The Marks You Cannot Remove

1 Corinthians 7:18-19 - “Was anyone at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was anyone at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision. For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but keeping the commandments of God.”

In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald published a novel about a man who reinvented himself so completely that almost nobody knew who he really was. The Great Gatsby tells the story of James Gatz, who grew up poor on a farm in North Dakota. But even as a boy, he dreamed of becoming someone larger, richer, and more impressive than the life into which he’d been born. Then, at seventeen, he stood on the shore of Lake Superior and saw a wealthy man’s yacht anchored offshore. James Gatz rowed out to meet it, but the young man who introduced himself that day was already calling himself Jay Gatsby.

From then on, he built a life around that invented identity. Some of his story was false, like the wealthy family, the inherited position, the suggestion that he had always belonged among the elite. Other pieces were true but carefully polished: his military honors and the few months he really had spent at Oxford. He made a fortune, bought a mansion across the bay from the woman he loved, and filled it night after night with crowds of strangers drinking his champagne. Then he died. The parties stopped. The crowds disappeared. And almost nobody came to the funeral. The identity he spent his whole life constructing couldn’t, in the end, carry the weight of a human life.

The church in Corinth was wrestling with something remarkably similar, though the details sound strange to us now.

In that world, circumcision was the physical sign of belonging to God’s covenant people. But in Greek and Roman cities, where public bathing and naked athletics were part of ordinary life, that same mark could expose a Jewish man to shame and ridicule. Some Jewish men went to extraordinary lengths to conceal or reverse its visible effects so they could pass as Gentiles. At the same time, Gentiles entering the church could feel pressure to receive circumcision so they would seem more spiritual, more biblical, or more fully accepted among God’s people.

Two groups moving in opposite directions, but doing the same thing. Each was trying to change their label. And Paul says to both of them: You don’t have to reinvent yourself to belong to Jesus. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, he says. The most loaded identity marker in that entire world counts for nothing. What matters is a life actually lived toward God, and no cosmetic change to the outside has ever produced one.

There are some marks we would remove if we could, too. The family we came from, the town on the birth certificate, the years we wasted, the divorce, the diagnosis, the accent, the gap in the résumé, the version of us that certain people still remember. So we work at filing it down, hoping that once it’s finally gone, we’ll be acceptable. And Paul, who had the most impressive religious résumé in the room and later called the whole thing rubbish, tells us these markers were never what counted.

But the good news is that we don’t have to invent a self worth loving, because we’ve already been handed one. In Christ you were given a name you didn’t manufacture and can’t lose. You were washed. You were claimed. You were made a son, a daughter, a saint of God. That is not a persona you have to keep up in front of the guests. It is who you are when the house is empty.

Gatsby spent his short life building a self that could be loved, and died in a house full of rooms no one entered. The tragedy was never that he failed to pull it off; he pulled it off beautifully. The tragedy was that the thing he built could not hold a human soul. What God has given us in Christ can! The mark you’ve been hiding doesn’t disqualify you from anything. The God who called you knew every bit of it, and called you anyway.

Today: Sit with this question and answer it honestly — which mark am I still trying to remove? Name the thing about your history you most hope people never find out. Then ask whose approval you were hoping to buy by hiding it.

Prayer: “Father, forgive me for working so hard to be someone other than the person You made. You know everything I’ve tried to hide, and You called me anyway. Teach me to rest in the new identity you’ve given me. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

-PK