Although I don’t talk about it specifically in the message, this reconstitution of the people of God in Christ has many implications for how we understand ourselves, for the meaning of the Lord’s Supper and for Christians as a people, as a people with their own interests and telos. Any Christian political theory worth its salt must begin by discussing the nature of the Christian community itself as the body of Christ and as the re-founding of the people of Israel in Christ in the community of believers.
Again, my pulpit notes are below.
Epiphany. What is it? The word itself means a sudden, profound realization or intuitive understanding. It is that experience when you finally understand something, that moment when it all comes together and you say to yourself, “Now I get it!”
In terms of Epiphany we are celebrating this moment of realizing who Jesus is and the significance of his life. During most of the three year cycle of the Lectionary, the texts vary from year to year on important dates, but on this date, the texts are the same from year to year. Isaiah 60:1-6 “Arise, shine, for your light is come…”; Psalm 72 which tells about the coming King who will bring the justice of God; Matthew 2:1-12 the story of the Magi bringing gifts to the newborn King; and this passage in Ephesians, which talks about the “mystery of Christ” which is now made known to us.
So, what is the “mystery of Christ?”
What is interesting is that Paul begins a thought and then breaks off mid sentence to talk about the mystery of Christ, picking up what he was going to say again in verse 14. Verse one and verse 14 begin with the same phrase and he will go on to talk about his prayer for the Ephesian church. In the meantime, though, Paul first intends to share a few thoughts about Gentile believers and the great mystery of Christ.
Paul begins by stating something that he is counting on being common knowledge in the early church. “Surely you have heard…”
What have they heard? …about the administration of God’s grace. The Greek here is οἰκονομίαν, from which we derive the word “economy” but in ancient times referred to the administration of the household. A good word to capture this is “steward.” Paul sees himself as God’s administrator, his steward of something of great value, this mystery of Christ that was given to him by revelation.
Much of the early shaping of the Christian faith was done by Paul and we must embrace the understanding that God really did speak to Paul, not just on the road to Damascus, but elsewhere. Much like when Jesus taught the two disciples on the road to Emmaus shortly after his resurrection, opening their eyes to the scriptures, so too Paul had his eyes opened and was taught directly by Christ through revelation. It was only later in his ministry that he went to Jerusalem and discussed with the other apostles what he had been teaching, and they confirmed that he was preaching the same teaching and had the same understanding of who and what Jesus was and his significance. They confirmed what he had received by revelation.
Paul sees himself as a steward of the “mystery made known by revelation.” He says in verse 4 and 5 that this specific teaching about the Messiah, the Christ, was not made known to other men in past generations but has been made known by Christ and the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself says that the Holy Spirit will teach us all things, and this seems like the kind of thing Jesus had in mind.
So, what is this mystery?
Verse 9. The mystery is that through the gospel, the Gentiles are heirs, together with Israel, members together of one body and sharers together in Christ Jesus.
This is important. We reflected on this indirectly last week when we meditated on Hebrews 2:10-18 when we talked about us being of one flesh with Christ, how it is important to know that Jesus was one with us in our suffering, that he faced all the same temptations as us. We talked about how this idea of being one flesh with Christ unfolds the meaning of communion, the Lord’s Supper.
The church as the body of Christ is not just a concept, but a spiritual reality that manifests itself in earthly physical reality. When we join the church as believers we become like a flesh and blood family. Jesus calls us fellow children of God because we share the same flesh and body with him and reaffirm this when we partake of Communion.
Here, this same spiritual reality is extended in a different way.
The Old Testament promises were all made to Israel, a people joined together as a great tribe, a nation that is a large extended family tracing their lineage back to the twelve sons of Jacob, who was named by God, “Israel.” When God took a people to himself, he divided the world into the Israelites and everyone else, the pagans who worshiped other gods, which we know are merely fallen angels, that Paul often refers to as the powers and principalities or as in this passage, the rulers and authorities.
What Paul is saying is that this dividing wall of ethnicity is being broken down and God is, in Christ, through faith, forging for himself a new people, a new body whose flesh bond is the body of Christ. In Christ, God is declaring to these powers that all peoples are his and that all who believe will be included in the body of Christ and we will share one flesh.
