Ch.4: “Sit” – The Mystery of God’s Gracious Plan (2): Ephesians 1:15-23
Paul’s First Great Prayer in Ephesians
Paul continues to stoke the flames of the “white-hot faith” needed to keep God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement going. His prayer turns the gifts for which he blessed God into petitions for his readers’ discipleship and lays the groundwork for inculcating the second element for building a movement: getting his readers committed to his cause. In effect, Paul says, “You have these gifts, now use them!” Again, what we have here in Greek is one sentence.
Paul is aware of the faith in Christ and love for others his readers have (v.15). His never-ceasing prayer is to encourage their practice of the third member of the well-known theological triad, hope (v.18), as well.
Here, as elsewhere in this and other letters, Paul models what he hopes his churches will practice. Unceasing prayer will, indeed, be unveiled as a powerful weapon in this struggle with sin, death, the powers, and the devil to which God has called us. As Paul deploys it here for them, so he will later ask for his churches to deploy this weapon for him (6:18-20).
I wonder how often the leaders in our churches genuinely seek for their peoples’ prayers for that which hinders them in their pursuit of faithful service? How often do the people think to seek such requests or to pray for their leaders? I wonder if the distinction we make of “clergy” and “laity” creates a one-way flow of prayer and service from the “clergy” to the “laity? Do “clergy” generally and genuinely model the kind of prayer Paul speaks of here? Just some questions to ponder arising out of this passage.
It is well to note how thoroughly trinitarian Paul’s prayer is in v.17 (though not of course in the later sense of the Nicene and other creeds). He prays
-to the Father “of glory”;
-the God of “our Lord Jesus Christ”;
-for the “Spirit of wisdom and revelation”.
He prays that the triune God will makes himself known to his churches. This coheres with the theological reality that only God can make God known. So Paul asks God to do what only he can do for us: draw us deeper and deeper into communication, communion, and community with him. And this, to “know” God (v.17), is as Jesus says in Jn.17:3 “eternal life”.
Paul unveils the core of the “mystery” here. Everything else flows out of this relationship. And everything moves toward it as well. God desires to share his life with his creatures and indeed, his creation too. That passion motivated God to create and, when we went astray, to redeem and restore us so that we might again move toward that destiny of new creation we so foolishly forfeited.
At the heart of everything is relationship! Even God as triune is, if I may speak reverently, his relationships as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we humans, created in God’s image (4:24) are “made” (so to speak) for relationships, with God, one another, and the creation itself. And it is just this relational core that was fractured in the primal revolution against God. And we, like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, can’t put it back together again. God must do it if it is to be done!
Paul looks back to his readers’ baptisms as the ground of this ever-deepening relationship with God. The tense of the Greek participle “enlightened” (v.18) points to a past completed act that has continuing effect into the present. Thus I would translate it, “having been enlightened” and take the phrase as the basis for Paul’s prayer rather than a part of the prayer itself. I suspect Paul is pointing to baptism here (see similar language in Heb.6:4) as effecting the enlightenment of the heart-eyes of Paul’s readers. His prayer here, then, is in line with what we noticed earlier – he prays that the gifts given now be exercised and grown into. I believe Paul calls his readers (then and now) to “remember your baptism” and to grow into all that it means for them.
One aspect of that growth into our baptisms is learning to see the world and our life in it from God’s perspective. In this sense, baptism cleanses not only our sins but our heart-eyes as well. We can now “see” what we heretofore could not, imagine the previously unimaginable, think the unthinkable. Ken Medema sings of the possibilities of having our heart-eyes cleansed in his song, “Is There a Place for Dreaming”:
Is there a place for dreaming, in the corners of your mind In a world where dreams are broken and dreamers hard to find Do you dream, do you weep sometimes about the way that things should be Come dreaming with me, dreaming with me, admission is free (refrain)
Dream of another country, where is no push and shove Where the rich don’t rule, the poor will be fed, and the only law is love Where a neighbor is a neighbor and there is trust and loyalty Come dreaming with me, dreaming with me, admission is free
“Is there a place for dreaming, in the corners of your mind”? If you are in Christ and share in God’s new creation and have been initiated into your true vocation as a member of God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement, there certainly is! Indeed, there must be. Something we cannot imagine, we cannot “see,” and what we cannot “see” we cannot move towards. Baptismal cleansing of our heart-eyes is essential to what God calls us to be and do.
