“We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
It’s one of the more famous lines in movie history. It’s from Jaws, the classic thriller that basically invented the summer blockbuster as we know it, was such a huge hit that there was a noticeable drop in beach tourism the year it came out, and still sends chills down the spine of people with just the first two notes of its theme music.
The line, in a sense, encapsulates the whole movie
in just a few words. It is spoken by the main character, Police Chief Brody, who at that point has hired a shark fisherman to take him out on a fishing boat to find and kill the giant shark terrorizing the waters around his beaches. So far, they haven’t had much luck, though. Brody is crouching at the back of the boat against a railing, frustrated and even bored at this point, when suddenly the shark rears out of the water right next him, the first time we’ve really seen it in the movie.
It is massive, rivaling the breadth of the boat’s stern in size. It looks at him, opens its huge mouth glistening with razor-sharp teeth in a menacing parody of a smile, and plunges back down into the water again and disappears. Brody snaps up to attention on his feet as if someone had hit him with an electric shock. He backs away slowly into the cabin of the boat where the lead fisherman is. Then, as many of you can quote yourselves, he says almost catatonically: “we’re going to need a bigger boat.”
Except he doesn’t. That’s what everyone remembers, but what he actually says is, “you’re going to need a bigger boat.” And there’s a pretty big difference between what people remember and the actual line. “We’re going to need a bigger boat” implies he’s on the team hunting the shark as an equal and fully-committed partner going forward. “You’re going to need a bigger boat” sounds like he’s distancing himself as far as possible from what now seems like an insanely dangerous enterprise; “you’re going to need a bigger boat, but I’m out!”
Just a small change in a line like that can radically shift our understanding of character, plot, and meaning. Another example of a misremembered iconic line comes from a movie that’s filled with them, Casablanca. Widely considered one of the best movies ever made, it centers on the story of an American named Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, who owns a bar in Casablanca during World War II.
His lost love, Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman, appears in the bar out of nowhere one day and makes a request to Sam, the piano player: “Play it, Sam; play ‘As Time Goes By.’” Rick comes in from another room, unaware that Ilsa is there, and hears the song, which had been “their song” when he and Ilsa were a couple. He storms over and begins to berate Sam: “didn’t I tell you never to play…” he begins, then sees Ilsa and breaks off in stunned recognition.
Later that night, consoling himself in the closed-up bar, Sam walks through and sees him. Unwilling to leave him alone in this state, Sam sits down at the piano and begins to play. “You know what I want to hear,” Rick growls. “No I don’t,” lies Sam, hoping not to cause Rick more pain. “You played it for her, you can play it for me,” Rick says. “Well, I don’t think I can remember…” Sam deflects, but Rick interrupts, barking: “if she can stand it, I can; play it!” And Sam finally complies.
But throughout all of that, nobody says the line that everyone remembers from the movie, which is, “Play it again, Sam.” It’s so famous that there was even a Broadway play and a subsequent film using the line as its title, but it never appears in Casablanca itself. And the truth is, that’s a good thing. “Play it again, Sam,” sounds light-hearted, even frivolous.
But the whole point of the song and Rick’s orders never to play it is that it represents the lost love that he has never gotten over, no matter how hard he tried to forget. When Ilsa requests it, it’s with a sense of wanting to revisit an old memory that still remains in the past. When Rick requests it later, it’s actually quite important that he doesn’t simply say, “Play it again,” because in requesting Sam himself to simply, “play it!”, he’s acknowledging that he had banished it from the bar the way he had tried to banish her from his mind and heart, and in overturning the ban on it, he’s allowing it back into the bar as he’s allowing his pain and love regarding Ilsa to come back and be heard once more in his heart. The difference between “play it again, Sam” and just “play it!” is all the difference in the world in terms of both the characters and the meaning.
It doesn’t take much to shift the meaning of a sentence, a phrase, or even just a verb. Something as seemingly insignificant as a preposition can make a profound difference. Talking with someone, talking to someone, and talking for someone all have different shades of meaning: talking with implies a mutual conversation; talking to implies conveying information from a speaker to a listener; talking for means the speaker is literally representing someone else and acting as their voice.
If you don’t understand the differences that even those small prepositions make, then confusion, miscommunication, and even danger can ensue. If I say, “I’m going to throw this ball to you,” you need to get ready to catch it; if I say “I’m going to throw this ball at you,” you need to get ready to jump out of the way! And if you confuse the two, bad things are probably going to happen.
This letter from the Apostle Paul to the Galatians contains a famous quote that is often misunderstood and misremembered, and it makes all the difference in the world in terms of connecting the dots between God and us as human beings. To fully understand it though, it helps to know the context and the characters, just like with those movie lines. When Paul was doing his early journeys, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and organizing churches among those who responded, Galatia was one of the places he visited.
What’s particularly important to understand here is that Paul’s preaching centered on a theology of grace: our salvation comes from God’s grace, not from our own efforts, and that grace is given freely by God, rather than being actively earned or innately deserved by us. The Galatians responded eagerly to that message, and once was satisfied that the Christian church was thriving in Galatia and capable of sustaining itself, Paul moved on, seeking to spread the gospel as widely as possible in the Gentile world.
And that’s when the trouble started, because sometime after Paul left, another group of Christian apostles came through Galatia and met up with the Christians there. And when they heard what Paul had taught them, they told the Galatians that they were doing everything wrong. Christian discipleship isn’t just a matter of God’s grace, they warned: you have to maintain the covenant that God has established with God’s people; you have to follow the Jewish Law, otherwise you are still outside God’s grace as Gentiles.
