause, and to bring you into subjection to their law, but their object is not good.
They would exclude you. Some texts read include here, which gives a very good meaning. These Judaisers are like crafty wooers, who, when they are seeking to win a wealthy wife, show her every kind of honour and service, and humour her whims in everything; but when they have attained their object, they shut her up, appoint custodians of her person, and treat her as a slave. They are now promising you, Galatians, great things ; but they want to shut you up under the law, and shut you out from the liberty that is in Christ.
That ye might affect them . It is not friendship that animates them. They want to gain your confidence, that you may surrender to them, and become their disciples, and give them ground for public boasting.
Ver. 18. — But it is good to be zealously affected always in a good thing. It is good to imitate others, but only in what is good. [The Vulgate reading is in the imperative : Be zealously affected always to the good in what is good!]
Observe that the first good can be taken in the neuter, for what is good, or in the masculine. If the latter be read, then the meaning is : Do not be zealously affected towards Judaism, which is evil, but take as your models good Christian men like myself, whose manner of life among you ye know. You followed me when I was with you ; you should do the same in my absence, for a good man is always to be imitated, whether absent or present. This is a hint that in the Apostle’s opinion it was his absence which had been the cause of their lapse into Judaism.
Ver. 19. — My little children . I begat you to Christ by the Gospel, and now that you have left Him for Judaism, I travail in birth of you again, till you learn to look to Christ for grace and justification , and not to the law. “ The Apostle here,” says Chrysostom, “ speaks of a mother’s anxiety over her children. You see the feelings of a mother rather than of a father ; you see his nervousness , and the cry of pain , much more agonising than that of a woman in travail. As the Blessed Virgin bore Christ in the flesh but without pain, so did Paul labour with Christ spiritually, though with pain and grief, and strive to form the Galatians for Christ, that He might be all in all to them.
S. Ambrose (de Isaac et Anima , c. 8) says, with equal piety and point : “ There [in the Cross and in baptism] did your mother travail ; there did she who bore you labour. There are we born again, for they are brought forth in whom the image of Christ is formed. He tells us how Christ was formed in His Spouse. Set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thine arm. Christ is the seal upon the forehead, that we may ever confess Him ; on the heart, that we may always love Him ; on the arm, that we may always work for Him ; so that, if it be possible, His whole likeness may be expressed in us, and He be our seal whom God the Father hath sealed.”
Let those note who desire to convert souls to Christ, that they must labour and toil like a woman in travail. Hence the question is asked in Job xxxix. 1: “ Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve ? . . . They bow themselves, they bring forth their young ones, they cast out their sorrows ” — where the reference is to the belief that the hinds suffer more acutely than most animals in parturition, a belief that was shared by Aristotle and Pliny. S. Gregory takes this passage mystically of preachers who, like hinds in labour, bring forth offspring to Christ with tears and sorrow.
“I see,” he says, “that Paul is like a hind bringing forth its young with great pain ; for he says, “ My little children, of whom I travail in birth again.” See the pain, see the labour he suffered; even after he was delivered he was compelled to give life again to his offspring when it had perished ” (Morals xxx. 21).
Let bishops, too, learn from S. Paul to be not so much fathers as mothers to their subjects, as S. Bernard says excellently (Serm. 25 in Cant.) : “ Learn to be mothers, not lords , to those under your charge. Seek to be loved rather than feared ; and if sometimes there is need of severity, let it be that of a father, not of a tyrant.”
Ver. 20. — I desire to be present with you now, and to change my voice. I would wish to say orally what a letter cannot sufficiently express ; I would wish to coax, to beseech, to implore you, to treat you as a mother does her children, to manifest in every way a mother’s affection, that I might persuade you to do what I wish.
See what love makes men do. Paul makes himself a father, and becomes a boy with his children. So King Agesilaus, to amuse his boy, would lay aside his purple and his sceptre, to ride on a stick for him ; and when one of his court remarked on his levity, he retorted : “ Hold your tongue, for when you have children of your own , then I will give you leave to laugh at your king’s folly.” So here Paul would say that a mother’s love knows no bounds, no shame ; for it no toil is too great, nothing is too trivial or too shameful.
I stand in doubt of you. “ I am ashamed,” as some render it, but wrongly. The meaning is : I am perplexed ; I do not know what to say to you to persuade you. Maldonatus gives two interpretations : (1.) I have not obtained the expected fruit of my preaching, therefore I am confounded; and (2.) I do not know whether you are Christians or Jews.
Ver. 21. — Do ye not hear the law? A vigorous question. If you will not listen to me, will you not listen to the law, that you think so much of, for it will point you from itself to Christ ?
Ver. 22. — Abraham had two sons . Ishmael, by his handmaiden, Hagar, who was, therefore, but a wife of secondary rank ; and Isaac, by Sarah, his wife of honour. The latter was his heir ; the former received such gifts as the father chose to give him. Cf. Gen. xxv. 5, 6.
Ver. 23. — He who was of the bondwoman. Ishmael was born according to the laws of natural generation, by which Abraham, though an old man, was able to raise up seed from his youthful bondwoman , Hagar.