My granddaughter Lily is eleven months old, crawling all over the place and climbing stairs. She especially loves to do everything her older three-year old brother is doing. The other day her brother Luke and I were playing with wooden trains, building a track layout on the floor. Lily crawled right into the middle of the tracks, and started pulling them apart. You can imagine how Luke felt about that. He did not say, “Great job, Lily. Thank you for destroying my train layout.” He said, “No! That’s mine! Pop-pop, can you take her away?”
Sound familiar? It’s not just toddlers that struggle to share or welcome new people into the fold. We humans of all ages can be very hesitant or even outright resistant to opening our arms, welcoming new and different people in our lives.
The Jews in Paul’s day seemed to have a similar reaction, which Paul describes in Ephesians 2:11-22. The Jews Paul writes about in viewed humanity through the lens of two groups: the Jews and the Gentiles. In Ins and the Outs. They seemed to have forgotten about Deuteronomy 10 where God says, “When you circumcise your hearts, you reach out to the foreigner because I love them, and oh by the way, remember that you used to be foreigners too.” The Jews in Paul’s day, and for centuries before that, missed the heart of God.
But in Ephesians 2:11, Paul describes a momentous change. There was a new group of Gentiles that are different. To those people Paul writes, “You particular Gentiles used to be in the OUT group. That was your former group.”
In Ephesians 2 verse 12, Paul explains the change: “Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.”
So those Gentiles used to be in the OUT group, but something changed. Paul describes the change in verse 13, “Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”
Praise God! All people who are not part of the “circumcised,” (Circumcised? I explain it in this post.) who are not part of the covenant between God and ancient Israel, can have hope of closeness to God because of Jesus. When Jesus gave his life, beaten, crucified, and then raised to life, Paul is declaring that Jesus made it possible for anyone in the OUT group to be part of the IN group.
In fact, more than a possibility, God invites all people to be part of the IN group. That’s one of the beautiful themes of Advent. Advent means “the arrival,” and it points to Jesus’ arrival, when he was born, when God the Son, took on a human body. Jesus, Paul reminds us, arrived so that we who were once far from God could be brought near to God. For Jews, that nearness was old hat. They were used to the idea that God had chosen them. But for Gentiles, this is something altogether new.
Yet the Jews in Paul’s day were not so sure about this idea that Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection meant that God was now making it possible for non-Jews to be in the same kind of relationship that they had enjoyed for centuries. They held that special relationship tightly.
Jews in Paul’s day said, “Hold on a minute Paul. The Gentiles are still in the OUT Group. We Jews are the IN Group. You can’t just change that. There are two groups. There always will be two groups.” For the Jews, this separateness was central to their identity. They held it as dear. Can you identify with their emotion? It can be very difficult to give up a cultural identity, or a personal identity that you have long held as central to your being.
Think of high school student who is the star of the baseball team. His parents get transferred to new jobs in a new city, so the family must move. Now the once star is the new kid, and he doesn’t make the team. His whole identity was “star baseball player.” Now what is he?
The Jews felt something like that. It’s really unsettling if you’re in the IN group, and you’re now told that your group is about to change, and you must welcome new people.
But if you are in the OUT group and you’re told that you are now have an open invitation to join the IN group, that’s amazing. That’s what Paul says next in verses 14 through 18:
“For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.” There are no longer two groups. No more IN Group and OUT group. There is one new group. Jesus, through his birth, life, death and resurrection, has torn down the wall between the groups, and he has made us ONE.
Paul uses a word over and over in this passage to describe what Jesus did. Do you see the repeated word? I’ll talk about it in the next post.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 