A Perfect Fit

Galatians 3:23–29

Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.  But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is about clothing.

As early as Act 1 Scene 3, Macbeth, a war hero and nobleman of sorts is greeted by others with another man’s title. He retorts, “Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?” equating a position of power with someone else’s clothing. Fast forward to Act 5 (spoiler alert… though you’ve had 417 years, so…) and through murder, mayhem, and machinations, Macbeth is King of Scotland.

And as an enemy army of prophecy advances on Macbeth’s stronghold, Scottish noblemen against Macbeth observe “now does [Macbeth] feel his title hang loose about him, like a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief.” (That image reminds me, maybe more than a little bit, of my sartorial choices before my wife came along.)

In other words, Macbeth’s power, symbolized through clothing, was never really his own. It did not fit him, nor did it change him. Macbeth remained, in the end, the same insecure, weak-willed, power-hungry man he was at the beginning.

In our passage, Paul also talks about clothing as he discusses our adoption. He writes about “put[ting] on Christ” through baptism. That is, we died to our lives spent in “captivity under the law,” and we rose again as new creations because “Christ came.” 

This clothing that marks us not as slaves but as children of the living God was through no work of our own. We had no hand in producing, patching, or purchasing it. Christ’s robe of righteousness was dyed “in the blood of Calvary’s lamb” and given to us.

And unlike Macbeth, it fits us perfectly, it is neither borrowed nor stolen, and it changes who we are at the most fundamental level.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female,” Paul writes, not to wipe out those or other distinctions, but to remove anything that would cause us to add or subtract from Christ’s work on the Cross.

Lord, that we might truly grasp and live our identities as sons and daughters of the King!