From now on let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.— Galatians 6:17
Paul usually wrote with a scribe (Romans 16:22). Most scholars think Galatians was no different, until the last lines: See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand (Galatians 6:11). Big strokes. He wants them to know the ending is his.
The whole letter has been a fight over a mark in the body. There were some who trouble you, Paul says (Galatians 1:7), insisting that Gentile believers be circumcised. He is blunt about what they were after. They wanted to make a good showing in the flesh, and to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ (Galatians 6:12).
Underneath ran a quieter attack. Was Paul even a real apostle? When the Twelve replaced Judas, the requirement was someone who had been with Jesus from John’s baptism to the ascension (Acts 1:21–22). Paul had not. He knew it. He called himself one untimely born (1 Corinthians 15:8).
So he is tired. His last defense is not another argument. It is his body.
The word is stigmata (στίγματα). Our word “stigma” comes from it and has kept the feeling.
In the Greek and Roman world a stigma was a mark put into the skin, usually a tattoo, sometimes a brand. Animals were marked to show whose they were. The people who got marked were mostly slaves who had run away or been caught stealing, often on the forehead. It said two things: whose you were, and that you had been trouble. It did not come off.
Paul opens Romans by calling himself a doulos (δοῦλος), a slave, of Christ Jesus (Romans 1:1). Here he goes one step further. He claims the slave’s mark, and he is not hiding it.
There is one more use of the word. Herodotus, nearly five centuries earlier, describes a temple in Egypt where a runaway slave could take on the sacred marks of the god, and from that moment no one was allowed to lay a hand on him (Histories 2.113). He belonged to the god now. We cannot know whether Paul had heard of such a custom. But listen to the verse again. Let no one cause me trouble, for I bear the marks. It is a marked man telling his pursuers that he is someone else’s property.
This is not a metaphor. On my body, he says. Elsewhere he gives the inventory: five times the thirty-nine lashes, three times beaten with rods, once stoned (2 Corinthians 11:24–25). The stoning was at Lystra, where they dragged him out of the city and left him for dead (Acts 14:19).
I cannot read that verse without stopping. Only a short time earlier, this same crowd had tried to worship him as a god (Acts 14:11–18). Now they hated him enough to pick up stones and keep throwing until they thought he was dead.
I wonder whether he saw their eyes. Whether, before he went down, he caught the face of one man lifting a stone with both hands. I wonder what it did to him to be hated that much by people he had come to bless. Paul was not hard to hurt. The stones proved that.
And he had seen faces like those before. Years earlier, men laid their cloaks at his feet while they stoned Stephen, and he approved (Acts 7:58, 8:1). Now he was the one on the ground.
What he did next challenges me every time I come back to it. He got up and walked back into the city (Acts 14:20). Later he returned to Lystra itself to strengthen the believers there (Acts 14:21–22). What kind of love walks back toward the stones?
Lystra is in southern Galatia. If, as many scholars think, this letter went to those churches, some of its first hearers had seen him lying in the dirt that day. When he wrote marks, they knew exactly which ones.
Those who troubled the Galatians were pressing circumcision on them, a mark that would let everyone avoid persecution. Paul’s marks came from refusing to avoid it.
He calls them the marks of Jesus. Not the title Christ. The name. The one He was given at birth (Matthew 1:25), the one nailed above His cross (John 19:19). And Jesus kept His scars. On the evening of the resurrection He showed them His hands and His side (John 20:20). Paul belongs to a Master who was marked first. Marked for him.
This is the hardest part. Scars usually make people bitter, and Paul had earned some bitterness. Yet the letter that began without a single word of thanks and called its readers foolish (Galatians 3:1) ends like this: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers (Galatians 6:18). In Greek, “brothers” is the last word before the Amen.
There is a kind of persimmon so astringent before it ripens that one bite dries out your whole mouth. Nobody adds sugar to fix it. It is simply given time, and the same fruit turns sweet. Paul’s last line always brings that fruit to mind. What he went through for Christ took the harshness out of him. It could have done the opposite.
Most of us have not been flogged. But belonging to Christ still leaves marks where it has cost us something. A forgiveness that was expensive. A position let go. Years given where no one was watching.
If someone searched our lives for evidence of ownership, what would they find? We ask it not to accuse anyone, but because we want Paul’s life to challenge ours.
A mark is what remains after something has happened. Paul looked at his and did not see damage. He saw a name, and it told him who he was.
Stay here for a moment.
The One who owns you showed His scars first.
Stay with that.
i. Where has following Jesus actually cost you something?
ii. Paul’s scars took the harshness out of him. What have yours done to you?
Lord Jesus, I call myself Yours easily. I am less sure what on me would prove it.
I confess that I have preferred the marks that impress people to the marks that come from following You. I have chosen the good showing. I have avoided the cost.
You were marked first, and You were marked for me. You did not hide Your hands and Your side. You held them out.
Where obedience has already cost me something, keep it from turning sour. Take the harshness out of me. Let what I have been through make me gentler with my brothers and sisters, not harder.
And when voices question whether I belong, let me stop arguing and remember whose I am. I am Yours. That is settled.
In the name of Jesus, who still carries His scars. Amen.
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