God’s Victory Over Division through Christ
We’ve seen how this second chapter of Ephesians, as part of a Divine Warfare pattern based on the Old Testament, provides us with the evidence of God’s prowess and his track record in defeating his enemies and that it offers two specimens of such victory to encourage us to channel our white-hot faith into commitment to God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement. The first victory Paul details is God defeat of sin and death in Christ (2:1-10). The second, too which we turn now, is God’s defeat of humanity’s alienation and division among itself through Christ (2:11-18). Eph.2:19-22 comprises the final element of the Divine Warfare pattern we identified earlier.
We noted that these two sections of Ephesians 2 have a matching structure – old state, God’s decisive victory, new state. In 2:11-22 that structure looks like this:
2:11-12 Description of the Old State: Gentiles alienated from Israel, God’s people
2:13-18 Celebration of God’s Victory: Christ Makes the Two into One New Person
2:19-22 Recounting the New State: Both Together are the Temple of God
Both of these divine victories that Paul recounts result from the death of Jesus on the cross and God’s raising him victorious on the third day. As they both follow a similar pattern I suggest Paul wants us to read them stereoscopically, as two accounts of the same thing seen from different points of view. They do not follow sequentially; both are results of the same death and resurrection of Jesus. Nor does one have a priority over the other; each are aspects of the same problem that God must deal with. After all, if his “eternal purpose” is to gather all things together in Christ (1:10), humanity must be brought back to God and to each other for that to happen. Neither without the other fulfills the purpose God intends to achieve. This suggests that we cannot and should not separate what God has put together: the vertical and horizontal dimensions of life, evangelism and social justice, the sacred and the secular. All of these are unreal distinctions that only do mischief to our efforts to be God’s “subversive counter-revolutionary” people. I suspect it’s to forestall such distinctions that Paul joins them at the hip the way he does here.
2:11-12: Gentiles are alienated from Israel, God’s People
“Remember” kicks off this second section of this chapter. In fact, it’s a double “remember” (vv.11-12). Memory, as we saw earlier, is a re-presentation and participation in what is remembered. Here Paul exhorts the Gentiles to remember their journey from “being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel” (v.12) to being “no longer strangers and aliens” but “citizens” and “members of the household of God” (v.19).
Paul also includes his Jewish readers in this journey down memory lane. He emphasizes the desperate state of the Gentiles but his rhetoric suggests that not all is well for the Jews either. They apparently scorned the Gentiles calling them the “uncircumcision,” those males who lacked the physical identifier of “belonging” to God’s people. This epithet is hurled at them, Paul tells us, by those identify themselves as the “circumcision,” those who do bear the mark of belonging to Israel. However, when Paul adds “a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands,” the implication that they are not quite where they need to be with God lurks nearby.
In fact, Paul cleverly implicates both in a problematic relation to God prior to Christ by using the phrase “in the flesh” to describe both: Gentiles “in the flesh” (translated “by birth” in the NRSV) and Jews “called ‘the circumcision’ . . . made in the flesh”. Paul means more here than merely physicality. He mostly uses “flesh” in contrast to life lived in the Spirit, as that part of us that resists God and refuses to go God’s way. Here he allows this sense to bleed over into the physical sense and give it a less innocent nuance that it might at first glance seem to have. Both parties are “in the flesh,” different ethnic flesh to be sure, but both stand together in resisting God’s will and way for them.[1]
Remember, Paul writes, that before Christ you Gentiles “were . . . without Christ”. And he expands that in what some have called the saddest verse in the whole Bible: “being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” Before Christ, in other words, the Gentiles were not active characters in the story of God with the world which centrally concerned Israel. Those “covenants of promise” signify the unfolding of God’s story with the world through Israel (covenants with Abraham, with Moses, with David, and a New Covenant to come) in which the Gentiles were not participants. But even though they were not participants, they were always the object of the promise carried by these covenants (Gen.12:3). Though the story was not “about them” in one sense, it was most surely “about them” in another!
Without hope and without God in the world is Paul’s way of summarizing the Gentiles’ plight. Though they are without God, God is not without them. They are always in his mind and heart. And their being drawn near in Christ has always been his plan from all eternity. And to that climax to all God’s promises and purposes we turn with Paul in the next section of this part of Eph.2.
[1] Snodgrass comments: “Paul wants his readers to remember that they were Gentiles, confined to that which is weak and merely human, being bad-mouthed by Jews, who labeled them “the uncircumcision” and themselves “the circumcision.” But, as we will see, the Jews were no better off; they too needed the gospel” (126)
No comments:
Post a Comment