In the first part of this chapter, Paul proclaims the saving work of Jesus Christ in epic terms, as an inconceivable transformation wrought on a cosmic scale. As we discussed a little bit last week, he pivots here—“Therefore,” he begins, because of this, for this reason—to declaring the equally epic, equally cosmic unifying work of Jesus Christ. If we were dead in our sin, then that death was separation, from God and from each other. If we are now alive together in Christ, then that life is, must be, unity, on the same terms and the same scale.
If we look around at the world, I feel safe in saying that former reality is blazingly obvious to everyone, at least in the flesh—in the physical reality of human life. We see all around us divisions based on outward distinctions, beginning with one Paul highlights: ethnicity and national identity. You, he tells his Gentile audience, were alienated from the commonwealth of Israel. Along with that went the visible mark of circumcision which divided those who were “in” with God from everyone else. Economic class was another big one—Paul doesn’t discuss that here, but he does in the letters to the Corinthians, where those lines of division were a major issue. We can come up with others; political tribalism wasn’t an issue Paul deals with (though it had been a century or two before, in the dying days of the Roman Republic), but it is for us, where so many people identify as members of the Red Tribe or the Blue Tribe—and remember, any identity we find or make for ourselves outside of Christ is an idol.
All these divisions seem hugely important to us, in any and every generation going back to Cain murdering Abel; all the way along, they keep us from doing the work God has for us. Paul’s fellow Jews looked down on everyone else—“We’re circumcized, and they aren’t”—and so they weren’t the light to the nations they were supposed to be. Instead of inspiring the nations to worship God, they inspired the nations to hate them. The prophet Isaiah was clear: one reason God would send the Messiah was to be the new Israel and fulfill the mission they forswore.
Thing is, merely earthly divisions don’t really matter all that much. They just aren’t all that important; they don’t justify our alienation from one another the way we insist they do. But we’re so convinced of their importance, we’re so emotionally and viscerally attached to them, I’m sure when I said that some of you instantly, instinctively rejected it. Honestly, there’s a part of my spirit that reacted the same way, and I’m the one who said it! That’s partly because these are our idols, and as a consequence we have attached them to our faith and piled theological significance on them. When I read someone saying that to be a faithful follower of Jesus is to support lower taxes because Jesus wants you to keep more of your money—I tend toward the small-government side of things, but whatever my economic beliefs, to say what we have is ours to keep and use however we want is profoundly at odds with what Jesus actually taught.
That said, some aspects of our earthly divisions do have spiritual significance; our society is, and probably always will be, divided in part over issues of profound importance to our understanding of who God is and who he call us to be. As we noted last week, the Enemy has been attacking the church using issues of sexual desire and practices, and these issues are regarded by many in our culture as primarily if not solely political. It’s deeply problematic for us to see them and treat them as issues of identity that drive our earthly tribalism, but it’s not wrong to say they matter or to be deeply concerned about them. After all, look at our passage: Paul isn’t just talking about earthly divisions, he’s talking about spiritual ones.
The fact that you were alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, he tells his hearers, meant you were strangers to the covenants of promise. You were outside God’s ḥesed, his covenant love and faithfulness, and thus outside his grace and mercy. You were separated from Christ . . . having no hope and without God in the world. The root of the earthly division you experienced was a spiritual division. This is profoundly important. When people set out to try to unify the church, they usually start by trying to force agreement—we don’t need to be divided because we’re not arguing with each other; when they can’t do that, they try to dismiss our spiritual and theological divisions as trivial. “It doesn’t matter what anyone believes about XYZ because God is love.” Well, yes, God is love, but what does that mean? How we understand XYZ might matter profoundly for how we answer that question.
Just as God’s grace doesn’t mean saying, “You haven’t really done anything all that bad,” unity in Christ doesn’t mean saying, “What we believe isn’t really important.” Unity in Christ is not a unity of agreement or consensus, it’s something much deeper, much more profound, and consequently much more difficult. Those who were far from God have been brought near to him—and while Paul is primarily addressing his words to Gentile converts, he’s drawing on Isaiah 57, which makes clear the Jews needed this just as badly. They may have been near to God compared to the Gentiles, but most were still far from him in their hearts. We picked up reading at verse 14, but if you look at the preceding thirteen verses, it’s one of Isaiah’s passionate denunciations of Israel’s idolatry. There are righteous people, verses 1-2, who are poor in spirit and humbly repentant of their sins, and God says in verse 15 he lives with them, but they are the exception. Look at verses 17-18 of Isaiah 57: God is clear that his people are not repentant and have not humbled themselves, then declares of Israel, “I have seen his ways, but I will heal him.”
This is what the peace of Christ accomplishes—and that’s with those who were nearest to God! And then you have the Gentiles—us—who were a long way farther from God than that, and a long way from each other and from the Jews as a consequence. It’s only possible, it’s only even comprehensible, because Christ is our peace; but that also makes it something much, much bigger than we usually mean by “peace.” Our politicians get us into war and then declare peace, and sometimes all they mean is a sullen ceasefire, and sometimes only a self-delusion—think Neville Chamberlain meeting Hitler in 1938 and declaring “peace in our time,” which was actually true for those who died within six months or so—and sometimes they declare peace and the shooting doesn’t even slow down. What Isaiah has in mind here, and what Paul is proclaiming, is vastly greater and deeper than the mere absence of conflict. The Hebrew word here is another of the great biblical words, the word shalom. To experience shalom is to be in complete harmony with God and his will, and thus in harmony within yourself. A life of shalom is a life lived in tune with God, ordered by his order, in accordance with his will. This means, as one scholar put it, “If the relationship with Yahweh is corrupted, there can be no peace.”