The following chart is a kind of map to this sentence to help us keep track of all that is going on in this remarkable prayer.
Wisdom Spirit (v.17) Revelation
Knowledge of God (baptism)
Our hope (v.18) God’s hope (v.18) God’s power (v.19) God’s calling Inheritance in us
Raised Sit Head of Church (v.20) (v.20) (v.23)
We have looked at the top half of the chart above. Now we turn to the rest of it, the petitions based on the Spirit’s drawing us deeper into our journey with and to God begun in baptism.
Paul first asks God for a deeper knowledge of the content of our “hope,” then a grasp of the “riches of God’s inheritance,” and finally, the “greatness of God’s power” (vv.18-19). These three petitions correspond to the three actions for which Paul blessed God in 1:3-14: equipping, reassuring, and strategizing. “Hope” equips us with all that is needed for the struggle. God’s “immeasurably great” power (vv.19ff) reassures us that we will reach that for which we hope. And in recognizing God’s “glorious inheritance in the saints” we reaffirm the strategy God has chosen to reach his goal.
Hope of God’s Calling
The mystery of God’s will, as we have seen, is that Jesus Christ is the focal point under whom as things will be gathered and ordered in their proper relation to him and to everything else – new creation, shalom, for short. This is our hope. It is to this project that God has called us.
Let’s take a bit of an excursus here and reflect on how such hope equips us for the struggle God calls us to. It is the achievement of Professor Jürgen Moltmann to have retrieved the critical importance of hope and reflected deeply on its significance for Christian theology for the last forty years. His seminal work, Theology of Hope, in the sixties firmly established hope not simply as a topic of Christian faith but as the very lens through which we must look at everything we think about God and the world. We will follow him as he helps us see some of the dynamic of hope at work in our lives.
I’ll put Moltmann’s insights into the vernacular so we can access and relate to them easier. Hope
-keeps our “eyes on the prize,”
-our ears to the ground,
-our arms linked with one another,
-our feet moving on.
If the hope to which God calls us animates us “body, soul, and spirit,” our lives will be marked by just these dynamics. “For the element of otherness that encounters us in the hope of the Old and New Testaments,” writes Moltmann, “. . . is one that confronts us with a promise of something new and with the hope of a future given by God.” If this is so, followers of Jesus cannot live with a “Same old, same old” mentality. We must expect, be on the lookout for, any sign of that future God gives us now. As “faith in the future tense,” hope “strains after (God’s) future.” Hope is active, always forcing us to life our eyes from the present to God’s future, the future we have in Jesus Christ as the gathering point of all creation, to “keep our eyes on the prize” so we can assess and respond to the present faithfully.
Hope “keeps our ears to the ground.” Living in the mode of hope attunes us to any glimmers, hints, or rumblings of God’s future that sprout up in the present. This is no “Pollyana-ish” exercise of ignoring or denying the harsh and unpleasant aspects of life in the interest of avoiding pain and struggle. On the contrary, hope animates us to protest the suffering and presence of such oppressive and unjust aspects of our world in its name, in the name of the good future of justice, righteousness, and peace that is coming, indeed, is already here, in Jesus Christ. The presence now of this coming future shows itself precisely in this unwillingness to come to terms with or tolerate such blasphemous denials of God. Says Moltmann,
“That we do not reconcile ourselves, that there is no pleasant harmony between us and reality, is due to our unquenchable hope . . . This hope makes the Christian impulses toward the realization of righteousness, freedom and humanity here in the light of the promised future that is to come . . . Wherever that happens, Christianity embraces its true nature and becomes a witness of the future of Christ.”
