"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control." (Galatians 5.22-23)
I've read those words hundreds of times, it might be thousands. Most times I've prayed them as I read them. Often, too often, they have been prayers of confession that whatever fruit there might be is unripe, maybe even unformed.
And yet. Such a description of moral formation and character construction was never meant to be an exam paper, a set of criteria with which to demonstrate our failures and supplement our existing feelings of guilt and shame.
As with everything else in Christian experience, the fruit of the Spirit is sown in grace and harvested in the life of those who are in Christ, who live by the Spirit, and whose first confession is of grateful praise for the love of God in Christ.
Paul's letter to the Galatians is a charter for Christian freedom. The heart cry of Paul to these new Christians is "For freedom Christ has set you free...for you were called to freedom."(5.1,13). Paul is not guilt-making or using shame as a lever when he lists the fruit of the Spirit. Like the good pastor he is, he is encouraging the Galatians to stand firm in their freedom in Christ, and to trust the work of the Holy Spirit to weave the strands of Christ-likeness into the tapestry of their character.
The fruits of the Spirit are listed in contrast to 'the works of the flesh'; and that list is much longer, describing the attitudes and actions that threaten every possibility of community. What makes the difference in Christian character is the great reversal, the freedom from works of the flesh, the call of freedom to a life lived in Christ, and the promise of the fruitfulness of life in the Spirit, in the community of Christ, and in our witness to the world.
In what I've always thought of as the pivotal verse in Galatians, Paul describes our existence in Christ as cruciform in shape, enlivened by faith in the risen Christ and in Christ's faithfulness: "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." (2.20)
The fruit of the Spirit displays the character of Christ crucified and risen, as his life is lived in us and through us by the power of the Spirit. In Romans 5 Paul says exactly how and why this is so: "Hope does not disappoint us, for God's love has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. (Romans 5.5)
The last thing Paul intends by listing the fruit of the Spirit is that those moral dispositions should be a further check-list of our failures. They are to be looked for as the natural outcome of God's gifting grace, Christ's reconciling love, the Spirit's liberative power.
Instead of seeing the fruit of the Spirit as mere aspiration, what we'd like to be but never will, or even worse, as a hit list of our chronic failures, take to heart Paul's advice to another group of Christians whose behaviour was at times far from exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit: "He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion until the day of Jesus Christ." (Philippians 1.6)
We are called to live into the freedom of Christ, to walk and live in the surrounding environment of the Holy Spirit. Crucified with Christ, and living by faith in the faithfulness of Christ, knowing that the Son of God loves us and gave himself for us, we live in Christ and Christ in us, and the fruit will appear.
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