Paul’s Second Great Prayer
Now we reach the end of the “Sit” section of Ephesians. With a prayer (3:14-19) and a concluding benediction (3:20-21) Paul rounds off and brings to a rousing conclusion this amazing part of his letter.
This prayer draws together many of the words and themes of these first three chapters.
-its Trinitarian structure (vv.14, 16, 17; every section in the letter so far)
-“in heaven and on earth” (v.14; 1:9)
-“riches” (v.16; 1:7; 2:7; 3:8, 10)
-“glory” (v.16; 1:6, 12, 14; 16, 18; 3:13)
-“your inner being” (v.16; 2:15)
-“faith” (v.17; 1:13; 2:8; 3:12)
-“rooted and grounded” (v.17; 2:21)
-“power” (v.18; 1:19, 21; 3:7)
-“to comprehend” (v.18; 1:8-9, 17; 3:5, 9)
-“saints” (v.18; 1:18; 2:19; 3:8)
-“love” (v.19; 1:4; 2:4)
-“fullness” (v.19; 1:23)
These links bring the full weight of all Paul has said thus far into this concluding prayer. It’s as if he makes one final gargantuan effort to impress on his readers the critical importance of grasping and internalizing the material in this first section as the background, or, to use computer terminology, as the operating system for God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement. The mystery of Gods’ gracious plan to sum or gather all things up in Christ, the memory of the victories or “skins” God already has on the wall that assure us that our struggle will not be in vain, and Paul himself, who has just modeled for us how one reads their life, work, and circumstances in light of this mystery and memory are essential elements in the making of God’s subversive counter-revolutionary people.
Paul’s prayer, which is one sentence in Greek, can be broken out into three parts: vv.14-15, vv.16-17, and vv. 18-19. Structurally and theologically, “being rooted and grounded in love” is its center.[1]
And that’s as it should be. God chose us in love (1:4). Raised us alive together with Christ and seated us with him by of his “great love” (2:4ff.). Paul calls us to live in the love of Christ (5:2, 25; 6:23), and with “an undying love for our Lord Jesus” (6:24).
Love, as we all know, is one of the most debased words in the English language. It has been sentimentalized and sexualized beyond recognition. Nevertheless, we cannot do without it and there is no good surrogate for it. C. S. Lewis has done us the inestimable service of attempting to rehabilitate the word for us in his The Screwtape Letters. The following dialogue is from one of the letters sent by Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, who is his ward in training in the seducing Christians away from their faith.
“The truth is I slipped by mere carelessness into saying that the Enemy really loves the humans. That, of course, is an impossibility. He is one being, they are distinct from Him. Their good cannot be His. All His talk about Love must be a disguise for something else—He must have some real motive for creating them and taking so much trouble about them. The reason one comes to talk as if He really had this impossible Love is our utter failure to find out that real motive. What does He stand to make out of them? That is the insoluble question. I do not see that it can do any harm to tell you that this very problem was a chief cause of Our Father's quarrel with the Enemy. When the creation of man was first mooted and when, even at that stage, the Enemy freely confessed that he foresaw a certain episode about a cross, Our Father very naturally sought an interview and asked for an explanation. The Enemy gave no reply except to produce the cock-and-bull story about disinterested love which He has been circulating ever since. This Our Father naturally could not accept. He implored the Enemy to lay His cards on the table, and gave Him every opportunity. He admitted that he felt a real anxiety to know the secret; the Enemy replied "I wish with all my heart that you did". It was, I imagine, at this stage in the interview that Our Father's disgust at such an unprovoked lack of confidence caused him to remove himself an infinite distance from the Presence with a suddenness which has given rise to the ridiculous enemy story that he was forcibly thrown out of Heaven. Since then, we have begun to see why our Oppressor was so secretive. His throne depends on the secret. Members of His faction have frequently admitted that if ever we came to understand what He means by Love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven. And there lies the great task. We know that He cannot really love: nobody can: it doesn't make sense. If we could only find out what He is really up to! Hypothesis after hypothesis has been tried, and still we can't find out. Yet we must never lose hope; more and more complicated theories, fuller and fuller collections of data, richer rewards for researchers who make progress, more and more terrible punishments for those who fail—all this, pursued and accelerated to the very end of time, cannot, surely, fail to succeed.”[2]
Love gets us right to the heart of what God’s counter-revolution against sin, death, and the devil are all about. There’s nothing more basic, more ultimate, more intimate that God can do for us than to love us in the ways Lewis creatively suggests the devil and his minions cannot understand! It is this unfathomable love of God “which surpasses knowledge” (v.19) displayed in Jesus Christ and sealed in your hearts through the Holy Spirit that has and will win the day! And it is this love that has come to us, undeserved to the undeserving, as a gracious gift.