Hope also links us arm in arm with the community of faith as together we serve the world bringing God’s blessing to everyone we meet (Gen.12:3) so we can link up arm in arm with them as well. God’s salvation is universal. It embraces everything and everyone. But this universality is worked out through particularity, through one particular people, the Jews, bearing the promise and blessing of God for everyone else. Jesus the Jew, the one faithful Israelite, fulfills all God wanted from Israel thus bringing God’s salvation to its climactic and decisive fulfillment. In the aftermath of the his resurrection, it is the task of another particular people, those who follow Jesus, both Jew and Gentile, to take the good news of reconciliation and restoration to God through him to the rest of the world. Thus Jew and Gentile link arm and arm and go into the world to seek and share God’s blessing with everyone them meet in the hope of God’s promise that one day all will be linked arm and arm together praising God (Rev.7:9-10) and sit at table together at God’s great feast (Mt.8:11). As Moltmann puts it, “Only when the real, historic and religious differences between peoples, groups, and classes are broken down in the Christ event in which the sinner is justified, does there come a prospect of what true humanity can be and will be.”
Finally, hope always keeps our feet moving on. Hope will not allow us to settle down, settle in, and settle for whatever the world has to offer. Moltmann quotes John Calvin on this: “By unremitting renewing and restoring, it (hope) invigorates faith again and again with perseverance.” Hope activates our pilgrimage.
“All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.” (Heb.11:13-16)
Hope lived as our mode of live, our way of thinking, and the specific content of our expectation shapes us into just the kind of people God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement needs!
God’s “Glorious Inheritance among the Saints”
Paul asks, secondly, that God grant his churches knowledge of his own “glorious inheritance among (or “in”) the saints.” We noted this earlier as Paul blessed God and he picks it up for further attention here as part of his prayer. If the hope of God’s calling equip-s us for service in God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement, knowledge of God’s inheritance reaffirms for us God’s intent to use us to implement and spread the victory Christ has won for all of creation. This is the flip-side, as it were, of our hope of God’s calling.
We’ve already touched on this above so there’s no need to belabor it here. Mindboggling as it is, humanity redeemed and living in Christ is what God is looking forward to in new creation. Kind of boosts our passion for the struggle, doesn’t it – knowing God’s looking forward to us; and has done everything necessary for us to reach the goal. If that doesn’t blow the embers of our faith to white-hot, we may be beyond help!
It also reinforces the strategic importance in God’s purpose of his people, the church. God has chosen to work through this people (us!) to implement and spread his blessing to the world (a lá his promise to Abraham and Sarah in Gen.12:1-3). God has chosen not simply to do for us what we could not do for ourselves. He has also chosen to include us in the doing of that work. Jesus has done that which had to be done and which only he could do - the redemptive part. But the implementation and spread of his victory at the cross God has entrusted to his people in Christ and through the power of the Spirit. That’s why Paul can say in Colossians 1:24: “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” We’ll say a good deal more about the strategic role of the church as we make our way through this letter.
“God’s Immeasurably Great Power”
The third petition Paul offers for his churches is for an assurance of God’s power at work in Christ and in the world. In light of the struggles in which they are immersed, Paul asks God to renew and deepen his readers’ awareness and experience of the resurrection power he let loose in the world when he raised Christ from the dead. At the same time Paul extends this petition into a statement about God’s power that forms the thesis of his letter.
Gombis notes that Paul “bookends” the body of the letter with the phrase “the strength of his power (1:19; 6:10). Paul’s summary of his message immediately follows the “bookend” phrase in 6:10. Thus Gombis argues that Paul’s great statement about God’s power immediately following the first “bookend” phrase functions as the thesis or point of the letter. We can fill out our outline of Ephesians to this point to incorporate this data.