This is what it means to say Christ is our peace: he has brought us into God’s perfect harmony, into right relationship with God, into life lived according to the pattern of his goodness and his love and his perfect will. It’s interesting how Paul says Jesus did this: by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances. This doesn’t mean he abolished or set aside the Old Testament. It doesn’t mean he abolished or set aside the Torah—you may remember we talked about this some weeks ago: this is the word we usually translate as “law,” but it more basically means “teaching” or “instruction.” The Torah, the five books of Moses, did include the law code for Israel, but that wasn’t their most basic function. Paul says they no longer function for us as “commandments expressed in ordinances”—which is to say, as law in our earthly sense. They are still valid for us as instruction in how we should live because, as Jesus told us, they were fulfilled in him. They no longer function for us as a standard we must fully keep or else be punished. The legal function of the Torah with the sacrificial system was a make-work way of dealing with human sin, a temporary solution that would enable us to understand the permanent solution Jesus enacted in his birth, death, and resurrection.
That the Jewish law was only a temporary solution is made clear in that Jews, though nearer to God than the Gentiles, needed the reconciling work of Jesus just as much. When Jesus saved us, he didn’t just make us Jews. He didn’t replace the Jews, either—Paul describes this in Romans 11 by saying we Gentiles were grafted into the existing olive tree—but he created something new out of both of us. And note, there’s nothing in this of saving us as separate individuals: Christ reconciled us to God as one body, the church. We absolutely cannot say, “I’m saved, but I’m holding on to my hostility to this person over here who didn’t do what I wanted, or that person over there who doesn’t vote the way I do, or the person who sits three rows behind me and sings way too loud off-key,” or whatever it might be. Making peace between us and God necessarily involves making peace between us. Christ is our peace, and he has made us one: Jew and Gentile; male and female, slave and free, as Paul writes in Galatians 3:28; Democrat and Republican, rich and poor, black and white and every shade in between; American, Canadian, Mexican, Martian, go on as long as you like. Whoever or whatever we once identified ourselves to be apart from God, we have been made something new and different, and part of something new and different, with a whole new allegiance.
And lest we think Paul doesn’t know what he’s asking of us, look at verse 14: “He himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility.” Does that sound like a small thing? I mean, when our current president declared he would build a wall between the US and Mexico and make the Mexicans pay for it, whether you thought that was a good idea or a bad one, everyone knew it was a huge one. If the Jews could have built a wall between themselves and the rest of the world and made the Romans pay for it, they would have—but I don’t think even Rome could have paid for it. But what the Jews couldn’t do in the physical world, they had absolutely done emotionally and spiritually, with the full cooperation of the Gentiles building their side of the wall. Imagine if there really had been a full joint project between the US and Mexico with full buy-in from both sides: even in our world where you can’t buy a toaster that will last five years, that beast would have lived like the Great Wall of China. That’s the kind of wall Paul is talking about—and Jesus, in his own flesh, by his death on the cross, ripped it down.
And notice how he did it: we talked about this a moment ago, it was by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances. That’s how Jesus made peace between us and God, as we said, by fulfilling all the requirements of God’s holiness in himself in his death and resurrection. What we could never do—keep God’s commandments perfectly—we no longer have to do, because Jesus did it for us. This is also how Jesus made peace between Jews and Gentiles, for a different reason.
I’ve said before, including last week, that legalism is our default mode because it’s how the world trains us to operate. I’ve also said it’s a constant seductive temptation, that we’re always sliding back into it if we aren’t vigilant. One reason is that legalism lets us take credit for our salvation, which lets us boast before others. Another is the flip side to that: legalism lets us criticize, belittle, dismiss, and condemn others for not measuring up. One of the persistent painful ironies here is that many of those who are most legalistic are the first to condemn others for their legalism because they’re utterly blind to their own. Do not ever think, for instance, that those who slam “fundamentalists” for their legalism are any less legalistic, or for that matter any less fundamentalist. They just have different laws and different fundamentals.
I would venture to say—and I think I’m safe in saying this—any time you find a wall of hostility rising between groups, you will find legalism as its bricks and mortar. Christ tears it down by humbling us out of our legalism. He tears it down by making us abjectly aware of our utter dependence on his grace for everything good in our lives. When people preach falsehood, we must speak against it. When people in the church sin defiantly, refusing to submit themselves to the word of God and elevating their own wills above his, we must name that truly as rebellion against him. But when we see people striving to follow Jesus and obey the word of God, however bad a job they may be doing of it and however grave their struggles with their sin might be, while we may offer correction, we may never condemn; their only hope is that Christ Jesus is their peace—and the same is true of us.
The key is this: we have all been given a new identity, and the same identity, and we need to understand everything about ourselves in this light: we are, together, one, in Christ. We were, to continue with this language—which, again, we’ll dive deeper into when we move into 1 Peter—we were refugees and illegal aliens, and Jesus gave us a new home. I was going to say he gave us a path to citizenship, but then I stopped and thought about it, and that’s wrong: he has made us already citizens of the kingdom of God. Which is to say, this isn’t just an individual reality, it’s a corporate one; this isn’t just about who I am, as I asked a few weeks ago, it’s about who we are. Christ united us in one body, not by negating or erasing our differences and oppositions, but in and with and through all of them. We’ll be talking about this in a few months, not just in the service, but on Sunday afternoons—three months from yesterday, actually, we’ll be starting an inquirers class for anyone who’s not a member here and might like to be; one thing we’ll be talking about is that God is raising up a temple for himself in this world, and he’s building it out of us—we are his living stones, being built together into the place on Earth where God lives. We are the dwelling place of his Holy Spirit on Earth. That is who we are. That makes all the difference in the world.
Photo taken November 14, 1989. Public domain.