3:14-15
On the basis of everything said thus far (“for this reason”), Paul goes to his knees in the presence of God. This is not the typical prayer posture for Jews. It makes sense, though, sense Paul ends the last section with an assurance of bold and confident access to the throne of God in Christ. In the very presence of God, so to speak, Paul goes to his knees, as is only appropriate. Thus he continues modeling for his churches the truth he teaches. The access he has announced Paul now lives by exemplifying the reality of this access to God by his posture in prayer.
Paul addresses God as “Father” (v.14) in a wider sense than he usually does. Here God is the Father of all families “in heaven and on earth” (v.15), whatever that exactly means. Paul does not tell us so it is useless to speculate. Remember the setting of worship. This expression of God’s universal, even cosmic, fatherhood is appropriate to this setting – the divine throne room in the heavenly temple. After all, if Paul has proclaimed Christ as the cosmic Lord over all, humans, the powers, everything, them he surely wants to claim the same scope of lordship for his Father! Let us take this phrase then as Paul’s way of affirming the same scope of lordship as he affirms for Christ.
3:16-17
At the heart of this prayer are petitions for strength (v.16) and power (vv.16,17). This is hardly surprising in light of what Paul has unveiled to these believers as the scope of God’s audacious plan and his equally audacious intention to use them (us!) as his agents of counter-revolution.
What is his first petition about though –“strengthened in your inner being” (literally “into the inner human”)? Seems obvious, doesn’t it? Our individual inner selves need to be bolstered and emboldened by divine power to carry out our mission of announcing God’s wisdom to the powers (3:10). Though it seems most natural to modern western readers like us to take it this way, I want to explore another option.[3]
First, as the literal translation I gave above shows there is no “your” in the original. Translators supply it because they assume Paul is speaking about the inner life of individuals. Further, the preposition rendered “in” in the NRSV is actually “into”. It suggests motion towards rather location in something.
Secondly, we have already met the term “human” (Greek anthropos) in 2:15 where Paul speaks of the “one new human (or humanity)” as a result of Christ’s work on the cross. Jew and Gentile have been reconciled into a new people, a new community, a “third race” as some in the early church put it. Paul again uses this phrase in 4:24 to denote our entrance into the church through baptism and contrasts it with our previous life in the “old humanity (or human)” (4:22). Paul thinks of the human community as two family lines. Each has a representative head or leader (Rom.5:12-21). The “old humanity (or human)” is fallen humanity, the line of the “first Adam; the “new humanity (or human)” is redeemed humanity in Christ, the “second or last Adam” (Adam as he should have been). If in these passages on either side of our text Paul uses “human/humanity” to signify a corporate body, might he not be doing the same here?
That’s the third reason I suggest we take a second look at this passage and not simply assume it means what seems natural to us. Paul has rather unambiguously been talking about and to the church as a community not about or to the individual believer in this letter up to this point. A shift of use of this word at this point, especially in a prayer following hard on the heels of a paragraph in which Paul lays out the crucial and central role of the church in God’s plan, seems odd and implausible.
A final point is that in the very next phrase Paul gives us what we try to make this phrase mean: “and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith”. Here we have the notion of Christ indwelling us along with the plural pronoun and noun, “your hearts”. Here indeed we meet the more familiar truth of each believer’s relationship to Christ.
