Deux Jougs — Le Fruit de l'Esprit

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — There Are Two Yokes

This is the third yoke to arrive in these pages in ten days, and it is the first one Le is told to refuse.

August 13 — Take My yoke upon you... for My yoke is easy and My burden is light.
August 21 — Bonhoeffer: those who let Jesus' yoke rest on them without resistance.
August 23 — Paul: do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage.

And the French shows it plainly on the page. Matthew: mon joug est doux. Galatians: le joug de la servitude. The same word. Two entirely different beams.

Which settles a question that would otherwise stay open. Jesus never offered a life without a yoke. He offered His. And Paul is not arguing that a free person walks unharnessed — he is warning against being put back under the wrong one.

Everyone is yoked to something. The entry of the thirteenth said it: the only open question is what is in the harness beside you. Ten days later Paul names the alternative and calls it slavery.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Entangled Again

One word makes the warning specific: do not be entangled AGAIN. Ne vous laissez pas mettre de nouveau sous le joug.

Paul is not worried about people who have never been free. He is worried about people who have. The Galatians had come out from under something — and were quietly walking back toward it. Nobody was dragging them. They were volunteering.

And the yoke in question was not a scandalous one. It was religion: rules, requirements, a system for being acceptable. The thing Paul calls slavery here is the attempt to secure by performance what had already been given.

Stand fast. Demeurez fermes. Which is a strange verb to open a chapter about walking — but the sequence is right: stand in the liberty, then walk in the Spirit. You cannot walk properly from a footing you keep renegotiating.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Works Are Made; Fruit Is Grown

Three verses earlier Paul wrote the works of the flesh are evident. Here he writes the fruit of the Spirit. He changed the noun deliberately.

Works are manufactured. Fruit is grown. A workshop produces output by effort, and the harder you work the more you get. An orchard does not operate that way at all. No olive tree has ever produced a single olive by trying.

Which is a fitting page to read parked at a lagar de azeite. Le is sitting in the middle of the illustration. The trees around her produce fruit by remaining rooted, drawing what they need, and standing still through weather they did not choose.

Smith gave the picture on the sixth of August: the branch in the vine, the member with the head, the building with the foundation — and the note that morning was that only the vine feeds. Here is what the feeding produces.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — One Fruit, Not Nine

Read the verb. The fruit of the Spirit IS — singular — and then nine nouns follow. The French keeps it exactly: le fruit de l'Esprit, c'est l'amour, la joie, la paix...

Not nine fruits to be collected separately, like a list of virtues to work through one at a time. One fruit, described from nine angles. They arrive together or not at all, because they are all the same life showing itself in different weather.

And the first word is love. Which is where this journal has been living all month — Ephesians 5 on the seventh, 1 Corinthians 13 on the fifteenth, the towel and the basin. Paul puts it at the head of the list, and the other eight are what love looks like under various conditions.

Then the line that is almost a joke: against such there is no law. La loi n'est pas contre ces choses. Paul has spent five chapters arguing that law cannot make anyone righteous — and he ends by noting that no legislature has ever passed a statute against kindness. The Spirit produces what no law would ever have thought to prohibit.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Marchons Selon l'Esprit

Verse 25 uses two different verbs, and English flattens them. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.

And the second verb is not the ordinary word for walking. Paul uses peripateō — to go about, to conduct oneself — everywhere else, including all through Ephesians. Here he switches to stoicheō: to walk in line, to keep rank, to stay in step. A word from marching columns and ordered rows.

Which brings the chapter back to the yoke. Two animals in one harness must keep step or both are injured. The pace is not set by the younger one. Its whole task is to match the one already walking.

So the two halves of the verse divide neatly. Live is a gift — it was given. Keep in step is the response — and it is the only part left to us. Not producing the life. Matching the pace of the One who has it.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Already Crucified

Verse 24 is in the past tense, and it matters. Those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh. Not are trying to. Not should attempt it. A completed act.

Which is the same grammar Le met four days ago. J'ai vaincu le monde — I have overcome the world, spoken hours before the cross. And the same shape as Galatians 2:20, read on the eleventh: I have been crucified with Christ.

Paul is not handing anyone a project. He is describing a status — and then asking that the walking match it. Keep in step with what is already true.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — And Then Verse 26

Paul has just written the most quoted sentence about beauty of character in the New Testament. And then, immediately, he lands it somewhere unglamorous.

Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. Ne cherchons pas une vaine gloire, en nous provoquant les uns les autres, en nous portant envie les uns aux autres.

Three ordinary sins, and every one of them is a failure to keep step. Conceit walks ahead. Provoking jostles. Envy watches the other one's pace instead of the Leader's. The military word from verse 25 is still doing its work in verse 26.

Which is honest about where the fruit is actually tested. Not in solitude. Among people — and, for a household living in a van, that means at very close range indeed.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — A Second Morning Among the Trees

Yesterday this journal noted that Gethsemane means oil press, and that the oil comes from what happens after the fruit is taken off the tree.

Today the reading is about fruit. Nobody arranged that either.

And it fills in the half that was missing. Yesterday was about the press. Today is about the tree. Before anything can be crushed into oil, it has to have grown — slowly, seasonally, without strain, by a life the tree did not manufacture.

Which is the whole argument of Galatians 5 in one grove. The works of the flesh are made in a workshop. The fruit of the Spirit grows on a tree. And a tree does nothing at all except stay rooted and stand through the weather.

Demeurez fermes. Stand fast. Which, for an olive tree, is the entire job description.