And that meant not simply the moral and ethical parts of the Law, but the whole Law: circumcision, dietary restrictions, purity rituals, everything. Horrified at their shortcomings, the Galatian Christians quickly began adopting the practices of the Jewish Law, convinced that Paul had left them with an incomplete gospel.
Time passes, and somewhere on his journeys Paul gets word of what has happened in Galatia…and he is outraged; I mean, boiling with anger and frustration and disappointment. And while his language can sometimes sound harsh as he berates them, what’s at stake in all this is nothing less than the heart of the gospel for Paul, the fundamental truth of how God connects the dots between God and human beings, and particularly around the question of whether we are saved by following the Law or by the grace of God.
Now, despite his reputation, Paul actually has no problem with the Jewish Law, with the covenantal promises that God made with the Jewish people and which Jews live out through their obedience to the Law. But he has a huge problem with the argument that Gentiles have to follow it, have to become Jews in all practical respects, in order to be considered righteous enough for salvation, because the implications of that is nothing less than a rejection of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.
“I do not nullify the grace of God,” Paul concludes this passage by saying, “for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died for nothing.” In other words, if the Law was necessary for the salvation of Gentiles, there wouldn’t have been any need for Christ at all, everyone could have been saved just by becoming faithful Jews.
So, Paul is saying that there is most definitely a need for Christ in order for Gentiles to be saved, and it doesn’t require proving ourselves as righteous by following the Law. Which brings us to the famous but incorrect quote. Now, interestingly, the version of this passage that Judy read earlier contains the correct version of the quote; let me read it again with the incorrect version, and see if you can spot the part that is different from what we usually remember.
“We know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through the faith of Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by the faith of Christ and not by doing the works of the law.” That’s from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which was translated into English from the Greek by a collection of mainline Protestant scholars (Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, etc.) in the late 1980s. But if you go to the New International Version, translated in the early 1970s by a group of evangelical scholars, you’ll see something different. It doesn’t say that people are justified through the faith of Christ; it says we are justified through faith in Christ.
Now, the difference in those two versions is just the preposition connecting the words faith and Christ: “of” versus “in.” But which preposition you choose makes a monumental theological difference. It’s not surprising that the evangelical scholars chose “faith in Christ,” because talking about us being justified through faith in Jesus Christ is a core theological belief of the evangelical tradition, which emphasizes making a conscious decision for faith in Christ. And they are certainly not wrong that being intentional about aligning not just our beliefs but our will and actions with Christ is a crucial dimension of Christian discipleship.
There’s only one problem with that: it’s not what Paul is talking about here. And more to the point, the translation “faith in Christ” here is, quite simply, wrong. The New Testament was written in Greek, and the Greek here does not say that we are justified by faith in Jesus Christ; that’s a mistranslation that began in some translations in the last hundred years or so to fit a theological conviction.
Now bear with me here for just a minute, because it might sound at first like what I’m about to say is splitting irrelevant grammatical hairs, but it’s actually one of the most important theological differences in the entire Bible, one that has everything to do with understanding the basic connection between God and humanity. In Greek, nouns have what grammar scholars call cases, which is roughly analogous to how verbs have tenses.
A verb may be in the past, present, or future tense, for example; similarly, a noun can be in different cases, which indicate things about the relationship between that noun and other words in a sentence. Here, if the word for faith was in the dative case, we would correctly translate it as “faith in Jesus Christ,” because the dative case is used to indicate location and connection. That would mean our faith is located in Jesus Christ, which is the famous quote.
But that’s not what is happening here: the word for faith here is instead in the genitive case, which doesn’t indicate location, but possession. So that would mean the translation is “the faith of Jesus Christ,” meaning the faith that Christ himself possesses; we, as humanity, aren’t in the sentence at all. It seems small, but it’s actually as big as it gets. Whose faith enables us to receive salvation? Not ours; we are not justified by the faith we have in Christ. Ironically, if that was the case, it would invalidate Paul’s whole argument here, which is that we cannot justify ourselves through righteous actions.
Instead, we are justified by the faith of Christ, the faith that Christ himself had which led him to accept and endure arrest, a false trial, torture, and execution in order to conquer death itself through the grace of God in his resurrection from the dead. That is whose faith saves us, Paul is saying: Christ’s faith, not our own. That is the essence of the grace of God, of the gospel of Jesus Christ itself: that in and through Christ, God accomplishes for us what we could never accomplish on our own: the ultimate defeat of sin and death, simply out of sheer love for us, and the only choice we have is whether to receive that grace through our own faith, to respond with gratitude and action, or indifference and rejection.
There’s a popular refrain these days that says, simply: “you are enough.” It shows up online in memes on Instagram accounts that are focused on self-development and self-care; I even saw it on a yard sign in Saucon Valley a few weeks ago. It’s a corrective to the pervasive message in U.S. culture that you are not enough, that you need to have more, do more, be more, if your life is going to have any meaning or fulfillment. And that refrain is a helpful challenge to those myths of scarcity, but for Christians, it is also incomplete.
What this passage from Galatians reminds us and assures us, above all else, is that it’s not even a question of whether we are enough, beause Christ is more than enough; that before we can think about our connection with God, God has already chosen in and through Jesus Christ to connect with us as one of us: to bridge every gap, cross every boundary, tear down every wall that stands between us and the fullness of God’s love. That is the meaning of the grace of God: God’s relentless, overwhelming, irresistible love for each and every one of us, a grace that is always more than enough, and never runs out, and always calls us home.