This is the mystery. That all peoples, through faith, are now joined into a new body. We share the body with Christ and become real brothers and sisters, children of God, all having the same Father as if we shared the same genetic material and are part of the same extended family.
The point of all of this is that we can, as Paul says in verse 12, now approach God with freedom and confidence. We will look at those two words in a minute, but we must grasp the significance of what Paul is saying here.
He is using temple imagery and language. The gentiles were forbidden from temple worship. As were women. Only Israelite men were allowed to come in and worship God. You were not allowed to approach God. There was a gentile court, the outer ring of the temple. Then there was the women’s court. Finally, there was the inner court where the sacrifices took place, and the Israelite men only were allowed here. Further, only the high priest, and only once a year, was allowed to go into the Holy of Holies.
Symbolically, God was walled off from women and from the nations. This is the importance of what Paul means when he says elsewhere that in Christ there is not Jew or Gentile, man or woman, slave or free. He is not issuing an egalitarian manifesto that erases the differences between men and women or that removes the differing roles that each has in society, or that there are not hierarchies that remain. It’s just that now no one is excluded from worship. We can all go into the Holy of Holies. We can all approach God in Christ. We are now bonded in flesh as one people, one family, in faith, by means of the body of Christ. We are the body of Christ. We are one family. We are all children of the Father with the Son of God.
When Paul talks elsewhere about discerning the body in the Lord’s Supper this is what he is meaning. That we see how in the Lord’s Supper we are being bonded together as the body of Christ into a real flesh and blood family.
Once you grasp this, you know that you cannot be a believer without entering into this relationship with other believers. You cannot do Christian faith on your own. You must participate in this great mystery to grasp it. You are now part of the people of God, bonded in flesh as the body of Christ so that we might together as one body, with no one excluded, come freely into the presence of God.
Paul layers this in verse 12 with two words, παρρησίαν and προσαγωγὴν, both of which are loaded with meaning.
Παρρησίαν, which is translated here as “freedom” carries the meaning of “the attitude of a free man” as opposed to “the attitude of a slave.” You have the standing of a free man who is able to stand boldly in the presence of his King. It carries with it the sense that you can stand before God with your head upright, lifted in confidence because in Christ we are a people set free from slavery and bondage. We are a free people.
προσαγωγὴν, meaning that we have access. We can approach God. We have access to God. Think of those images of night clubs with bouncers. It’s like someone had pulled back the rope and we have been given VIP access to God. We are being led into an audience with God himself. Not the idea of God, but into very presence of God himself. We are being let into the inner sanctum to meet God.
It is not just an undoing of the boundaries between Israelite and Gentile, man and woman, we are all being brought into presence of God to have an audience with him. It is an undoing of the curse of the Garden of Eden. No longer are we cast out the presence of God. No longer are we divided. Together, in Christ, in faith, we become a single body that can, with heads held high, with confidence, we can come into the very inner sanctum of the presence of God to be with him.
I want to fold in briefly the passage in 1 Timothy 3 which underscores this language in a new way. We are God’s household. God is Father, he is the head of the house. We are his children, united in one household.
As this household of God, we are the living repository, the pillar and foundation of truth itself. There is this early hymn or catechism or creed that echoes all the language we saw in Ephesians:
Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great:
He appeared in the flesh,
was vindicated by the Spirit,
was seen by angels,
was preached among the nations,
was believed on in the world,
was taken up in glory.
Its all there. The great mystery. The real bodiliness of Jesus. The cosmic implications of what he has done, witnessed by the angels, both those that are obedient and those that are fallen. God, become man has been preached to the nations and in this body, that is his body is rooted the truth, the wisdom of God.
We as believers, as a body, as a family, we live and reveal in who we are the deepest truths of God. We are the body of Christ. We are one body and as one family together we come into the very presence of God. This is the great mystery of Christ.
This is the core of what we do, of who we are. We reveal to the world the great mystery of Christ by being that family of God who boldly comes into the presence of God, and within whom the wisdom of God is a living reality.
