The small, struggling communities of Jesus-followers in and around Ephesus receive a letter from the famed apostle Paul. Writing from his imprisonment in Rome, Paul tells the Ephesian Christians that their humble gathering is the vanguard of a restored and reconciled humanity! And furthermore, the new society which they are forming is exhibit #1 of God's almighty power! Such is the expansive vision of God's purpose for the Church set forth in the NT book of Ephesians. At the
start (v.1), Paul asserts his God-given teaching authority as an apostle, an
official messenger, of Christ Jesus “by the will of God.” God himself stands behind this surprising manifesto. The letter is sent “to the saints in Ephesus,
the faithful in Christ Jesus,” who, small and inconsequential as they may feel
themselves to be in a hostile world, are actually at the center of an astounding plan of God that involves the entire universe.
Ephesians
begins with a call to worship, an explosion of praise that might well serve as
a litany for the churches reading Paul’s letter. The initial words “praise be to the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 3) are followed by a recitation of how God
the Father chose us, God the Son redeemed us, and God the Spirit sealed us—each
unfolding step of God’s saving mission punctuated with a cue to the
congregation—“to the praise of his glory!” (vv. 6, 12, 14) The Christian life is marked with joy and
gratitude because we have experienced God’s grace.
Note Paul’s
total concentration on the powerful, purposeful activity of God. All the active verbs in vv. 3-14 refer to
God: It is God who blessed us, chose us,
predestined us for adoption, lavished grace upon us, and revealed to us his
hidden purpose in Christ. Humans, on the
other hand, are characterized solely with passive verbs: We have been redeemed, obtained an
inheritance, been predestined, heard the word of truth (the ear is a passive
receptor), and been sealed with the Holy Spirit. As Spurgeon said, salvation is “all of
grace.”
The
expression “in Christ” or “in him” is used repeatedly (12 times) and points to
a key concept in Paul’s gospel. God
“chose us in him before the foundation of the world.” “In him we have redemption through his
blood.” “In him we have obtained an
inheritance.” For Paul, this means more
than simply saying salvation has come to us through Christ. Paul sees Jesus as the second Adam, whose
obedience to God secured eternal life for the whole human race, just as the
first Adam’s disobedience brought death upon the whole race (see Rom. 5:12-19). God chose him
before creation, God perfected him through
obedience unto death on the cross, and God raised him from death as a vindication of his faithfulness. To be “in Christ” means to identify ourselves
with Christ as the representative head of a new humanity, a kind of “corporate
personality” in which the whole Christian community is included. We are
chosen not because we are worthy, but because Christ is worthy, and because we are united with him through
faith.
Note the
ultimate goal of divine election (v. 10).
“God chose us in him . . . as a plan . . . to unite all things in him,
things in heaven and things on earth.”
Although God elects particular individuals, he elects us to become part
of a reconciled and reconciling community that will eventually include “all
things” in heaven and earth. The
“spiritual blessings” given us in Christ (to be chosen, accepted, and forgiven)
are not ends in themselves. They are
part of God’s master-plan to bring everything in the universe back into
oneness. “Election,” “adoption,” and
“redemption” are divine actions that draw us individually into God’s
predestined, ultimate purpose of “unification.”
Our glorious inheritance from God is a reconciled universe in which
every vestige of hatred, division and greed will have been banished and all
created beings will live in harmony with each other and their Creator.
This new
creation is not yet fully realized, but God gives the Holy Spirit as a pledge
of what is surely coming (vv. 12-14).
The Holy Spirit is not a personal allowance to be cashed in privately,
but a communal treasure to be shared between “we who were the first to hope in Christ” and “you [who] also were
included in Christ when you heard the word of truth.” The gift of the Spirit is a foretaste of
God’s universal intention, like a volcanic island of love rising within the
raging sea of a fallen world, destined to expand until there is no more
sea. The tangible shape that the Holy
Spirit takes in the world is the Church.
“In Christ you [plural] were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.”
So Paul prays
(vv. 15-23) for his readers' spiritual eyes to be enlightened that they might know “the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints” [i.e., a
corporate reality]. Let’s remember that
Paul addresses this letter to “the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful
in Christ Jesus,” a community grounded in this world, not in some ethereal
world to come. This here-and-now
community, writes Paul, is a demonstration of God’s “incomparably great power
for us
who believe” (v. 19). The down payment
of our inheritance comes in the form of “the church, which is his body, the
fullness of him who fills everything in every way” (v. 23). The Spirit of the risen Christ indwells the
Church so fully that we can say the Church is actually “Christ existing as
community” (Bonhoeffer). This miracle of
reconciliation we call “Church” is the most stunning demonstration of God’s
“mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead
and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms” (v. 20). Jesus
is the second Adam, and the new humanity is rising in him.
At this point let's consider more specifically the connection between
Christ’s resurrection and the new humanity that takes concrete form in the
Church. Death is the enemy that
fractures the human spirit and the human community. The human quest for fulfillment is
continually dashed on the jagged rocks of mortality, alienating us from
ourselves and from each other, as lust, greed and violence are inflamed by the
futile drive for self-preservation.
Although decreed and permitted by God as a divine judgment, death is
really the domain of the Devil, the realm where he exercises his limited and
sinister power. This is undoubtedly what
Paul has in mind when he says that the risen Jesus is reigning with God “in the
heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” (vv.
20-21; cf. “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places,” 6:12). Jesus has conquered death, and death has
been stripped of its intimidating power over those chosen, adopted and redeemed in
Christ. We now reign with him, we
experience his risen life, and the once-compulsive need to secure our own place
in the universe is falling away like a putrid corpse. The death of the old grasping self makes way
for a new humanity—the body of Christ— to rise with their living Head as a
community of mutual, self-giving love.
