Ephesians 3:7-21

The letter to the Ephesians breaks rather neatly into two halves; the first three chapters, which lay out a chunk of Paul’s theology – his argument for unity, that we are called together in Christ, united by the work of Jesus, in order that we might together be reconciled with God. The good news of salvation, he argues is for all, Jew and Gentile alike; and not as two different pathways – a way for Jews to be reconciled with God, and a different path for Gentiles – but that the two are drawn together in Christ, and in Christ, reconciled to God as one body.

The second half of the book begins, in the opening words of chapter 4: “I beg you therefore to lead a life worthy of the calling”. The remaining three chapters are Paul’s practical outworking of that theology; his description of what this reconciliation in Christ looks like in the details of day to day living. And it’s going to be really important to keep that in mind in the coming weeks; that the rules for living, the ordering of family life, the relationships between slave and master; that these are all the application, in a particular time and culture, of the fundamental truths of who and whose we are.

In particular, in the words of our reading today, we as the Church have been called to make known “the wisdom of God in its rich variety”: in chapters four, five and six, Paul will outline what that might look like for his first readers. But mistaking the outworking of a truth for the truth itself is the root of many, many distortions. Not least of which is the use of passages from Ephesians to defend patriarchy, to defend slavery, to defend domestic violence and violence against children.

Which is why it is so important to read that we read the first half, first; for our task is to work out how we, in our time and place, work out those same truths in a way that might make known the wisdom of God to our culture. The wisdom of God “in its rich variety”: the wisdom of God is one; but the way it is experienced, the way it is expressed, is rich in its variety.

So we turn to Ephesians 3, in which Paul talks about a mystery, hidden for the ages in God, but now, through the Church, made known to the rules and authorities in the heavenly places.

That’s a difficult phrase for us, and I’d like to take a few moments to unpack it. “The rulers and authorities” would seem a simple enough reference. The gospel, the good news, the Church, had always been a movement from amongst the people, from the grassroots; not a directive of the authorities or rulers, whether they be religious, political or military.

So to say that, through the Church, that is, through this movement of people known as the followers of the way, the people of Jesus, something new was being made known to the rulers and authorities of the day, that would make perfect sense. A mass movement speaking to the rulers of the day: that’s something we recognise – from the suffragettes, to the civil rights movement, to modern environmental movements.   Something emerges, from the ground up, and demands the attention of those rulers and authorities.

But Paul doesn’t leave it there. For the wisdom of God is being made known, he writes, through the Church, to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

And this isn’t the only place that Paul uses this sort of language. In chapter 6 he will write that ‘our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers and authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places’.

Now I don’t know how you understand this sort of language, the language of spiritual forces of evil. I don’t know how I understand it, either. But there is this sense that there is more to the way the world operates than simply the decisions of individuals. That the forces which stand against God in the world are more than just the sinful and selfish decisions of individuals.

And even outside the Church we name some of these forces, these powers, as if they were entities in their own rights: white supremacy, militarism, patriarchy, homophobia; we talk about these things as if they were more than just the sum of their parts.

The social and political sciences seek materialistic descriptions of these things; Paul speaks of them in spiritual terms; but there is a common idea – some systems, and some ideas driving them, are so big and complex and powerful that they seem to take life for themselves.

Now people can get bogged down in arguments about what it means for these things to have a spiritual reality, but what Paul draws out attention to here is not the origins of these powers, but our relationship to them.

That those things, those forces that seem to rule the world, whatever they are, will be shown the wisdom of God in its rich variety through the Church.

The Church is God’s chosen way to make known the mystery, to demonstrate the possibility of a way of being which is not that of the powers. We have received that gift, that grace, that mystery, bringing together of Jew and Gentile into one new creation united in Christ; demonstrating that even the deepest of all human divides is transcended by the mystery of God’s wisdom.

The Church is God’s way of showing the world, and the powers behind the world, that their power, arising, ultimately, as it does from greed, envy, othering, fear, prejudice, is not the only way. That there is something else, a radical alternative based on inclusion, reconciliation, generosity, love, and that this, this something else, is the plan, the mystery of the universe hidden, until now, in God.

And the Church is God’s way of showing that to the world.

Which is no small job.

And it is for this reason Paul then prays for his fellow believers.

For this reason. Because we as the Church are meant to be something more. More than a human institution, more than a collection of people drawn together in the common love of God, more than a gathering of individuals who are together celebrating the grace of God that has called and changed and saved them. We are called to be the salt and light of the world, the hope of the world, the living out of the love of God.

In a sense, this has been what the whole sweep of scripture has been about. God calling people together, to be different, and by being different, speaking to the world, and to the powers, and saying “look! there is another way!”

This, Paul says, is the mystery of God’s wisdom; hidden for the ages, but made visible in Jesus Christ and in the Church.

It’s an amazing vision for Paul, for whom the Church was still a tiny insurrection, a handful of Churches consisting, in many cases, of just a handful of people. This was no great and powerful institution; if you feel like we are in the minority today, the early Church was a tiny fraction of our size and influence.

But Paul has this vision of the Church as God’s way of making God’s reconciling wisdom known to the world. And you don’t need to be big to set an example, to show an alternative.

And for that reason, Paul prays that we will be strengthened with power, that we will be the dwelling place of Christ, and that rooted and grounded in love we will both mentally comprehend and experientially know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge so that we may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Paul, it seems, doesn’t pray small prayers.

He prays that we will be filled with the fullness of the God who fills the universe, that we may know the love of God which is beyond knowing.

Because that is the other way. The alternative. The message that we have for the powers and authorities in the heavenly realms.

By this, Jesus said, all people will know that you are my disciples: if you have love for one another.

That, Paul tells us, is the message that we have for the othering that leads to bigotry; for the fear that drives violence, whether in the home or between nations; for the sense of scarcity that drives hoarding of resources.

This is the other way. The way we are to be different.

Life lived in the wisdom of God, in its rich variety; life lived in the love of God which is beyond all knowing. A life which is made different by the saturating indwelling of the love of God.

Paul brings his theological outline to a close with a doxology:

to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever.

And then begins the second half of the book – how this love is going to work out in practice, in some particular examples of the rich variety of God’s wisdom.

Which is where we begin next week.

Amen