What then of Eph.3:16? Paul uses “inner human (or humanity)” here and not “new human (or humanity)” as in the other passages. But it may be that he means the same thing as in those other passages. Paul has just laid out for his his churches God’s plan in which the church plans a key role. This is, as Gombis rightly calls it, “a massive task”[4]. Thus Paul prays for all his people might need to undertake it. Therefore we find mention of being “strengthened . . . with power through his Spirit”. And if the view I am suggesting is correct, the Spirit gives us this needed strength by moving us ever deeper and more inextricably into this hew humanity in Christ, this new reconciled and reconciling community Christ died to bring into being. This strengthening, then, is spelled out and detailed in the next section of the letter (“Walk,” 4:1-6:9) to which Paul immediately turns.
But we need not only this incorporation into this new humanity in Christ. We also need the reality of Christ’s indwelling presence in our hearts. This new humanity is the crucial and irreplaceable context in which we live out our new life but it is not its beating heart. That is the living and risen Christ himself with whom are united by faith. Paul prays that through the indwelling Christ we find ourselves “rooted and grounded in love” (v.17). Again Paul mixes organic and construction metaphors suggesting both the dynamic potential and the structural strength we discover in the community born of the divine love our enemy just cannot get his head around!
I have belabored this point because I think it is both crucial and difficult for individualistically-oriented westerners like us to catch hold of. To summarize, so far Paul is praying for his churches to experience more of the new life they have in and through Christ in the new community he died to birth. Faith is our connection to the living Christ and this new community. God’s own love shared with us by Christ, who dwells in our hearts, is the soil in which we grow and are established as the people who will announce God’s wisdom to the powers and forces that keep trying to tyrannize God’s creation!
3:18-19
We meet another puzzling matter in the next petition of this prayer. Not only are life rooted in the new community and in the indwelling Christ necessary, Paul prays for yet another (or perhaps two) resources for us.
Again he prays for power (v.18). This time it power “to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (vv.18-19). Most read this as if the “and” were not there and take it that Paul is praying that we grasp the dimensions of Christ’s love. But the “and” is there in the original and makes it appear Paul is thinking of the dimensions of something as well as the unfathomable love of Christ. But what are we to know the dimensions of if not of Christ’s love? Has Paul’s rhetoric simply gotten away from him here? What can he mean?
There’s been no lack of suggestions, as you might suspect. Two seem more plausible to me than the rest and are related. If a building of some kind is in mind, there are two in scripture that get their dimensions spelled out: the temple (I Ki.6) and the New Jerusalem (Rev.21-22). Now, the New Jerusalem is cube-shaped like the Holy of Holies, the innermost and most sacred enclosure in the temple. If also covers the whole of the new creation. And it has no temple in it (Rev.21:22). Thus many scholars believe that the city of the New Jerusalem is the temple writ large, the new heavens and earth as the place where the triune God will meet, welcome, and live with his people forever.
As we have seen, Paul has already described this new humanity of reconciled Jew and Gentile as a “holy temple” (2:21) and “a dwelling place for God” (2:22), and the victorious Christ as “the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (1:22-23). It may not be far-fetched then to imagine that Paul had this in mind when he prayed for the church to comprehend these dimensions, the dimensions of God’ ultimate plan, his “eternal purpose” (3:11). Why he didn’t name the object he was describing we don’t know. But if it is not love, the New Jerusalem may be the best guess.
In a more general sense, it may be ever better to take these dimensions as pointing to scope of God’s wisdom. That’s, after all, what these first three chapters of the letter do – help us to know, understand, grasp, and discern what God is up to and where we fit into his great project of reclaiming and restoring the whole cosmos. This would certainly include the New Jerusalem idea above but perhaps surpass even that in scope. Either way, Paul wants us to get hold of what God is up to so we may learn to better align our lives with it.
And for that, both parts of it (getting hold of it and aligning our lives with it) requires power and community. Paul asks God to so center us in him that together we can resist the lure of false or partial visions of what God is up to (which the enemy will be aiding and abetting) and enable us to truly become what he has made us to be![5] We will need each other and all the power of wisdom, insight, and discernment for this crucial growth into the fullness of God’s people. Thus, Paul requests just this for us.