1:1-2 Greeting
1:3-3:21 “Sit”
1:3-14 Paul Blesses God 1:15-23 Paul Prays for his churches
1:18-19 Petitions for knowledge of God’s call, inheritance, power 1:19 “bookend #1”: “the strength of his power” 1:20-23 Thesis: God has won the victory over all the powers
To lead a counter-revolutionary movement a leader needs to have more than big ideas and large hopes. A leader has to have those, to be sure. But more is required. If others are to follow you into costly struggle and conflict, you have to have some “skins on the wall”. Big ideas may generate passion, white-hot faith, but that is not enough to build a movement on. To turn that faith into commitment to a cause (the second factor in building a movement) requires a leadership with a proven track record.
Therefore, Paul prays that his churches be clued in to God’s power, the “immeasurable greatness of his power” (v.19) and expounds the nature and scope of that power as the thesis of his letter. He follows that up with an account of the “skins,” the victories, God has on the wall in ch.2. Let’s look now at Paul’s thesis statement.
God’s “immeasurably great” power was displayed in raising Jesus from the dead (v.20). The most fearsome power opposed to God is death. Apart from God’s resurrection power death’s seemingly universal reach mocks life and levels everything and everyone into insignificance (see Ecclesiastes, for example). It sucks everyone into its “black hole” of meaninglessness and nothingness. The “Grim Reaper” is a feral and indomitable foe indeed!
Unless, that is, unless the good news that God raised Jesus from the dead is true. Resurrection of the dead meant the end of this present evil age for Jews. Their God would intervene in history, bring the present age to its end, raise the dead, judge them, and then would ensue the eternal new age of God. For Gentiles, Jesus’ resurrection challenged the iron rule of death and the worldviews and religions concocted to help humanity cope with them. The great enemy of humanity and humanness has met its match and been overcome! By raising Jesus from the dead God insert a Joker into the deck of the known and expected and, surprise, changed everything for everyone by defeating death and all its manifestations. This is the biggest of all “skins” on God’s wall!
As the agent of God’s defeat of the biggest and baddest of all his foes, Jesus has been installed as the Triumphant One. All those superhuman powers driven by the power of death, every person or movement that wielded death as the instrument of its illusions and pretensions, any claimant to idolatrous dominion over the hearts and fate of humanity and history, all these and any others have been deposed and/or domesticated by the risen Jesus. God has raised Jesus and installed him at his “right hand” (the place of divine power) as Cosmocrator (ruler of the cosmos) for now and for forever (v.21). God has subjected death and all lesser powers and pretenders to the risen and exalted Jesus.
Paul alludes here to Psalm 110:1, “The Lord says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies your footstool.’ This passage is frequently used by the writers of the New Testament to describe Jesus’ victory. But there is more here than simply an allusion to a particular verse. Gombis writes:
“Paul is depicting a dramatic victory rather than a peaceful scene of coronation, and he indicates this by using Psalm 110. The psalm depicts the Most High God installing his chosen king and then strengthening him as he goes forth to bring God’s enemies into subjection to God’s righteous rule. Paul uses this language to demonstrate that this is precisely what God has done in Christ Jesus. The death and resurrection of Jesus was God’s decisive and dramatic blow, breaking their grip over God’s world. Notice the subversion – the cross, which to all appearances was the defeat of Christ by the fallen powers, was the death blow struck against the powers.”
The implication of this Paul draws out in v.23. The risen and exalted Christ fills the church with his fullness and as the church’s “head” Christ uses his people to “bring God’s enemies into subjection to God’s righteous rule” (to use Gombis’ language). This is another indication that describing the church as God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement is moving in the right direction.
This first of Paul’s two great prayers in Ephesians essentially mirrors the blessing of God with which he began the letter. In the two sentences which constitute this chapter in Greek, the first blesses God for all he has done and given us in Christ that we might be his people, the people through whom he will continue to bless the world. In the second, Paul prays that his churches will be filled with the realization and experience of all these blessings that we may in practice be God’s vehicle of blessing for the world.
In ch.2 Paul will detail the victories, the “skins” on the wall, God has won. Memory of these victories will cement our awareness of the ways the mystery of God’s gracious plan in Christ has entered history and facilitate their commitment to the cause of the gospel. Before we turn to that, though, let’s consider some ways to practice “sitting” in the truth and reality of God’s Mystery.
