The word of the day is “under.”  At the end of our first reading (Galatians 4:8-21), Paul asks the pivotal question, “Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law?” (Gal 4:21). Today, we consider Paul’s teaching of what it means  to be under the Law or under freedom. In Paul’s day, the “Judaizers” had insisted that the Gentiles had to be circumcised to become “real” Christians. The great Jewish teacher Gamaliel had trained Paul, and the apostle knew that circumcision was the rite of binding one to the Law of Moses. So if the Gentiles were circumcised, they would be bound to keep the entire Jewish Law, its rituals, dietary restrictions, and division of clean and unclean, as…