That leaves us with love (v.19). If we can with God’s help grasp the dimensions of his wise and profound plan, we cannot do so with God’s love. It exceeds, if possible, even God’s wisdom! Paradoxically, Paul prays that we may “know” the unknowable – this unfathomable depth of passionate commitment that moves God to do what he does, indeed, that makes God who he is. Obviously this “knowing” is of a different order than that of discursive thought. We cannot offer reasons and explanations here. Rather, we can only share with others the overflow of the reality of the love that has called and claimed the whole cosmos as his own. “That you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (v.19) is Paul’s breath-taking request. And that “you” is plural – as the new humanity in Christ we will experience and show forth the fullness of this love!
The Benediction (3:20-21)
Paul concludes this prayer and indeed this whole first section of the letter with a benediction. In it he draws together themes of divine power at work in us, the surpassing wisdom of God, Christ, the church, and the universal reach of this good news. Pretty nice summary of three packed chapters in one short sentence! Let’s take a brief look at it.
God is the object of the praise because he is the source of the blessing. It’s the power of his presence in and with us that surpasses our own limited, finite wisdom and continually surprises us as God “is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (v.20). What a God!
God’s glory (the signs of his presence) is to be seen in Christ and in the church (v.21). Paul has laid out in marvelous detail the signs of God’s glorious presence and power in Christ (ch.1-2) for which he deserves the best and richest of our praise. But this is the only place in the New Testament in which God’s glory “in the church” is mentioned. It makes sense though, doesn’t it. Ephesians is the great letter about the church, its primary place and critical role in the outworking of God’s “eternal purpose”. Where else would we expect to find such a notice?
What does it mean, though, for God’s glory to be reflected and seen in the church? It happens by the church
“becoming loving and joyful servants, emulating the cross-bearing of Christ. That is the only mode of life that draws on God’s power and that demonstrates the triumph of God in the cosmic realm. Jesus glorified God in his life of dependent weakness, suffering on behalf of others and faithfulness unto death. The church, therefore, is to take on similar postures in the world, glorifying God by participating in the life that Jesus lives through the church in the world.”[6]
Such praise of glory to God will resound through “all generations” (V.21) and beyond, growing and swelling as the choir of the cosmos learn to sing it better and better throughout the ages of the ages!
We Practice “Sitting” as God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary People (6)
Eph.3:14-21
We have seen how this closing prayer and benediction draw together the various themes and emphases of the entire first section of Ephesians. In these section we have been invited to luxuriate, soak ourselves, internalize everything God has done for us and the cosmos as well as our identity and calling as his people.
I think the best ways for us to bring our own reflections on and practice of this “Sitting” is to share Paul’s prayer and benediction again. This time however we will switch the pronouns to first person singular or our name so we may hear it as Paul’s prayer for each of us. I have glossed it to reflect some of the understandings we gained from it. You might record it with this change and then “sit” taking it in silent reflection. Do this as many times as you need to until you believe this prayer has begun to “sink in”.
“For this reason I bow my knees my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that Lee may be strengthened in his connection to Christ’s new humanity in which he dwells with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in Lee’s heart through faith, as he is being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that he may have the power to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s wisdom, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that Lee may be filled with all the fullness of Christ.
Now to him who by the power at work within Lee is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all he can ask or imagine, to him be glory in Lee and the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen”
AMEN!!
[1] Snodgrass, Ephesians, 178.
[2]C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Touchstone, 1961), 73-74. Online at http://members.fortunecity.com/phantom1/books2/c._s._lewis_-_the_screwtape_letters.htm#19.
[3] I owe this way of taking this phrase to Yoder Neufeld, Ephesians, 158-160.
[4]Gombis, The Drama of Ephesians, 133-34.
[5] Yoder Neufeld puts it like this: “We should thus understand grasping the four dimensions as an invitation to grasp reality fully. That includes viewing reality from the vista of God’s secret now disclosed in Christ, and also taking hold of reality in the sense of participating in the gathering up of all things in Christ (1:10).” (Ephesians, 161)
[6] Gombis, The Drama of Ephesians, 138.
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